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Author's note
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Dr Britta Jenson posed the following philosophical question to her class at North Sydney Girls High School last year: What is the greatest moral challenge of our time? She asked her students to each pick a moral challenge and write an argument about why it mattered on a poster. Several academic philosophers, including me, were invited to review the posters covering issues from euthanasia to body shaming to inequality.
It was an inspiring exercise and it gave me the idea of putting the same philosophical question to some of Australia’s top philosophers. Today I kick off The Conversation’s series on moral challenges by arguing that we often get tangled up in a mistaken conception of morality itself. A lot of conflict comes from a common, but unexamined, view that there is a fixed and immutable moral order, rather than seeing morality as something we can negotiate about how best to live together.
Over coming days other philosophers will give their take on moral challenges like how to live in a “post-truth” world, how to engage with ideas we disagree with and whether technology is slipping out of our control. Many of these issues will need to be tackled by future generations too. Fortunately, judging by what I saw at North Sydney Girls last year, we’re in pretty good hands.
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Tim Dean
Honorary Associate in Philosophy
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Top story
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Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Broken Eggs (1756).
Wikimedia Commons
Tim Dean, University of Sydney
The greatest moral challenge of our time is our flawed conception of morality itself.
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