Is there knowledge we should not seek? Or is all knowledge inherently a good thing, and can only persons be harmful?

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

Orlovska Lasma

11IB

Essay #1

Is there knowledge we should not seek? Or is all knowledge inherently a good thing, and can only persons be harmful?

Knowledge itself is actually neutral, it is neither good, nor bad. It can be partially evaluated only after it has been obtained and applied by a person, assessing the means how the knowledge has been obtained and the consequences that have occurred after applying the knowledge. However, even then the evaluation is very subjective, as the criteria of good and bad may vary, depending from the society, which is the judge in most cases, and in fact all the knowledge can be used in both, good and the bad way. As knowledge is neutral, all of it should be sought, but the attention should be paid to the way it is being used.

The first step is obtaining the knowledge. Different knowledge can be acquired in different ways and there are also ways that cause a lot of harm and damage. A serious decision has to be made, if one sees that the output of a particular knowledge brings a lot of impairment. The person has to try to prognosticate whether the knowledge obtained will be worth all the victims and damages, or better the output of the knowledge should be cancelled, because the knowledge will of a smaller value than everything lost in the search of it. I think that an example that would brightly represent such situation is the case of researches made by doctors – researchers aiming to find a new kind of medicine. When the researchers see that their experiments with the new drugs cause more and more harm, for example an increasing amount of people on whom the experiments were made are dieing, they have to make a serious decision. The researchers have to decide, whether the final, improved sort of drugs will save lives of more people than were killed in the study process or maybe there is no point in continuing the experiments as there will be no usage of the medicine anyway. But unfortunately it is not possible to prognosticate such things, hence we cannot know whether the knowledge should or should not be sought. But still, if it was real to predict the results, it would be possible to evaluate the necessity of seeking the particular knowledge, by assessing the benefits and harms brought by the knowledge. Knowledge could be called good and should be sought, if the benefits outweighed the harms and vice versa.

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When the knowledge has been obtained, it is followed by - knowing. And this is where the neutrality of the knowledge appears. Neither harm, nor benefit is brought by only having the knowledge. Knowing is not the same as applying the knowledge. One may know something for years, but never use it. Not putting the knowledge into use may have several reasons. Not having a chance to do it, might be one of them. For example, I know that it is possible to take a plane and go to Australia. But it does not matter, at least at the moment, that I know it, as I do not have time and money to apply the knowledge and take a plane to Australia. Another reason for not using the knowledge could be the fact that doing it, will bring damage. Knowing that getting hit by a car can injure or even kill you, but not employing the knowledge, is an example of it. Knowledge may remain unemployed also in cases when one does not know how to apply it. For example, I cannot make use of knowing that acid rain damages tree leaves. There is actually a lot of unapplied knowledge in most human beings, but as all of it is neutral, nothing is changed by the fact that it exists somewhere in our brains. If the knowledge itself would be bad, then it would do some harm, for example, to our brain. Knowledge could be called bad if it constantly destroyed parts of our brain, or it would erase other knowledge. Of course I cannot prove that we do not forget some knowledge because of acquiring another, but it also has not been proved that it is that way, therefore we might consider all the knowledge to be neutral as it does not perform any good or bad processes while it is being kept into our brains and mind.

If the knowledge has been obtained and kept into one’s mind (or maybe written down somewhere), sooner or later a situation in which the knowledge can be put into use appears. The consequences that arise from applying the particular knowledge may be different. It depends from the way, the knowledge is utilized. But assessing the quality of the knowledge and whether it should or should not be sought by evaluating the consequences is extremely subjective because of several reasons. Firstly – all the knowledge can be used for achieving good objectives as well as objectives that are not at all so good. For example, knowing how to send e-mail can be put in use in a way which it achieves a good objective – the information is shared, but in the same time a person can use the knowledge of how to send an e-mail my use it for sending computer viruses around the world. Secondly – there is no person, who would have been elected to be the judge – the one to decide what is good and what is bad. There is actually no definition of the good and the bad, so deciding whether the consequences are good are bad becomes very subjective, depending on the person’s who is evaluating criteria. Another reason is that in almost all the cases when after using some kind of knowledge some people become unsatisfied, angry or even they are injured, there is the other side of the coin – the people who are satisfied. And again, there is no one to decide satisfaction of which side is more important. Those, studying ethics, might say that in such cases quantitative evaluation method can be used. According to it, good knowledge would the one after applying which, more people would become satisfied than disappointed. But also this way of evaluating is not totally objective, because there is no reason to think that something that is approved by more people automatically becomes the best. It mainly depends on the society, thus the evaluation of the same consequences may vary. As an example I could mention a very current issue – probable war in the Afghanistan. Lets accept the fact of the atomic weapons in Afghanistan as certain, so they have already applied the knowledge of constructing the weapons, and undoubtedly they have the knowledge how to apply those weapons. In case if they decide to make use of the in ware against USA, then the consequences of it will be destructive to the inhabitants of the United States, but the people of Afghanistan probably will be rather satisfied. For me, it seems obvious that the consequences are negative as I cannot approve killing of innocent people, but for those in Afghanistan it may seem fine, and neither person has the rights to say that their perception of things is wrong.

Knowledge, as a justified true belief, is neutral, it is only possible to make subjective assessments of the way the knowledge has been obtained and the way it has been applied, but as those evaluations are highly biased no quality of knowledge can be estimated. As knowledge can be neither good, nor bad, people are those who may use the knowledge in harmful or destructive manner, but only subjectively harmful or destructive manner, as also the evaluation of it can vary. Therefore it is possible to conclude that the knowledge itself is highly neutral, and the assessments made in connection with it are greatly subjective.

Word count: 1308