Through academic training, human interactions as well as work experience, people gain different sets of information that ultimately constitute their knowledge. However, even if this statement is universally true for all human beings, the extent to which the ways of gaining knowledge are used by each person is very relative. Following this premise, it is true to convey that information – and therefore knowledge – is asymmetrical, which further implies that the nature and the amount of knowledge possessed by every human being are different. In certain situations though, knowledge might carry an ethical responsibility, that is, the duty to prevent a harmful or unjust situation from occurring, or correct it if it has already happened. However, this poses another problem: if knowledge is asymmetrical, could the perception about truth and righteousness be also asymmetrical across different groups of people or cultures? Therefore, has a person – who acquired his/her knowledge in a particular cultural and ideological environment – any responsibility to judge whether a situation occurring in a different “thought and value” system is righteous or not? These are the questions that this essay will explore, as well as attempt to answer, by using relevant examples from different areas of knowing such as history, natural sciences and human sciences.
I would like analyze the first example from the natural sciences, referring to the issues of climate change. It is certain that we have all heard about the tremendous damage that almost one century of industrialization has caused to our planet. As scientists inform us, the polar caps melt faster, endangering the life of many species that inhabit the North and the South Pole. At the same time, respiratory and cancerous diseases affect more people every day, due to the increased pollution of air with toxic gasses. The greenhouse effect causes the temperatures around the globe to rise, making it more difficult to practice agriculture in certain regions to the globe and therefore, increasing the risk of hunger and distress among certain populations. However, large corporations continue to pollute the earth, air and water, while the planet’s flora, fauna and intelligent life suffers. Therefore, people who have very good knowledge (and extensive information) about the danger and the manifestations of climate change definitely feel the ethical responsibility to act towards ending the process of global warming and improving the Earth’s climate conditions. These people include scientists, politicians and members of the business sector, that come together in order to find solutions to the problem of climate change and make sure that they will reduce its harmful effects for the future generations to come. For example, the Kyoto protocol has contributed significantly to the reduction of global carbon footprint, demonstrating that people that have the knowledge and the power to act, feel compelled to do so immediately. The further exploration of the climate change topic by scientist leads to the development of new knowledge in the area and therefore increasing their ethical responsibility to act and put an end to it. Still, there is another side to this example: even if natural science has presented compelling arguments and evidence supporting the veracity and the danger of climate change and even if human beings, using logic, reason and perception (after all, the temperature is rising and the rain is acid), comprehend that it is both wrong and harmful, we, as individuals, do not feel a very strong ethical responsibility to act in order to stop it. Maybe some of us recycle or volunteer to collect waste and plant trees, but the great majority of the population doesn’t feel an immediate responsibility to correct the damage that climate change continues to cause. Why is that? I believe it is because as individuals, we do not think that our actions will have an impact on a greater scale; therefore, even if we know something (such as the fact that climate change is a dangerous and harmful process), we do not feel compelled to act on it. Therefore, it may be concluded that ethical responsibility does come alongside with the accumulation of knowledge (as seen in the Kyoto protocol example), but only when human beings feel that their sense of responsibility will provide significant resources for the resolution of the problem.
When talking about human behavior and interactions (that the human sciences aim to analyze), I believe that that our “knowledge-resulted” ethical responsibility stands in the fact that we have to expose and correct the wrongful actions of others. Therefore, if, given our current knowledge, we identify certain human behavior is harmful or unjust, we have an ethical responsibility to stop it and expose it as incorrect (for example, if we witness a crime, we have the responsibility to report it or stop it, if possible). Here I will provide an example form Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book, Freakonomics. The authors analyze the concept of information asymmetry, touching, in some ways, the subject of ethical responsibility that comes with the possession of knowledge. They present the case of real-estate agents, who often lie to their clients and make them accept an offer for their house that is cheaper, even if she/he knows that keeping the house on the market for another ten days will increase the sale price with about 3% (for example, for a 30000$ house one might gain an extra 10000$). “The problem is that the agent only stands to personally gain an additional 150$ by selling your house, which isn’t much of a reward for a lot extra work. So her job is to convince you that a 300000$ offer is in fact a very good offer, even a generous one, and that only a fool would refuse it”. Therefore, even if the real-estate agent knows that the client could sell the house for more, he/she convinces the client otherwise, because the agent’s personal gain from the affair doesn’t increase significantly and he/she would rather move on to other deals. The information asymmetry stands in the fact that the agent has a lot of knowledge about the real-estate market that the client does not possess, knowledge which the first one uses to his or her own advantage. Even if these aspects are well known by all real-estate agents, none of them feel any ethical responsibility to put an end to such deceiving practices or to expose them to the general public. On the contrary, they see them as advantages in their trade and continue to use them frequently. Therefore, within their professional group, real-estate agents do not perceive their actions as being unethical, while the rest of the public, outside of that particular professional group, feels almost immediately an ethical responsibility to denounce and put an end to such practices. This way, as we argued before, the sense of ethical responsibility that comes with knowing something is also relative, depending on which social, cultural or professional group a person is part of, because this particular membership defines what is and what isn’t ethical for us. This is why I believe that ethical responsibility a result of knowledge does occur in situations are governed by general, pre-defined rules (for example, national and international laws, agreements, treaties) regarding areas such as crime prevention or academic honesty, but is might not always occur in situations that could be interpreted differently from the point of view of different groups of people.
