The Moral Malaise in Public Life
In 1916 and 1917, during World War I, Australia went through two divisive referenda dealing with the issue of whether men could be conscripted for overseas service. In 2017 we have gone through a divisive plebiscite on the issue of whether only heterosexual couples can legally marry. One of the strange features of the whole business was the numerous expressions of moral outrage without any basis in a thought-out moral system. This is disturbing but hardly surprising. Unaccustomed as one is to agreeing with anything David Marr comes up with, he did recently point out in the Guardian that the…