The Common Origin of Knowledge and the Equality of Persons Why What We Know Cannot Rank Who We Are A Stand‑Alone Essay in Political Philosophy · Companion to The Ultimate Evolution of Human Social Governance Forms
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This essay offers a self‑contained argument for the equality of persons, proceeding not from human nature, law, or natural endowment—the familiar routes—but from the publicness of civilizational transmission. Everything an individual knows, he or she has received: language, method, concept, and fact are all inherited from a cumulative heritage that no one invented alone. The essay observes that, in contemporary social practice, knowledge and expertise are readily converted into positions of advantage, discourse power, and status; a familiar psychological inference then follows—"I know more, I stand higher, therefore I am, as a person, superior." This inference is the principal target. The argument proceeds in five steps: (1) knowledge is a common, inherited good; (2) knowledge‑advantage is routinely translated into power and status; (3) the resulting chain "knowledge–power–status" is misread as a natural hierarchy of persons; (4) that hierarchy rests on a false premise—that one's learning is one's own private, innate credential; (5) capacities and positions may differ, but dignity does not come in ranks. Two thought experiments—an artificial intelligence that aggregates all human knowledge, and an "Omniscient Person" who contains the whole heritage in the flesh—are used to expose the category mistake at stake: capability, however total, does not carry the attribute of rank. The essay then subjects its own core to four standard objections (original contribution; the effort invested; whether knowledge‑power‑status is a necessary chain; the is–ought gap between publicity and norm), and concludes by marking the argument's genuine but delimited scope: it is a powerful critique of the prejudice that learning proves superiority, not a universal theory of all forms of hierarchy. A final, genealogical section places the claim in conversation with Rousseau, Marx and Engels, Hayek, Rawls, and Young; identifies its own unanswered question in the foundation of equality itself; and proposes the term cognitive privilege illusion for the error it diagnoses. All core ideas and arguments are the author’s original work. AI was only used for textual polishing. The author takes full responsibility for this paper.
Author: SHEN, YANG
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213658039