Justice

We had a catch up TV day yesterday. We find that all the really good educational stuff is on at the same time, and end up recording half of it. Our hard disk recorder is usually full! The advantage of this though is that we often watch entire series in one or two goes, which makes for better continuity.

One thing we have been following is the BBC4 Justice Season

We started watching Justice with Professor Michael Sandel who presented a series of lectures from his Harvard undergraduate course in Political Philosophy. In it Sandel Sandel tests the philosophies of Bentham, Kant and Aristotle against contemporary problems. We really enjoyed watching this as it asked hard questions to which sometimes there are no right answers. I think it is good for 14 year olds to find out that in life not only are there sometimes no right answers, but sometimes people can wildly disagree with each other. I wish there were more programmes on TV of this calibre.

From there we watched some of the other programmes in the series. Yesterday we finished watching one about the programme Rough Justice as well as watching two programmes on Crime and Punishment: The Story of Capital Punishment and The Story of Corporal Punishment. (only 18 hours left to watch on iPlayer!)

This was quite thought provoking for Ram, as he has gown up totally in a society that is against corporal punishment so it has allowed him to realise how we got to where we were today, and how different it was in the previous generations. It was also interesting to see how much of certain cases I remembered, and how fallible my own memory is. I totally fluffed the Guilford 4 Renault 5 joke! I just couldn't remember the punch line!

We also watched most of the debate that Sandel chaired, Justice:Fairness and the Big Society. One of the advantages of watching the recording of it rather than watching live is that we can pause and have our own debate.

Serendipitously this actually ties in with the book we are reading at the moment. Easeful Death – Is there a case for assisted dying, by Mary Warnock and Elisabeth Macdonald. It starts out by explaining the main ethical, medial and legal arguments for and against a change in the law covering assisted suicide and euthanasia. Ram now has a really good understanding of Kant and Bentham, and how it relates to modern moral dilemmas. This is something that we had already had a look at after watching Terry Pratchett's lecture on this.

We find one of the great advantages of home education is that we can come at the same subject from several different sides, and see how it all ties in with life, society, and our own personals circumstances while at the same time reinforcing what we have already learned. All the while sitting knitting and putting Lego models together!