The Minefield

The rolling series of scandals and allegations of corruption engulfing the world football governing body took a dramatic turn last week with the arrests of more than a dozen senior FIFA officials and marketing executives. Days later, FIFA's long-term president Sepp Blatter announced he would stand down. So how do you instill a sense of ethical behaviour in a corporate culture that has become corrupt?

Allegations of corrupt dealings and widespread bribery against FIFA have captivated fans of ‘the world game’ over the past week, and emboldened critics of the world football governing body. But however high the money-trail leads, there can be little doubt that fans, sponsors and governments cannot absolve themselves of complicity in the corruption of the world’s most popular sport. So what are the ethical obligations on those who want to preserve the integrity of sport?

Despite the attempts of the reformers to recover the rehabilitative, penitential function of prisons, the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw prison systems give themselves over to the merely punitive. The result is devastating incarceration rates in nations like the US and Australia, especially among young black and Indigenous men. But is there another way of conceiving the practice of imprisonment?

Under pressure from rising incarceration rates, prisons can - and frequently do - perpetuate the injustices of the past. Their strategies of isolation and de-socialisation, far from reforming their inhabitants, strip them of the very skills and capabilities needed to live cooperatively, peaceably, and well.

Not since the Second World War have so many people been left stateless and vulnerable as the result of war, persecution, the fear of genocide and the reality of social deprivation.  So are national borders morally defensible? Can powerful forms of deterrence – even in defiance of the international conventions and the principle of non-refoulement – be implemented for purportedly ‘humanitarian’ ends? Does the threat of terrorism now trump assertions of universal human rights?

Last year, the number of forcibly displaced persons exceeded 51 million, the highest number since the Second World War. But while the post-war displacement sparked some of the most serious ethical reflection and international agreements about the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of stateless minorities, the current crisis is met with calls for strong national borders and harsh forms of deterrence. So what is the moral status of national borders, and can they be justified in the face of vast human suffering?

No sooner did Joe Hockey hand down his second federal budget, than the howls of hypocrisy and charges of rank political expedience filled the media. But what if political hypocrisy is not only unavoidable in democratic politics, but even desirable? Could this help us rethink the tension that has long existed between political compromise and personal integrity, between cold hard realpolitik and political conviction?

The early 20th-century German theorist Max Weber warned against the most dangerous of all political animals: conviction politicians who ‘make use of purely emotive language of the kind also employed by the Salvation Army in order to set the masses in motion’. Today, we demand pragmatic policies but condemn political inconsistency. We want political conviction but don’t like ideologues. Perhaps it is only by embracing the unavoidability – even the desirability – of political hypocrisy that we can begin to break the cynicism and mutual distrust that now pervades public debate.

‘The common good’ has become a kind of mantra in contemporary Western politics, but we seem to have little clarity about what we mean when we say it. Is it simply an interchangeable term for fairness or social cohesion? We soon discover that the idea of 'the common good' has a richer heritage than is comprehended by either of these terms. So what is it, and is it even possible today?

Before his election in 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron encapsulated his vision for British politics in the term ‘Big Society’, pledging to devolve both decision-making power and civic services to the local level in what he described as a politics of the common good. The concept of 'the common good' has now become a hot issue in the UK election campaign. But what does it mean? . Is it simply an interchangeable term for fairness, or for that ever-elusive notion of social capital praised by ‘Third Way’ politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton and Mark Latham? Or is the reason we have little clarity about 'the common good' because we have come to only ever think about civil life in political terms?