“Autonomy,” as a desirable state, is notion often used by food sovereignty-oriented farmer movements and scholars studying repeasantization. The term predominantly rather casually, relying on presumed meanings, but van der Ploeg's book New Peasantries seeks to elaborate particular meaning of autonomy characteristic feature the peasantry. desire farmers/peasants for formulated in tandem with agr...

Modern public health strives for maximizing benefits for the highest number of people while protecting individual rights. Restrictions on individual rights are justified for two reasons--for the benefit of the individual or the benefit of the community. In extreme situations there may be a need to protect the health of an individual and particularly a child; even by overriding individual/parent...

Fundamental principles that characterize medicine’s social contract are primacy of the patient’s welfare, patient autonomy and social justice. Professions become de facto trustees of the public interest if those principles are maintained in the face of pressures from the state or the marketplace. Professions must protect not only vulnerable persons but also vulnerable social values. If professi...

Some have objected to human enhancement on the grounds that it violates the autonomy of the enhanced. These objections, however, overlook the interesting possibility that autonomy itself could be enhanced. How, exactly, to enhance autonomy is a difficult problem due to the numerous and diverse accounts of autonomy in the literature. Existing accounts of autonomy enhancement rely on narrow and c...

This paper deals with the issue of surveillance as it applies to recent technological advancements. Specifically, advancements in video capturing and social media have made public events into spectacles that are observed and shared online by the public. Public protest and discourse loosens itself from the bounds of state authority and enters the arena of the public. This phenomenon reconsiders ...