Universal Justice and Human Rights

Trace the western origins of human rights, from Plato and Cicero to Kant and Arendt, highlighting universal law, natural rights, citizenship, and dignity across history.

Explore the difference between citizenship rights and human rights, and how universal, incontrovertible, and subjective debates shape natural law, duties, and the idea of positive versus negative rights.

Trace human rights origins from Hammurabi to the Cyrus Cylinder and Ashoka. Compare Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, rights of man, and international law theories: realism, liberalism, Marxism.

Explore how natural law and positive rights synthesize into international law. Trace the United Nations' roles, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and NGOs shaping global human rights.

Examine how censorship intersects human rights and the First Amendment, balancing free thought and expression. Review autonomous, social, legal (prior and penal), extra legal, voluntary, and subterranean censorship with historical cases.

Examine free speech and freedom of information, from Mill's four reasons to challenge truth to net neutrality, surveillance, and the evolving censorship debates shaping media and online platforms.

Explore political prisoners by linking law, due process, and the 14th amendment to universal rights and oppression, with cases such as Jesus, Dreyfus, Mandela, apartheid, Central Park Five.

Examine prisoners of conscience who are detained for innate traits or nonviolent political activities, with examples from Tibet, Jews, Romani, and conscientious objectors, and discuss disappearances and political imprisonment worldwide.

Examine the purpose and history of torture, distinguish it from corporal punishment, and note its use to humiliate, dominate, and destroy, despite Geneva Conventions bans and ongoing debates.

Examine the torture process, from arrest and isolation to dehumanizing methods, including rack, thumbscrews, drugs, electricity, sleep deprivation, beatings, and waterboarding, in a human rights framework.

Compare moralism and causalism in the ethics of torture and explore a scenario about saving lives. Examine how authority, dehumanization, and medical ethics shape the justification and consequences of torture.

Trace the history of the death penalty from ancient murder codes to modern abolition, highlighting methods like hanging, guillotine, firing squad, electric chair, gas chamber, and lethal injection.

Explore how religion, politics, and philosophy shape views on the death penalty, including religious justifications and condemnations, political trends, and debates over deterrence and innocence.

Present research on the death penalty, showing higher costs than life imprisonment due to due process, no general deterrence, and race, class, and medical ethics biases.

Analyze how segregation and apartheid enforce racial division—from Jim Crow and Plessy v Ferguson to Brown v Board and the Civil Rights Act of 1964—through law, culture, and economics.

Analyze the Indian caste system as a fixed hierarchy shaping work, education, and interactions, reinforced by reincarnation beliefs and contrasted with ongoing sexism and gender inequality.

Explore how slavery spans serfdom, debt bondage, and chattel slavery, enforced by violence across history. Learn triangle trade, abolition, and the 13th Amendment, plus lingering prison labor and debt bondage.

Trace how enlightenment thinkers and the Quakers spurred abolition and shaped modern views on slavery, including key legal milestones. Britain's 1887 abolition and 1998 international law; debt bondage persists.

Define genocide as the killing of a race or group, rooted in the myth of purity and in-group out-group thinking, to cleanse or get rid of a culture or people.

Explore how post-World War II genocides unfold, from Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to Rwanda and East Pakistan, driven by leadership, fear, conspiracy theories, and dehumanization; examine five types and four motives.