For my last point, I will analyze history as an area of knowing and historical objectivity as the ethical responsibility of every historian. In order to achieve objectivity, historians have to make good use of language and reason as ways of knowing and present an unbiased and non-preferential account of historical events. Given the fact that history implies a lot of research, historians accumulate a great amount of knowledge about past events. Having all this information on their hands and being the only ones who know and understand it to its full extent, historians have the duty to expose it and explain it to the public. Therefore, historians have to put aside their cultural biases and national grudges in order to adopt an objective attitude and present past events clearly, without shadowing some events and promoting others. This way, other people will be able to form an informed opinion about different occurrences and processes in history. To go even further, I will say that in order to form an unbiased opinion in the first place, historians themselves will have to use the ways on knowing extensively and to their full potential in their research. For example, language barriers can create severe issues in research, because “our understanding of the world depends to a large extent on the language with which we use to interact with it”. Reading accounts recorded only in one language may be insufficient and therefore, may cause the historian to have a biased account of events from the start. This is why, historians have to learn and explore the meaning of multiple languages, in order to be able to read texts that belong to different nations and cultures, from the present time or from the past time. As the correct and complete collection of data serves the purpose of objectivity, it is safe to say that the intensive exploration of language as a way of knowing can also be considered an ethical responsibility (applied to history, of course). At the same time, if a history lacks objectivity, people (or a population of a state) could suffer significant harm, including brainwashing and the loss of national identity. One example in this area is the use of false historical data for brainwashing the population during the times of Soviet Russia: the history books contained biased, even fabricated facts about the history of the peoples within the Soviet Union in order to historically motivate the Russian invasion of these countries and to justify their appurtenance to the Soviet Union. At the same time, this kind of historical falsification was used to eradicate any sense of national identity of the different peoples within the Soviet Union and to make them believe in the ideal of the Soviet man. Therefore, a historian’s misuse of facts and information, his biased option or lack of ethical responsibility can cause great social, ideological and historical damage; historians have the responsibility to do extensive research and to present the discovered facts in an unbiased manner, so the public could decide for itself who was right and who was wrong in history. Ultimately, the ethical responsibility of the historian does not stand in the fact that he has to stop or correct a wrongful situation, but in the fact that he has to make no judgment upon the righteousness of historical events and present them without rank or preference for the public to judge at its turn.
Therefore, by looking at the three areas of knowledge – natural sciences, human sciences and history – this essay concludes that the possession of knowledge does indeed carry an ethical responsibility, but not in all cases. As seen in the first example – related to climate change prevention – it is clear that individuals feel a certain ethical responsibility associated with their knowledge only when the actions that might result from their ethical responsibility will have a significant impacted on the issue at stake. Therefore, even if you have a lot of knowledge regarding a certain phenomenon, you will not feel responsible about it unless your actions will produce significant change. The second example showed that ethical responsibility might not arise in a certain group of people simply because their definition of what is ethical and what is not is different from other people’s definition. This way, the concept of ethical responsibility becomes relative when looking at the cultures and the ideological environments that people come from, because these environments have a significant influence over people’s ways of knowing. The third example proves that in certain fields, such as history, the objective presentation of facts and events becomes an ethical responsibility with regards to the people that are going further to make use of the information presented by historians. The misuse of historical information can lead to significant damage to the public opinion, even to a peoples’ sense of national identity. Therefore, knowledge should be associated with ethical responsibility, but as proven in this essay, that is not always the case.
Bibliography
Foster, Gregory D. "Ethics: Time to Revisit the Basics." The Humanist, 2003: 8-17.
Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.
Theory of Knowledge. The extent of our language equals to the extent of our knowledge? 2010. http://www.theoryofknowledge.net/ways-of-knowing/language/extent-of-language-extent-of-knowledge.php (accessed November 15, 2012).
