Philosopher's Zone

The 2023 Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme exposed a system that unfairly (and illegally) subjected vulnerable people to stress and trauma - but was it deliberately punitive? And to what extent does our welfare system reflect negative public attitudes toward people living in poverty?

There's an app for everything these days, including parenting and childrearing - but at what cost? Women in the Global South are increasingly using parenting apps, whose Western developers say their advice is scientific and reliable. But that modern, scientific advice is edging out older, traditional childrearing wisdom and causing intergenerational tension.

Democracy is a powerful force for progress, but it's also vulnerable and beset by its own internal contradictions. Plato thought that democracy was a bad idea, as it gave unmerited power to the ignorant and the malevolent. Looking around the world today, can we confidently say he was wrong?

Conservation is the name of the game in most ecological thinking - but in the eyes of some environmental philosophers, conservation is a backward-looking concept. What if, instead of looking to conserve nature, we tried to recreate and improve it via biotechnology? This year's Alan Saunders Lecture explores such futuristic interventions as reviving extinct species, turning carnivores into herbivores and genetically engineering less resource-intensive humans.

Are you troubled by the way that social media has enabled the spread of propaganda? Well, get ready for slopaganda, which is propaganda that's AI-powered and unprecedented in terms of speed, scale, audience reach and persuasiveness. "AI slop" is the term used to identify unwanted AI content - the algorithm-driven equivalent of spam email. Slopaganda is turning out to be just as annoying as spam, but far more dangerous.

As an academic discipline, Australian literature has been a largely white affair, with the canon of "great Australian authors" dominated by Anglo-European men. Indigenous writers are working to change this, and Australian indigenous literature is flourishing. But how comfortably does it sit within the traditional university structure?

Living and writing through the years before, during and after the Second World War, French author and philosopher Albert Camus witnessed the rise of fascism and its terrible endgame in German National Socialism. Today, amid fears of a neo-fascist resurgence in the USA, his work well is worth revisiting.

Beauty apps are becoming more and more miraculously high-tech, but also more and more invasive. You might feel OK about an app that gives your face a "beauty rating", but what if the app started to recommend cosmetic surgery procedures? Or how about a selfie enhancement app that doesn't just get rid of minor skin blemishes, but actually alters the shape of your face to suit and algorithmically determined ideal?

Babies cry, smile, laugh and react to their environment - so it seems odd to look at a baby and wonder whether or not it's conscious. But consciousness is a tricky thing to pin down, and according to some theories of consciousness, babies don't attain it until two or even three years of age, while others suggest that babies could be conscious even in the womb. It's an important scientific question but also a moral one, as it affects how we treat not only babies but other such "consciousness candidates" as non-human animals, AI and synthetic biological systems.

If there's one thing AI has in common with all new technology, it's that a lot of people are scared of it. When it comes to AI and education, horror stories abound of students using ChatGPT to write their essays, and a possible future where teachers are replaced by bots. But according to this week's guest, there's much to be excited about.

Most of us have Male or Female registered on our birth certificates - but what does this certification mean, in terms of its effect on our lives? There are many other things about us that have at least as much significance as our gender - our sexuality, our ethnicity - but only gender has legal status. This week we're talking about the pros and cons of uncoupling gender from the law.

It's easy to say that people who hold extreme antisocial beliefs should be held responsible for those beliefs. But in fact, many extremists operate within what philosophers call impoverished epistemic environments - epistemic "bubbles" and echo chambers whose inhabitants might be ignorant of the truth, or subject to manipulation. But does that mean responsibility for extreme beliefs therefore lies with the wider public? And if so, what are we to do about it?

The 2019 bushfires that devastated the east coast of Australia had one upside: the smoke in the atmosphere made for some stunning sunsets. But is a beautiful sunset caused by bushfire smoke really beautiful? Or consider the blobfish: crowned the world's ugliest animal in 2013 by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, the blobfish is actually a miracle of evolution, perfectly adapted to its deep-sea environment. But does that feature make it attractive? This week we're looking at how the aesthetic appreciation of nature and scientific knowledge can be at odds with each other.

When it comes to global problems like climate change, it can be easy to feel as though your own individual efforts to stop it are too small to make a difference. But then when you consider the big players whose efforts could make a difference—the corporations, the political parties—making them do the right thing just seems too daunting and complicated a task. What to do when individual efforts seem too small to matter, but structural change seems too big to effect? This week, the authors of a new book talk about taking a middle path.

Digestive disorders are a common source of distress and social anxiety - which might seem to be an odd topic for philosophy, until you start to think about why we attach such stigma, shame and silence to issues of the gut. What does the gut tell us about our own experience of embodiment - and how can disability theory be used to shape healthier attitudes to the gut issues that plague so many of us?