Is there knowledge we should not seek? Or is all knowledge a good thing? Should we be careful with the knowledge we acquire?

A prime example of when knowledge becomes dangerous is in weapon development. The early bombs that were created had little or no impact on human life in war fields, nowadays the weapons have been developed more and are more dangerous and life threatening than in early times. The knowledge of how to use these weapons has circulated in the populations of the world meaning more and more weapons are used for self-defense hence leading to more deaths.

It is not only in weaponry where knowledge is dangerous. In the biological case of abortion, the study into how to stop unwanted pregnancies created a method to stop them, and kill a human life. The practice of abortions has been going on since early times, and since then there has been new developments into abortion practices. This has some serious moral and ethical complications which are still under debate in today's society. With Moral issues it could be argued that abortion is the right thing to do if the parent does not want the child, rather than it growing up in an environment not being loved and cared for properly. Whereas ethical issues could be completely different and could argue that abortion is not the natural way, there is an innocent life being taken away for nothing, if the child was not meant to be born it wouldn't have been. Abortions have been partially banned if not completely in certain countries by governments to try and satisfy the people. Governments have taken into consideration the moral and ethical issues of this and have come to a conclusion, but who is to say they are right? How do they justify if something is right or wrong? This is also under huge debate and is causing problems and riots over human rights because the government can abuse their power because they are "full of knowledge" in the areas of decision making on these new topics.

Another example is the knowledge about cloning which has been debated largely in society because it has many moral and ethical issues. The first successful clone that was made was animal, called dolly. This sheep was cloned successfully and from this successful clone, we acquired knowledge about the practice. Scientists are now trying to apply this knowledge into practices with human embryos to try and clone them too, just as they did Dolly. This practice has been made illegal in most countries but the practices are in the process of being carried out in International waters because there are no laws governing there therefore it is legal to do there. Again there is the question of who decides if cloning is right or wrong, and how do they justify it? This question arises because not everyone has the same view because the unsuccessful clones are essentially a life that has been taken due to science and this is not justifiable in the eyes of the government or a majority of the world population.

Our knowledge is growing day by day since we were born and will continue to grow till the day we die, it is something we cannot stop because it is only natural to develop curiosities for the things around us, to search for new knowledge using our old knowledge as a basis. As you can see it is extremely hard to come to a conclusion about whether or not knowledge is a good thing or whether we should seek new knowledge. At the moment I do not think this really matters due to the fact that humans will never stop trying to satisfy their curiosity by finding answers to the things they do not understand. So in the long run I think we need to consider the consequences of the knowledge we are trying to acquire before we conduct methods to find it, and we must also think about the ramifications that knowledge could have on the world as a whole. From this I think that there is a strong border line that we should not cross when seeking knowledge, this border line in my eyes would be when human life is put at risk or disposed of. I think that wasting human life is unjustifiable no matter what the reason for it is. But again this is only my opinion which would be very different to a scientist researching on humans who justifies its cause and that is why it is so hard to come to concrete conclusions about knowledge!