Guest lecturer Dr. Timothy Walsh offers a glimpse into current psychiatric understanding of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. He takes students inside the psychology of an eating disorder and the medical and behavioral complications that patients may experience. Dr. Walsh then explores the issues behind diagnosing, treating, and understanding these disorders from the doctor's perspective as well.

Professor Brownell reviews public health as a profession and explains how it provides a different framework, compared to the traditional medical approach, for tracking diseases and trying to prevent them. Specifically, he explains how public health focuses on community/population (vs. the individual) and prevention (vs. treatment) and discusses which may be better for addressing problems of diet. He provides examples of how different forms of prevention (primary, secondary, tertiary) and the epidemiologic triad are utilized to address disease in public health.

In this lecture, Professor Brownell asks whether modern agriculture is environmentally, culturally, and morally sustainable. First, he explores how genetically modified foods both benefit and hinder world sustainability, such as with the case study of BT corn, and contamination to different parts of the environment. Secondly, he discusses the issue of animal welfare and its relationship with sustainability by exploring how modern food conditions encourage the mass production of meat. Arguments for and against the way animals are raised and eaten are also reviewed.

Professor Brownell reviews the energy costs of modern food tastes. Specifically, he discusses how agribusiness and what people choose to eat has consequences on the depletion of water, land, and fossil fuels, and contributes to global warming. In addition, he considers whether food production and the earth's resources can keep pace with the demands of global population growth, and whether we can enhance sustainability in our food environment.

Professor Brownell discusses what the green revolution is and how it has impacted the world scene in both positive and negative ways. On one hand, the green revolution has increased world food productivity and decreased world hunger; on the other hand, it has produced negative environmental effects and failed to benefit all countries involved. Professor Brownell also reviews the green revolution's technology advances including different kinds of irrigation systems, fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, and describes the future of the green revolution in Africa.

Professor Shapiro guides the class through some practical applications of his theory of democratic justice. As applied to governing children, a sphere in which power-based hierarchy is inevitable, he circumscribes the role of the state as the fiduciary over children's basic interests and the role of parents as the fiduciaries over children's best interests. In other words, the state ensures the provision of the resources necessary for survival while the parents provide the resources to enable children to thrive as well as possible.

Professor Shapiro takes up again Schumpeter's minimalist conception of democracy. When operationalized as a two turnover test, this conception of democracy proves far from minimalist, yet people often expect other things from democracy, like delivering justice. Although people experiencing injustice under other types of governments often clamor for democracy, they become disillusioned with democracy when a particular regime fails to ensure greater justice for society. However, societies are also unwilling to swoop in with a scheme of justice that has not been democratically legitimated.

Majority rule and democratic competition serve as the focus of this second lecture on the democratic tradition. What is it about majority rule that confers legitimacy on collective decisions? Is there any validity to a utilitarian justification, that catering to the wishes of the majority maximizes the happiness of the greatest number? Does majority rule reflect what Rousseau called the general will? What is the general will? Does Arrow's paradox indicate that the results of voting are arbitrary? Is majority rule just an exercise in realpolitik?

Professor Shapiro transitions to the third and final section of the course, an in-depth look at democracy and its institutions. According to him, democracy is the most successful at delivering on the mature Enlightenment's twin promises to recognize individual rights as the ultimate political good and to base politics on some kind of commitment to objective knowledge. And interestingly, democracy as a tradition was not made famous by its champions, but rather by its critics. Professor Shapiro guides the class through the writings of Plato, Tocqueville, Madison, and Dahl.