Scott Stephens

The invitation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is to set off on a journey of mutual attentiveness, of truth-telling and peace-making, without a clear sense of the shared destination. Marcia Langton joins us to discuss whether Australia’s political settlement accommodate such a strenuous moral task.

In November 2022, Scott Stephens delivered the 20th annual Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value hosted by the Australian Catholic University. His topic was the moral conditions of democratic life.

The tendency over the past four decades has been for governments to try to shield their populations from energy shocks and their associated “cost of living” crises — but is such a response truly sustainable?

The latest Mapping Social Cohesion report from the Scanlon Foundation paints a complex picture that helps us understand the conditions within which social cohesion is able to strengthen, and those factors which cause it to become brittle and even break down.

Ours is a time when institutional distrust, digital disinformation and mutual suspicion have become pervasive — but can democracy withstand epistemic and social fragmentation of this kind?

Ever since Plato, “crowds” have been associated with irrationality, emotivism, conformism, short-term thinking, and herd-like behaviour. But what if it turns out that crowds are collectively more intelligent than their individual members?

During the pandemic, there was a sudden renewal of interest in Harold Ramis’s 1993 film “Groundhog Day” — especially its bleaker aspects. But this missed its sophistication and humanity, to say nothing of its acute depiction of moral growth.

Whatever else artificial intelligence is, according to Professor Shannon Vallor, it is first and foremost a projection of the human. And so whatever threat it poses, is a threat from within our humanity.

Because our lives are increasingly tailor-made, we are constantly seeking ways of distinguishing ourselves from others. What is being lost through it all is our sense of a humanity whose inherent vulnerability to misfortune, malfeasance and violence makes us dependent on one another. This episode was first broadcast on 07 July 2024.

What is “content” doing to our sense of value?