TOK Atlas
Teacher account
Element 4 of 4

Ethics

The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Knowledge questions

Each one is written to be argued about rather than answered. The areas of knowledge underneath are where it has somewhere to land.

  • 01Are there questions a discipline should decline to ask?
  • 02Does a discipline's responsibility end when its findings are published?
  • 03What does a practitioner owe when communicating uncertainty?
  • 04Who bears responsibility when knowledge is applied badly?

Ethics in each area of knowledge

Concepts that surface here

Perspective
Deciding whose perspective counts as informed is an ethical act with epistemic consequences. Excluding a standpoint usually removes the evidence only that standpoint could have supplied.
Culture
Documenting, translating or formalising the knowledge of another community changes it and raises questions of consent, credit and control that the receiving discipline is often poorly equipped to notice.
Power
Knowledge confers standing, so producing it is an exercise of influence over people who must take it on trust. The ethical questions here are about authority and its misuse, not only about how research subjects are treated.
Values
Values are not applied to finished knowledge from outside. They are already in the choice of question, the acceptable rate of false positives, and the decision about which harms count as costs, which is why value-free enquiry is not an available option.
Responsibility
This element asks what practitioners owe: integrity in producing knowledge, honesty about uncertainty when communicating it, and a decision about what to do once something is known that cannot be unknown.