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Ethical Judgments Limit the Methods Available in the Production of Knowledge in Both the Arts and the Natural Sciences
Ethical judgment is, the same as any judgment, a personal view on specific things. No matter if it is based on the culture, religion, age or sex, it is all in one’s mind. Therefore I don’t agree that ethical judgment should be applied on subjects such as arts and natural sciences, and especially to the means of the production of knowledge. We, as a society, human race, are born to learn and then we die; if we will judge the ways we are being thought or learn, we might not be able to fully live our lives.
The answers to all the questions about ethics are never given and are mostly based on the background of the author of an article, a book, a webpage or a movie. In any way, it is difficult to determine the reasons for “building” ethical walls around any areas of knowledge, that cut down the amount of the knowledge that is and can be produced. As to the amount of how much the society has changed and how the ethical judgments have changed, we can determine that the society has become more humane and choses to stop any harmful ways of producing knowledge and believes that it is possible to produce the same knowledge through more technological ways. Therefore the conclusion is that ethical judgments do, in a way, limit the methods available to produce knowledge in arts and natural sciences, but thanks to the development on todays technology, it is possible to produce the same knowledge in different, more ethically correct ways.
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IB TOK Ethical judgments limit the methods available in the production of knowledge in both the arts and the natural sciences. Discuss. According to Hunt and Vitell (1986) “ethical judgment is the process of considering several alternatives and choosing the most ethical alternative”. Rest (1986) defines it as “ethical judgment is the process by which an individual determines that one alternative is morally right and another alternative is morally wrong”. By using these definitions we are able to discuss whether or not ethical judgments limit the methods available in the production of knowledge in the arts and natural sciences. The arts and natural sciences are areas of knowledge that don’t have specific boundaries or limits as to how the knowledge is produced, therefore it is difficult to present an ambiguous answer to a statement as the one stated above.