“The possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility.”
Although ‘knowledge’ can be defined as various things in relation to different subjects, the human and natural sciences will be the main focus of this blog. When considering knowledge in terms of the human sciences, the first thing my mind went to was the knowledge of mental illness and the psychology behind it.
Psychology is one of the biggest branches of the human sciences and focuses on studying the human mind and how it functions. Like many other human sciences, this field was not always as well-developed or supported. For many people with mental health in the past, this created a disturbing amount of torturous methods for treating their ‘problem’.
Before the idea of ‘mental health’ had existed, there was no coined term towards people who had atypical brain chemistry, resulting in abnormal behaviors. Despite the lack of a psychologically correct term, there were other words used towards people who were believed to have had mental disorders: possessed, bewitched, demonic, etc. A few historic treatments of people accused of being these terms are lobotomies, shock therapy, and malnutrition.
Although modern medicine makes these forms of ‘treatment’ look arbitrary, the lack of research and answers to what causes these abnormal behaviors in their ‘patients’ was what led to their creation. If more ‘doctors’ in this time had the knowledge of brain chemistry and mental illnesses, they wouldn’t have been so fast to have sent them to priests for exorcisms. Therefore, when German psychiatrist, Emil Kräpelin, finished his comprehensive research on psychological disorders, he published the information that contained symptoms in order to better treat people who presented the behaviors he described.
This real-world example of knowledge on mental illness proves the validity of the statement, “the possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility’, because if Kräpelin and many other researches in the psychology field had withheld information on treatments and origin of mental disorders, there would still be present cruel and inhuman methods of treatments for these illnesses. Therefore, the ethical responsibility is derived from the fact that spreading that knowledge would prevent the unsuccessful and harmful processes these people with mental illnesses had to endure for hundreds of years.
Moreover, Milgram’s Study of Obedience presents an interesting situation in which to consider this statement as well. By sitting through a discussion on the ethics of not telling the people in the study that they weren’t truly harming the people they believed to be shocking, it produced the question of whether all knowledge should be sought after, despite the ethical dilemmas. The people being experimented on were subject to PTSD and other forms of trauma as a result of this experiment, though if they were told that they weren’t truly harming anyone, it would make the results of the experiment useless.
Personally, I’m not sure whether I agree or support the methods used in this experiment, however I do believe that it proves the assertion that possession of knowledge contains an ethical responsibility. The scientists experimenting on the subjects had the knowledge that they weren’t actually shocking other humans, therefore it became their ethical responsibility to make their subjects aware of that if they wanted to prevent any long-term trauma that could’ve been derived from this experiment. Whether or not they should’ve acted on this responsibility is not something I have an opinion on, though the responsibility still fell on those scientists with that knowledge.
The natural sciences is another area of knowledge that I can easily make connections with this statement to in relation to medicine, more specifically vaccines.
In general, medicine is something that contains the ethical responsibility of sharing knowledge on if possessed in a similar way to that of mental health. A specific example of this would be the recently developed covid vaccines. During the time where there wasn’t an existing vaccine to this virus, millions of people died. Therefore, a vaccine being created was important enough to where millions of dollars in research was put into finding one. When one was found (or multiple ones), it became the scientist’s ethical responsibility to share their knowledge of the vaccine with people to prevent the deaths of millions more.
These examples only pertain to two areas of knowledge, natural and human sciences, however the statement that the possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility can be applied to any area of knowledge, due to the fact that all knowledge has the power of progressing society and when someone obtains a new piece of knowledge, they then carry that ethical responsibility to do something with it.
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This is a really nice and well developed treatment. I love your first impulse to consider the history of mental illness. In that example, the ethical responsibility seems to go both ways. Like, there are people suffering, which seems to create an ethical responsibility to understand that suffering, which then creates a new responsibility to act on the new understanding. There are so many times in the world, big and small, in which people seem to KNOW that there’s a problem, and even know HOW to fix the problem, but don’t seem to have the will to actually carry it forward.
This also relates to your last example, because in a WAY the vaccine manufacturers “shared” their knowledge, by producing and selling vaccines, but a stickier situation arises when you consider those people and nations who have NOT had ready access to the vaccine. Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, famously responded to questions about why he did not pursue a patent by saying, “Could You Patent The Sun?” The implication is that the the vaccine, once discovered, was a natural right to every human. (These days, I think some WOULD try to sell sun rights.)
I am frustrated by your willingness to sidestep what is ethically RIGHT in the Obedience experiment, if only because DECIDING FOR YOURSELF would have made you consider where the line actually falls, and why it might fall in different places according to different circumstances.
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