Are you ready to burst your filter bubble? To hit pause on righteous anger? Principle of Charity injects curiosity and generosity back into difficult conversations, bringing together two expert guests with opposing views on big social issues.
But here’s the twist: as well as passionately advocating their own views, each guest is challenged to present the best, most generous version of the other’s argument.
This unique format comes from an ancient idea - the principle of charity - which tells us to seek the truth, not to win the fight; to truly understand the other before we instinctively reject them.
The podcast is hosted by Emile Sherman and Lloyd Vogelman. Emile is an Academy and Emmy Award-winning film & TV producer who’s obsessively curious about ideas and holds onto the naïve belief that a generous conversion is still the best way to get to the truth. Lloyd has a doctorate in psychology, spent years as a leader in the fight against apartheid before building reconciliation in South Africa, and describes himself as a recovering extremist who’s passionate about the potential to change our minds.
@PofCharity on Twitter, @PrincipleofCharity on Facebook and @PrincipleofCharityPodcast on Instagram.
You can find Emile at:@EmileSherman on Twitter, @EmileSherman on Linkedin,
You can find Lloyd at: @Lloydvogelman on Linkedin
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Producers:
Jonah Primo - Find at Jonahprimo.comor @Jonahprimo on Instagram
When someone breaks the law, most of us have an instinct that they should be punished. In fact, that they deserve to be punished. At the base of this is a sense that we are morally responsible for our actions and we should get our ‘just deserts’ if we make bad choices. This assumption is deeply encoded in the criminal law itself. Sure, there are other reasons we may want to put criminals behind bars – keeping society safe, deterring others from committing the same crime, even rehabi...
May 09, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast
Immigration is such a hot topic. Our borders are, in a sense, our collective skin and the question of who we let in seems to activate our primal instincts. Who comes in can feel and can at times be dangerous. Yet we want new ideas, new brain and brawn-power to fuel our country. A larger population can bring greater economic growth and prosperity. And with fertility rates below replacement level in most wealthy countries, our population will decline without immigration. ...
Apr 25, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast
Up until not that long ago, storytellers were encouraged to flex their creative muscles, to look outside themselves, and armed with their imagination as well as a lot of research, to bring to life characters, stories and worlds that they didn’t inhabit themselves, often worlds vastly different to the culture they’ve grown up in. But relatively recently, storytellers have received a huge challenge from the progressive left, a challenge that has now permeated the creative...
Apr 11, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast
In this episode, we explore the two great movements of the political right - liberalism of the right and conservatism. They are such different political philosophies, yet they share the same bed, uneasily much of the time, in right wing politics. By liberalism, we mean the political philosophy that champions individual rights and freedoms, private property and equality before the law. It’s linked with the rise of democracies and of capitalism, replacing social structures defined by ...
Mar 28, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast
What do we do, as a society, with people who want to die? We’re talking here about those with a terminal illness , who know that the rest of their waking hours will be filled with much pain, and who want to choose when and how to end it. Do we have the right to end our life on our terms, or is life so precious that even we can’t extinguish it? And if we do open the door, what are the potential pitfalls? Could it be used against the vulnerable, manipulating those who feel like a burd...
Mar 14, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast
Why is it so important to understand other points of view? How do we escape our own bubbles of bias? And when should we stop listening and focus on winning? In this special episode, we shine a light on the ‘Principle of Charity’ itself. We look at what exactly it is and why it’s so important. We then go one layer deeper and ask when it might be problematic or unhelpful to use it. To do all of this, we have the fabulous Tim Minchin. Tim is a renowned musician, comedian, compose...
Feb 28, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast
Everyone is talking about “social impact”, or “purpose”, as a way for business to deliver greater good to society. But does having a social purpose actually help society any more than a business just focused on making goods that people want to buy, for profit? Is social impact hollow virtue signaling, a marketing tool to make customers feel warm and fuzzy? Or does it in fact signal a profound shift in our attitude to capitalism, where the common good is finally put first, where it belongs...
Aug 09, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast
We first touch on the perennial question, whether technological disruption, this time in the form of AI, will ultimately eat our jobs so entirely that there’s no paid work left for us to do. We then take this prospect seriously enough to ask - will that in fact be a good thing? Is paid employment the cornerstone for the good life; rich with purpose, meaning, providing us the reward for our efforts, keeping us out of mischief, and holding society together? OR, is work, in fact,...
Jul 26, 2021•54 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast
We are not here to argue whether climate change is real or not. It’s real, and it’s bad. We are here to ask the much edgier question - should we fight or adapt? Our guests include Rebecca Huntley, one of Australia’s leading social researchers, who shifted her entire career to exclusively fight climate change, using her expertise in human behavior to galvanise action. We also have Alan Heeks, a representative of the Deep Adaptation movement, which urges us to accept the catastrophic reality of cl...
Jul 12, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast
Leading economist Gigi Foster lets us in on the dirty little secret - our lives have been given a dollar value, and it’s used by governments to make a whole range of decisions, from whether we’re given that life saving medicine, to when to shut down an economy because of a pandemic. Covid19 has let us into this secret room, as we as a society grapple with how much economic pain we should suffer to protect the lives of the elderly and vulnerable. One of Gigi’s most articulate critics, moral ...
Jun 28, 2021•57 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast
Media professor and feminist Catharine Lumby sees a role for pornography in a healthy sexual diet, whereas public ethics professor Clive Hamilton has the self-confessed unfashionable view that it’s destructive and demeaning. They’ve clashed in the media, and we bring them together for the first time to see if we can tease out this complex topic, in a conversation that exemplifies the principle of charity. Everyone seems to be looking at pornography but its rarely discussed. 35% of a...
Jun 14, 2021•1 hr•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast
Fat Pig Farm owner and author Matthew Evans and vegan animal advocate Ondine Sherman of Voiceless join us to discuss whether it’s moral to eat meat. How are we to make sense of the incredibly complex topic of meat. First of all, is it right to take a sentient life? What about our evolution, our nature, our culture, and our taste-buds, all powerful forces that drive most of us to eat meat? Each year over 70 billion land animals and a trillion sea animals are killed for food. The vast ...
Jun 14, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast
