Hook students with the high stakes of freedom and diagnose their intuitive understanding of liberty and constraints.
Introduce the ultimate sacrifice made for freedom.
Imagine giving up 27 years of your youth. Imagine voluntarily walking away from your family, the clothes you like to wear, and the simple pleasure of talking with friends.
For Nelson Mandela, this choice meant enduring solitary confinement. It meant giving up his favorite sport—boxing—and being locked alone in a room, not knowing when or if he would ever be released.
Prerequisite knowledge check.
Assess intuition on key chapter concepts.
A controversial author publishes a book containing ideas that the majority of society currently considers completely false and offensive. Based on J.S. Mill's defense of freedom of expression, why should society hesitate to ban this book?
Concept: freedom-of-expression. You will explore J.S. Mill's four core reasons against banning ideas, even those society labels as 'false'.
Feynman explains why true freedom requires constraints.
Visual metaphor of freedom within a functioning system.
True freedom thrives within the safety of necessary constraints, allowing individuals to express themselves without fear of chaos.
Concepts
Understand freedom as both the absence of external constraints and the presence of conditions to develop human potential, grounded in historical struggles.
Recognize where constraints come from and why a society cannot exist without them.
Apply J.S. Mill's Harm Principle to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable constraints on individual action.
Distinguish between negative liberty ('freedom from') and positive liberty ('freedom to'), and understand their supporting ideologies.
Understand why freedom of expression is considered an inviolable area of non-interference using J.S. Mill's four arguments.
Synthesize and evaluate the different dimensions of freedom, the Harm Principle, and the balance between liberty and constraint.