From Philosophical Research
# We _do_ know human rights exist, but how _can_ we know?
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[cr. 2024-02-20T23:28:09Z]
within the notion of finding the origin of human rights,
there is an important difference between "how _do_ we know" and "how _can_ we know"
to ask "how _can_ we know" is not to question whether a particular human right exists at all.
we may find that we _do_ know from our experiences as individuals or local communities that a particular human right exists — that some spontaneous event happened and after this event we mysteriously established that somehow everybody in the community now knows about human rights. in this case, the question "how _do_ we know" is easily answered with "the spontaneous event happened" or "the spontaneous event changed all of us in this particular town".
at the same time we think we understand how we _do_ know about human rights, we do not necessarily know the answer to how we _can_ know about human rights — how this event actually came to be, or how the event granted us this knowledge instead of not properly serving that purpose.
to ask how we _can_ know about a particular human right is, effectively, to begin to investigate a historical materialism of human rights independent from any history of particular governments, policies, laws, or legal systems. it is one thing to look at the United States and say "we _do_ know that Rosa Parks sat on a bus as a protest and then there was a particular court decision and then there was a particular set of policies regarding school intergration that many people widely agreed to". it is another thing to ask "how exactly _could_ this successfully happen? what causes an event like this to leave lasting consequences instead of everyone eventually stochastically drifting away from this conclusion and going back to previous moral understandings?"
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[cr. 2024-02-20T23:28:09Z]
there has been a certain resistance across Existentialism and even across Marxism to asking the "how _can_ we" question.
Existentialism has been nearly adamant that human rights exist precisely because there are protests, and if there were not protests or at least large-scale Liberal campaigns the questions of how we _can_ and _do_ know about human rights are both meaningless. the Existentialist view comes very close to implying that human rights are non-existent as concepts or causes anybody could argue unless there are protests. there is a very troubling character to this framework of effectively saying that human rights are whatever some group of people can force somebody else to do, and the only reason the content of a particular agreed set of human rights is positive and empowering is the arbitrary agreements and sets of rules established within the group applying force. Existentialism, we must remember, is not based on extensive Marxist models of Materialism or of centralistic democracy and the "tuning fork" process of different regions contributing ideas to each other to improve each other; it does not actually provide built-in guidelines for what kinds of rules a group must adopt to avoid coming to agreements that would constitute oppressing others, apart from notions of "seeking Difference" which as we have covered tend to be logically contradictory and self-defeating. logically speaking, it is easy for Existentialism to accidentally produce a movement with mixed values such as a movement for racial justice that is uncompromisingly transphobic and launches giant protests to prevent transgender rights, thus enshrining the freedom from transgender rights as a purported human right nobody can question — all because it is considered fully sufficient we _do_ know everybody has the right to never respect transgender people and nobody asks how we _can_ know that.
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[cr. 2024-02-20T23:28:09Z]
within Gramscianism, there is somewhat more of an explanation for how human rights precede protests. there is a vague understanding that hegemony politics rests on the fact we already _do_ know we have human rights, and then a Gramscian movement attempts to fill various existing slots in society with people who _do_ know about human rights. the reality-defining function of protests in Existentialism is replaced with vague networks of people all connected into what may later become a workers' movement or Gramscian party-nation — this diffuse or deliberate network forms the basis for preserving understandings that we _do_ have human rights over time. while having this particular material explanation makes Gramscianism more coherent, it still underscores the mystery within earlier parts of the process of where the understandings Gramscians fight for in hegemony politics _could_ come from and how we _can_ know the programs we are fighting for across society are ready to be adopted by everyone.
