Just a brief post today (I open up so many posts like this, even the ones that end up running to 1,000 words), for real this time. I’ve added a new link in my list of interesting people, the blog of Richard Matthews. Richard is an old professor-turned-national-colleague of mine, who currently teaches at King’s College in University of Western Ontario. I first met him when he was my professor for an introductory epistemology course in 2003. We read Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy, A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, and closed the course with Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty. He might be pleased to know that the copy of Russell's book was the source for some of my references in my forthcoming essay at Social Epistemology (the journal).
His blog, Neither Victims Nor Executioners, is a series of reflections on the political and ethical aspects of justice in the modern world, and it’s well worth a read. His most recent posts discuss the controversy over Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers Visa program, his particular target being the populist rage against the program blaming the foreign workers themselves for taking jobs that would otherwise go to Canadians. Richard makes a firm case for why such anger is misplaced (because it is), since the inequities of the program largely lie with its designers, who have built a visa program that exploits the yearnings of poor people for better opportunities to debase them as a cheap source of labour.
I strongly encourage you to read through his archives. They aren’t too long yet, but you’ll find plenty of stimulating philosophy of justice.
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