ToK essay #2

essay.tex

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\begin{mla}{Shou}{Ya}{Nathan Engquist}{Theory of Knowledge}{\today}

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\noindent\textit{\textbf{Essay topic:}
3. ``The possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility.''
Evaluate this claim.}

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Knowledge is the most precious wealth of human civilization. Those
people with higher knowledge level might be in a more significant
social position than the others. Hence, some people have raised a
contention that those who owns more knowledge should shoulder more
ethical responsibility. Basically I don't agree with this opinion.
I would like to analyze why people think so, and then pose my idea
about how should we regard these.


The origin of our knowledge is from activity of mankind in the
thousands years. We obtain knowledge from our experience and
understanding of the world. Our knowledge inherits. For example, Isaac Newton said,
'If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants'\footnote{Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, 5 February
  1676, as transcribed in Jean-Pierre Maury (1992) \textit{Newton:
  Understanding the Cosmos, New Horizons}}. It
is the whole human race who have been contributing to the knowledge
pool. And obviously in this process it
won't bring any ethical issue.

Some ways of acquisition of knowledge
might involve our sense of responsibility, such as from book or
by taught by a teacher. People will probably feel it like a kind of transferring of
wealth. Therefore they regard knowledge acquisition as
bestowing. For example, if you learnt something from your teacher, you
will feel grateful to \textit{something}. While my point is, the target of
the gratitude should be the teacher's teaching work, but not the
knowledge itself, since it is public and open. People don't usually realize that, so in this way
they may mix them up and give knowledge a physically wealth-like
position. Even that knowledge is usually regarded as wealth, it's
shared and not exclusive.

At last, the possession of knowledge, just like the
possession of treasure or power, gives people a sort of
superiority. It is this kind of superiority that gives people an urge,
in the way of ethical responsibility, to do something valuable. These are
the fundamental principles of knowledge and how they impact our sense
of responsibility.

As we can see from the previous analysis, knowledge is a kind of
public and free(not the beer one) stuff. However, where in which we
feel responsible is just
our subjective feeling caused by unconsciously misunderstanding and
confusing of the concept of knowledge.
Since the possession of public knowledge is a kind of affair which is
personal, so I think it's not necessary to relate it with ethical
responsibility. 

People could decidethe wayto deal with knowledge without ethicsal consideration. For example, if I know something in an area, let's say, programming, I don't have to contribute to an open source project; 
It doesn't matter if I only regard it as personal hobby, nor even I never actually program. Nobody even has duty to do something if he know something.


On the other hand, most knowlege is open. That means everyone can acquire it without extra process such as confirming with someone. We might have to pay on the process of acquiring knowlege though,
the knowlege itself is free and open to everyone.

Another feature of of knowlege is that it is not exclusive. In the other words, same knowlege could be shared among many people without any loss or something likewise. 

In all of these analysis we don't see any necessity to be responsible of possession of knowledge. So in the way I don't consider the possession of knowledg carries ethical responsibility.


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%   with contributions by Steven Wheelwright,
%        Edward Z. Yang, and Teddy Bradford
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%   Last updated on December 29, 2010
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%    For use with LaTeX and pdflatex.
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%   put \begin{mla}{Firstname}{Lastname}{Prof's lastname}{class
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