Scholarly quest for human virtue

JACK Fuller watched with approval last year the president of Harvard University, Drew Faust, call for her privileged students to commit to public service, Macquarie University's Steven Schwartz's campaign for an "ethical community" on campus and Michael Sandel's Reith Lectures proposing a new citizenship that returns to a moral base.

JACK Fuller watched with approval last year the president of Harvard University, Drew Faust, call for her privileged students to commit to public service, Macquarie University's Steven Schwartz's campaign for an "ethical community" on campus and Michael Sandel's Reith Lectures proposing a new citizenship that returns to a moral base.

All this suits his own, large agenda, which will take a leap forward later this year when the University of Melbourne science graduate takes up his Rhodes scholarship.

"I'm aware I'm still an apprentice and I'm looking for the people who can teach me," Fuller says of his decision to undertake a master of philosophy course in international relations at Oxford University in October.

Fuller, 24, majored in neuroscience because of his interest in human nature "and how to cultivate the best in our nature", he says.

"Neuroscience tells us a lot about what it means to be human.

"We are learning human nature goes beyond self-interest to self-control, appreciation of dignity and beauty, to morality, and our politics needs to reflect that. At the moment we are tending to just cultivate self-interest, which is quite an adolescent approach."

Fuller, the tri-lingual child of a classicist father and environmentalist mother, believes civilisation and its high culture are worth fighting for, and that as custodians of the globe for a generation, we had better get cracking to ensure a future for the world and its best achievements.

Hence his honours thesis, which is a plan for a regional climate change treaty for the Asia-Pacific region, something that could be attempted following the failure of the Copenhagen summit.

Since Fuller's definition of failure is anything shy of a commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 40 per cent by 2020, he will be pushing his thesis at anyone who will listen.

"Maybe we can develop a regional scheme, and Australia's role in it.

"The starting point I propose is that a core group begins an emissions trading scheme, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Indonesia, that expands over time." He stresses it is important to have partnerships between developed and developing countries.

Fuller is a project leader at the two year-old progressive think tank Per Capita, where, before heading for Oxford, he will work on "how to cultivate virtue in the population". He has already published a paper on how to encourage self-control in a society that is used to instant gratification, whether it is gobbling junk food or living with unsustainable debt.