Throughout history humanity has sought one thing: knowledge. The pursuit of these elusive ideas has spanned time between people as distant as Plato and Einstein. During this span two main camps have emerged surrounding the avenue for the pursuit of knowledge. One camp believes that, above all else, knowledge is worth obtaining. The second camp would beg to disagree.
During WWII many different types of people were taken to concentration camps. These camps were places where people were forced into manual labor, starved, and even experimented upon. Those experiments often took the lives of the unwilling prisoners, their bodies discarded in mass graves to make room for the next batch of participants. The second group of people, those who disagree with the idea that knowledge is worth obtaining no matter the cost, find the foundation for their belief in stories such as the above. Knowledge is not worth obtaining when it is the cause of someone’s unwanted death.
Ethics, then, is the determinant between when the pursuit of knowledge is good, and when it turns humanity into a self-destructive species. The questions one should ask, before starting on the path towards a new discovery, surround those who will be involved in the process. Can one predict a participant being hurt during the course of an experiment? Will the experiment end in death? Or even on a less intense level, will the experiment lead to foreseeable, but unwanted, struggles for any person part of the process? If the answer to any of those questions is yes then perhaps a different avenue to the discovery of this new idea is in order.
Knowledge is a worthy goal. But the path taken to obtain that goal must be without reproach. As history has shown there are examples of groups who, through the torture of others, have learned new things about our world. Yet those groups are looked at with distain by most of society. Those who look at the former with distain see the only knowledge worth pursuing as that obtained through ethical means.
I wrote that in 30 minutes off the prompt: The pursuit of knowledge is always justified.
