Knowledge Carries an Ethical Responsibility, Essay Example

The claim that “the possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility” may be understood at first glance as an attempt to establish a relationship between two elements that are mutually exclusive: that of knowledge and that of ethics. By considering knowledge and ethics as mutually exclusive, this entails that there is nothing inherent about knowledge itself which infers ethics and vice versa. Clearly, such a claim relies upon specific definitions of both knowledge and ethics respectively, wherein their potentially interpenetrating relationship is refuted. In this case, knowledge would merely designate, for example, a collection of facts; whereas ethics would designate a mode of existential action. However, already in this strict separation between the two, we may detect a certain overlap: what if the collection of facts in question that constitutes a given body of knowledge is ethical in content? This hypothetical further clarifies the question of knowledge and ethics’ relation: even if one would possess knowledge of a particular ethical system or code, for example, so-called “virtue ethics”, this does not mean that one will act ethically: in other words, there is a gap between knowledge and ethics based upon existential action, the individual acting upon the knowledge he possesses. But even this contains a presupposition: what if knowledge itself is not passive, but always active, that is knowledge also bears a quality that is fundamentally related to existence? Above all influenced by the theory of Immanuel Kant, the following essay will attempt to argue precisely for this existential dimension of knowledge, which will then tie into the claim that knowledge must be ethical. Insofar as knowledge and ethics are both ways of existing in the world, according to the essays interpretation of Kant, they indicate our most primordial relationships to the world.

Insofar as this thesis may seem somewhat obscure at this introductory stage, it is important to understand what we mean by ethics and knowledge, so as to develop the necessity of an ethical responsibility of knowledge. Certainly, as the history of human thought indicates, these respective concepts are in no way clearly defined. In the case of theories of knowledge, various epistemological explanations exist as to what knowledge entails. For example, is knowledge directly related to a concept of reality, such that knowledge can be said to exist when it is viewed as a correct correlate and interpretation of that, which is considered to exist objectively? This can be understood as a so-called “representational theory of knowledge”, however, one that bears its own fundamental problems. For example, as Ankersmit notes, there is a problem in certain epistemologies to understand “what differentiates the represented from its representation”[1], which entails that, my knowledge of an apple appears to never be equivalent to the apple itself: the apple somehow transcends this knowledge by reducing it to my particular representation of the apple, and therefore misses something essential about the apple: can this still be properly called knowledge of the apple, and thus knowledge itself?

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is in this regard important because he offers a more fundamental concept of knowledge, with which it is possible to understand potentially different forms of knowledge that exist. As Greenberg suggests, what is at work in Kant is an investigation of the “possibility of a priori knowledge, as distinct from the possibility of empirical knowledge.”[2] In other words, Kant asks a deeper question about how we can know what we claim to know. From this question Kant develops his own theory of such a priori knowledge, defined as a knowledge which is “independent of all experience.”[3] Hence, when we make a claim about knowledge of an apple through its observation and its representation, for example, in a drawing of the apple this very operation presupposes some framework that allows us to carry out this act. This is the type of knowledge that Kant is interested in, and with Kant’s framework we can avoid some of the problems about what knowledge is: is it direct empirical observation, is it representation, is it even perhaps emotional intuition or belief? Kant asks, instead, how belief, representation, intuition, etc., are themselves possible. With this gesture he provides a broad foundation for what possible types of knowledge may exist, while also providing a foundation about how these diverse knowledge experiences may exist. This is what a priori means: the structuring of the world according to something prior to experience which all human beings possess, for example, the fact that all our experiences unfold according to concepts of “space and time.”[4]

