The Spectator’s Ethicist, Rachel Haliburton, provides convincing — and sometimes counter-intuitive — arguments as to why making the rich pay their fair share of taxes benefits us all.(Read Reason #1 and Reason #2)   As faithful readers of the Ethicist column in the Cape Breton Spectator will know, for theRead More

The Spectator’s Ethicist, Rachel Haliburton, provides convincing — and sometimes counter-intuitive — arguments as to why making the rich pay their fair share of taxes benefits us all.(Read Reason #1) In my last column, I began exploring some arguments that might be given in support of the claim that itRead More

Last month. I wrote about taxation, and observed that determining what levels of taxation are fair – and deciding who should pay the most taxes and who should pay the least – will always be substantially ethical decisions, and can never be solely economic or practical ones. While voices onRead More

Earlier this summer, those of us living in Ontario suffered through a provincial election campaign filled with attack ads, ad hominem critiques, anger, angst and fear. Underlying the anger, angst and fear felt by a large percentage of the electorate was a queasy feeling that public services, particularly in theRead More

My neighbor and I recently paid a visit to a new distillery that has just opened up in Sudbury. The distillery, called Crosscut, is located in a very industrial part of an already industrial city and has tried to capture this industrial element in its tasting room: the floor isRead More

As I write this column, I am struggling to make ethical sense of current events. How can politicians like Donald Trump shamelessly tell lie after lie, and still have a significant number of people willing to support them? How can men who make or act in sensitive and enlightened filmsRead...

One of the most interesting features of philosophy is that it forces practitioners to notice the extraordinary in the ordinary. Part of its charm lies in its power to make what we might be tempted to take for granted look strange and intriguing. For the philosopher, everything and anything isRead More

In the last two columns, I have been exploring Cartesian dualism and some of its consequences. This month, I want to consider an intriguing technological development that may emerge out of the marriage of Cartesian thinking and advances in computer technology. This is the claim made by some so-called “immortalists”Read More

Last month, I discussed Descartes’ thought experiment and its sharp separation between mind and body. This month, I want to look at a bizarre and ethically troubling proposal that arises as a consequence of this way of understanding ourselves: the head transplant operation that Italian physician Dr. Sergio Canavero claims thatRead More

There is a common type of case study presented in many bioethics textbooks. It concerns a person (usually a woman, for some reason) who is suffering from somewhat advanced dementia. She is often described as having been someone who was highly intelligent, who had a professional career in which sheRead More