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r2 [cr. 2024-02-20T23:28:09Z]
within Trotskyism, there has been a curious trend of presenting Existentialist-style struggles and Leninist struggles as nearly indistinguishable. although this is not a common talking point across every Trotskyist organization, there do exist some organizations which have presented protests for LGBT rights, local worker uprisings, and local uprisings of Trotskyites against central "Stalinist" party-nations as all essentially the same thing. to this variety of Trotskyism, a protest is a protest, and protests bind people together in a bond of camaraderie into a potential community that may theoretically be able to form a tightly-connected soviet democracy capable of supporting a Trotskyist party-nation up to whatever scale they may believe needs to exist; the smarter decision would probably be to form the Trotskyist uprising into a localized state and wait to see how much further it does or does not expand, but nonetheless Trotskyists tend to think any small uprising can ultimately proceed to an international or worldwide scale.
with this model of protests, Trotskyists present an awkward picture of the origin of human rights which balances oddly.
on one side, they assign protests a similar role as in Existentialism but at a greater scale — if a group of Trotskyists were able to carve out their particular region of a "Stalinist" country and turn it into a Trotskyist country, they would be _morally justified_ to have done that simply because they proved to be capable of forming their own society and there was no justification for the "Stalinist" society to be able to contain them any more. this is at once more logically-consistent than Existentialism and something of a problem — if anyone capable of seceding from an association of people which already has a set of values is justified in doing this, how will anyone be held to the same values instead of every attempt to build a workers' state or a progressive movement dissolving into many separate regions which refuse to respect each other or cooperate with each other?
on the other side, Trotskyists have actually begun to answer the question of how we _can_ know we have human rights by presenting one possible pathway: soviet democracy. in historical soviet-democratic systems, local communities are so tightly connected that every individual acts in reference to other individuals or structures and every collision of will or purpose between individuals has at least an opportunity to be resolved; local disputes and hostilites must necessarily be resolved for the system to function well. if questions of human rights come up inside such a system, it is simply the collision of individuals and individual wills and the desire to solve these collisions peacefully to thus create larger structures which originates human rights — the basic left-Hegelian thesis.
next to Existentialism and Gramscianism, Trotskyism comes out looking far better than anyone would ever expect, offering a real answer albeit one buried deep inside one of its usual talking points.
this really shows how at this point in the history of the United States every philosophy which is not Marxism has great difficulty truly explaining and grounding human rights to the point it becomes at all useful for defending them. even flawed Marxisms sometimes miss this target, let alone non-Marxist philosophies.
many assume the topic of human rights is simpler and easier to solve within Liberal democracy than it is to combat capitalism, speaking of "basic democracy" as if the existence of human rights was nothing more than a welfare program, but in fact, human rights are actually one of the deepest and thorniest problems a philosophy has to face, requiring a deep understanding of historical materialism and Hegelian interactions to properly comprehend.
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[cr. 2024-02-20T23:28:09Z]
## the conundrum of gender
it has been popular and almost mandatory to speak of gender identity and transgender rights as things we only _do_ know and never _can_ know. people have gender identities but nobody really knows how they got there. people's gender identities and pronouns simply all fell from the sky one day and each person has to accept the reality of gender without asking how they _can_ be a gender. gender is unknowable. it is incomprehensible. it is a lived experience, but we are not even sure what we are experiencing. we know transphobic statements have to be incorrect but we are never sure exactly why.
there were so many people that _did_ know they had a human right to not respect any transgender people or allow them into society that on a practical level it became impossible to argue for transgender rights as a matter of freedom or democracy. vast majorities of people _did_ know they deserved the freedom to never talk to transgender people or show them kindness. only tiny portions of the population _did_ know they deserved transgender rights.
gender is the moment when the entire "how _do_ we know" approach went up in flames
the only real way to defend transgender rights is to ask how we _can_ know
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[cr. 2024-06-14T22:07:12Z]
ethical epistemology.
that is what this problem basically is
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:: cr. 2024-02-20T23:28:09Z
; 1708471689
:: t. 5001_how-can
; v4.3/ We _do_ have human rights, but how _can_ we?
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>> 1722738685 v5.2 chapters/ Did Trotsky go to hell?: Theological morality ; 1611 TheologicalMorality
>> v5-2_1612_saiyan-revolution v5.2 chapters/ The Saiyan Revolution ; 1728865651
