In 2013, the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the British spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), tapped fibre-optic cables for access to our personal communications (including emails, Facebook posts, internet histories, and phone calls), and then shared this information with the National Security Agency (NSA), the major spy agency in the US. The Snowden…
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This is the dissertation I wrote for my Philosophy undergraduate degree in 2012. Some of the statistics may be a bit out of date, but recent developments in drug liberalisation (such as in the US) and research on the illicit drug trade – as well as the therapeutic application of certain illicit drugs – are still…
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Donating your organs for transplantation, or donating your body to medical science, is a very charitable act. I myself do not believe that I will need my body or any of my body parts after I am dead (since I will not exist). I’m a registered organ donor for this reason and plan to donate…
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Having control of one’s body and one’s mind – also called self-ownership – is, I believe, the most basic human right anyone can have. Mill summed up it nicely in On Liberty: “Over one’s mind and over one’s body the individual is sovereign” – although he did (rightly so) allow for exceptions involving actions which…
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