From this perspective of knowledge, influenced by Kant, it becomes possible to understand how all knowledge relates to ethics, and in fact, must carry an ethical responsibility. This is because knowledge understood as a priori knowledge is our own human way of existing and being in the world: it is a common foundation for all our cognitive experiences. Knowledge is basically a question of how we exist in the world: Kant attempted to define how we existed in the world by examining these invariant conditions of a priori knowledge. The link to ethics is clear, because ethics itself essentially addresses questions about how we should live in the world: “what is the good?” and “what is justice” are classical examples of such ethical questions. If we define knowledge, following Kant, in terms of an a priori foundation for all possible forms of knowledge, what becomes interesting in this regard is that our forms of knowledge seem to be stable and invariable, whereas ethics is precisely unstable and variable, since ethics essentially asks the question “what we ought to desire, feel, be, or do?”[5]
What is interesting about taking a Kantian perspective on the question of whether “the possession of knowledge carries an ethical responsibility” is therefore as follows: if analyzing the possession of knowledge in terms of the potential of possessing knowledge, which Kant essentially does with his a priori analysis, then it becomes clear that we are all knowledgeable on the more crucial a priori level: all possible forms of knowledge are derivative of this more fundamental a priori form of knowledge, which all human beings have. This changes the question therefore: it essentially asks whether this knowledge which all of us share is essentially also ethical in character?

Kant developed his own ethics and thought that we are all potentially ethical precisely because ethics has the same a priori structure of knowledge. Kant was vehemently opposed to any form of ethical relativism, since this means the loss of meaning ethics for itself: saying something is good depending upon the individual is essentially saying there is nothing good. Rather, much like his invariant structure of rational “rules”, such as space and time, which give us the a priori conditions for any possible form of knowledge, ethics perhaps also has this same structure: this means that we must follow our ethical actions simply because we already possess an ethical framework, much like we have a rational framework with which we view the world. Kant therefore does not examine ethics in terms of experience, since “if we attend to our experience of the behavior of human beings we meet frequent and, as we ourselves, just complaints that no reliable example can be cited of the disposition to act from duty”,[6] which means that if we look at human experience there are an infinite number of actions taken in history, some which are ethical, others unethical: we have to look for something deeper than human history and experience to understand where our ethical responsibilities lie. Namely, because human actions take so many different forms, Kant argues, there must be some type of preexisting ethical responsibility inherent to us, for how could we develop an idea of the good merely by looking the chaos of experience? In other words, if ethics is possible it must exist in a similar a priori form to the reason that allows us to possess such varied forms of knowledge.

From this perspective, we can approach the initial question once again: all knowledge must carry with it an ethical responsibility because both knowledge and ethics are forms of our a priori existence. We all look at the world using concepts of space and time, and can develop from this background many different types of knowledge, such as intuitive knowledge, emotive knowledge, representative knowledge and belief. When ethics is viewed on this Kantian level, we have a certain ethical foundation inherent in us: the question is whether or not we follow this ethical rule or not. This refers to the certain immutability of values across cultures, such as kindness and justice. If knowledge, much like ethics, are not only ways of existing in the world, but also ways of how we understand our existence in the world, then knowledge carries an ethical responsibility since knowledge and ethics both meet on this primordial level.

When we think of knowledge and ethics as essentially human ways of existing, we understand that knowledge is inseparable from ethics, since both are characteristic of human existence. Certainly, this does not mean that there are consequences of knowledge which have not produced ethical catastrophes, or that ethical transgressions occur irrespective of knowledge. In contrast, by understanding knowledge and ethics, as Kant does, as fundamental aspects of our existence, we understand that to be human is to articulate the inseparable relation of knowledge and ethics, a relation which by definition upholds the ethical aspect of knowledge and thus knowledge’s ethical responsibility. Only in this regard, do we remain true to ourselves.

Works Cited

Ankersmit, Frank R. “The Three Levels of “Sinnbildung” in Human History.” In: Jorn Rusen (ed.) Meaning and Representation in History. Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books, 2006. pgs. 108-122.

Darwall, Stephen. Philosophical Ethics: An Historical and Contemporary Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998.

Greenberg, Robert. Kant’s Theory of A Priori Knowledge. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001.

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

[1] Ankersmit, “The Three Levels of “Sinnbildung” in Human History”, pg. 111.

[2] Greenberg, Kant’s Theory of A Priori Knowledge . pg. 4.

[3] Greenberg, op. cit., pg. 3.

[4] Greenberg, op. cit., pg. 2.

[5] Darwall, Philosophical Ethics: An Historical and Contemporary Introduction, pg. 5.

[6] Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pg. 24.