Saints, heroes, sages, and villains

This essay explores the question of how to be good. My starting point is a thesis about moral worth that I’ve defended in the past: roughly, that an action is morally worthy if and only it is performed for the reasons why it is right. While I think that account gets at one important sense of moral goodness, I argue here that it fails to capture several ways of being worthy of admiration on moral grounds. Moral goodness is more multi-faceted. My title is intended to capture that multi-facetedness: the essay examines saintliness, heroism, and sagacity. The variety of our common-sense moral ideals underscores the inadequacy of any one account of moral admirableness, and I hope to illuminate the distinct roles these ideals play in our everyday understanding of goodness. Along the way, I give an account of what makes actions heroic, of whether such actions are supererogatory, and of what, if anything, is wrong with moral deference. At the close of the essay, I begin to explore the flipside of these ideals: villainy

Ordinary working men...transformed into giants on the rugby field': Individual and Collective Memory in Oral Histories of Rugby League.

As a sport that partly owes its existence to the issue of ‘broken time’, the working life of professional players outside the game is a highly symbolic issue in rugby league. In England financial reality meant that until the 1990s most players at professional level had to combine their career with full time employment away from the sport, often in the communities they represented on the field. To many this helped create a strong communal bond between those who played and watched rugby league and this perception has become a key cultural narrative in the sport’s ‘collective’ memory. This article uses individual narratives from oral history interviews which relate to the working life of professional players outside rugby league to examine the contention advanced by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and others that recollections of personal experience are always shaped to fit within the accepted public discourse. A wide range of personal testimonies are considered in order to illustrate how far, as some oral historians have argued, individuals are able to reflect upon the significance of shared experiences in ways which offer alternative perspectives to dominant cultural scripts

Battlefield euthanasia - Courageous compassion or war crime?

Issues relating to voluntary euthanasia that are currently being debated by Australian society are distinctly different from those encountered by battlefield doctors. Doctors in war undertake to treat those affected by conflict; their participation in euthanasia challenges the profession’s definition of “duty of care”. Euthanasia must be distinguished from “triage” and medical withdrawal of care(which are decided within a medical facility where, although resources may be limited, comfort care can be provided in the face of treatment futility). Battlefield euthanasia is a decision made, often immediately after hostile action, in the face of apparently overwhelming injuries; there is often limited availability of pain relief, support systems or palliation that would be available in a civilian environment. The battlefield situation is further complicated by issues of personal danger, the immediacy of decision making and difficulties with distinguishing civilians from combatants. Regardless of the circumstances on a battlefield, doctors, whether they are civilians or members of a defence force, are subject to the laws of armed conflict, the special provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the ethical codes of the medical profession.Susan J. Neuhaushttps://www.mja.com.au/journal/2011/194/6/battlefield-euthanasia-courageous-compassion-or-war-crim

Reconsidering Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978); the screen adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel (1972)

Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), a story of horrific violence caused by racial oppression, has a controversial place in the Australian social imaginary. As a raw narrative of a part-Aboriginal man's axe-murders of white women, the manhunt which followed, his eventual capture and death by hanging just after Australia achieved federation in 1900, the film was apparently constrained by the limited framework of representation of race relations available in the late 1970s. Audiences were left numbed by the image of a segregated society, the overpowering murder scenes and the disempowerment and downward spiral of Jimmie and his half brother Mort. Yet it has also been valued as a major film in the Australian new wave cinema and judged as ‘underestimated and overlooked’. This article approaches the film's mixed reception by re-examining it as a screen adaptation of Thomas Keneally's novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), arguing that Schepisi used an expressionist cinematography to convert Keneally's ‘ironic epic’ (Hodge and Mishra 1990: 59) into a fatalistic tragedy. In reconsidering the film in terms of its era, the article shows how the Australian landscape becomes a site of problematic race relations, overturning the myth of ‘innocent settlement’ that is associated with films of the Australian Film Commission (AFC) genre, heralding post-Mabo films like Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002), Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djigirr, 2006) and Jindabyne (Lawrence, 2007) whose stories and mise-en-scène acknowledge earlier traumas, inducing in viewers a belated shock of recognition (Collins and Davis 2004: 92)