Equal Rights

Prerequisites

Requires:

Socialism
Psychology

Statistics

Gives:

Access to other Advances

Gameplay

Equal Rights for people are a concept that extends naturally to rights for other creatures as well. This in turn leads to the humanistic and ecological knowledge necessary for a Science Victory in the game.

Historical

The ethical and moral concept of Equal Rights is both a slippery one and one that stems from two apparently opposing political and economic views. On the one hand, the Rationalist philosophy that was expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, "all men are created equal" was expressed as equality before the law, and in legal practice in the United States was not applied to anyone except adult white males with property. On the other hand, the Socialist ideal that all men are entitled to share in the ownership and products of their labor equally was anathema to the Rationalist ideal of private property rights. When the Civil Rights movement began in the United States and Western Europe in the last half of the twentieth century, it was largely a reaction to the excesses of Property Rights and Socialism as expressed in Communistic and Capitalistic systems of economics. The longer the Civil Rights movement went on, the more universal became the expression of the rights requested. By the end of the century Equal Rights extended not only to all human beings regardless of race, gender, or economic worth, but also to animals, plants, and the ecology as a whole. The logical conclusion of this train of thought was to envision the entire planet and cosmos as an organic whole, which comes suspiciously close to circling back to some of the earliest animistic philosophies of stone age mankind.