Thomas Szasz was an American psychiatrist who became a controversial academic figure for his criticism of the foundations of psychiatry. He has been associated with the anti-psychiatry movement (although Szasz himself insisted he was not anti-psychiatry but anti-coercive psychiatry). In books such as The Myth of Mental Illness (1960), as the title suggests, Szasz argues that…
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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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The amendments made to the Policing and Crime Act (2009) mean that all forms of public solicitation (‘kerb-crawling’ or being in public, looking to sell or pay for sex) are illegal. According to the present law, one prostitute may work from indoor premises, but no more; otherwise the place is considered a brothel. The law…
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A minimum pricing for alcohol would mean that a restriction would be set in place preventing alcohol from being sold below a baseline price. The baseline price would be in reference to each unit of alcohol, as opposed to a general baseline of, say £1, for all types of alcoholic beverages. So, if the minimum…
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Cryptocurrency is digital money which relies on cryptography. Cryptography is the art of protecting information by transforming (encrypting) it into an unreadable format. Someone has to have a “secret key” in order to decipher (decrypt) the information so that it makes sense again. The most well-known form of cryptocurrency, which is constantly rising in popularity, is…
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