Universal Humanism (UH) is an ethical framework built from the ground up rather than handed down. It doesn't start with a holy text, a nation's founding story, or a political party's platform. It starts with what is actually there: living human beings, the physical world they share, and the limits that world puts on them.

From that starting point UH builds in layers:

• Truth: a claim is true when it corresponds to reality. Ethics has to be built on what is, not on what a group wishes were so.
• The three apple proof: a simple arithmetic model showing that every ethical situation between people falls into one of three states: scarcity, sufficiency or surplus.
• Preserve Life: the foundational axiom. Good and bad are measured against whether an action reasonably preserves life.
• Humans as ends in themselves: human worth comes from being human, not from belonging to a nation, religion, race or class.
• Justice: everyone is inside the circle of moral concern until they personally break the social contract by their own actions, and even then they remain human.

The name says what it is. Humanism: the framework is about human beings and their lives. Universal: it applies to every human being without exception, and it refuses to rank people by the groups they were born into.

UH is also honest about how sure it is of each piece. Some parts are proven, one is an axiom that can't be voted away, and some are argued and tested against history. The last level of this course looks at that structure directly.