There’s a passage in Emily St. John Mandel’s wonderful (and surprisingly not too depressing) book, Station Eleven, about the world before, during, and after a pandemic which I want to quote at length because it captures better than anything else I know how I am feeling right now. It goesRead More

As of this writing, elementary and high school teachers in Ontario are embroiled in an escalating dispute with Premier Doug Ford’s government. Teachers have held a number of one-day strikes and, I understand, have many more planned. While the government has been putting forward a narrative that consists of theRead More

Last month, I discussed the work of an ex-student of mine, Caitlin Heppner, who recently defended a very interesting thesis on the epistemological dimensions of climate science. Caitlin explored both the question of why some people might be skeptical about the validity of the science and the motives of theRead More

Last month, I argued that, when we think in Marxist terms about the contradictions of capitalism, perhaps the most striking and important contradiction of all is that to make the goods bought and sold to keep the capitalist machine running we are destroying the very planet we depend upon forRead More

Over the last few columns, I have been exploring our disordered relationship with our material possessions. One of the reasons that so many of us, even those of us who have limited incomes, can still accumulate too much stuff results from the fact that we live in a capitalist economyRead More

Last month, I considered the surprising popularity of the KonMari method of organizing our homes, and argued that the attractiveness of this approach to decluttering results, at least in part, from our recognition of our disordered relationship with our stuff, and that this disordered relationship negatively affects our lives. WhatRead More

Like many North Americans, I recently binge-watched the Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. For readers who have been living under a rock and are consequently unfamiliar with this show, it features the Japanese tidying guru Kondo and her (eventually) grateful clients. I found myself watching the show somewhatRead More

Rachel Haliburton, the Spectator’s Ethicist, who has written frequently about the necessity of taxes, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton-Canso and Sydney Victoria: Given deficits are rising and healthcare in trouble, would you (or your party) consider raising the GST back to where it was before formerRead More

Earlier this week, as of this writing, I lost a very dear friend and her death has made me reflect on the ethical dimensions of friendship. Most contemporary moral philosophers agree that there are three major ethical approaches in the Western philosophical tradition, utilitarianism, Kantianism and virtue ethics. Surprisingly, itRead More

I am sitting in a board game café as I write this month’s column. I have my phone on the table in front of me, and I am surrounded by young people, most of whom are using computers and/or are holding phones in their hands. Our phones and our computersRead More