TOK situations about responsibility
What a knower owes as a result of knowing, or of being in a position to know. It covers obligations in producing knowledge, in passing it on accurately, and in acting or refusing to act on it, including the responsibility taken on by choosing not to look.
What responsibility means in TOK, and the IA prompts it is central to
- Africa
When a government doubted the virus
South Africa's government under Mbeki gave platform to AIDS-dissident scientists and delayed antiretroviral rollout, and later epidemiological studies…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
Counting Bhopal's victims
Official, judicial and activist counts of deaths from the 1984 gas leak differ by tens of thousands, diverging on time windows, causation standards and whose…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Power
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
Evacuating a million people on a forecast
Before Cyclone Fani struck Odisha in 2019, forecasts triggered the evacuation of over a million people, and the death toll stayed in double digits where a…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Certainty
- Responsibility
- Latin America
Bones as witnesses
Forensic teams exhuming mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina matched skeletal evidence to survivor accounts, converting disputed atrocities into documented…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- East Asia
The cloning papers that unravelled
Hwang Woo-suk's celebrated human cloning results, published in a top journal and backed by national pride, were exposed as fabricated partly through anonymous…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Objectivity
- Responsibility
- South Asia
Was this flood climate change?
After Pakistan's 2022 floods displaced millions, attribution scientists estimated how much more likely warming had made the rainfall, and the numbers entered…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Certainty
- Responsibility
- India
The right to ask the state what it knows
India's Right to Information Act lets any citizen demand documents from public authorities, and activists have used it to surface everything from ration fraud…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- South Asia
A nationwide experiment with no pilot
In 2021 Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertiliser imports almost overnight, aiming for fully organic agriculture; harvests collapsed and the decision was reversed…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Southeast Asia
Thirteen lives and competing expertise
The 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue forced a live arbitration between cave divers, military planners, medics and engineers whose recommendations conflicted, under…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Africa
Smuggling a library to safety
When militants occupied Timbuktu in 2012, families and archivists smuggled hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts out in trunks and boats, hiding a…
Enduring · History
- Culture
- Responsibility
- Southeast Asia
When the platform is the public square
In several Southeast Asian countries, a single social platform effectively is the internet for much of the population, and investigations after episodes of…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- India
A billion identities in one database
Aadhaar links welfare, banking and identity to biometric records for over a billion people, and when a fingerprint fails to match or a record misfires, the…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- Global
A museum for art with no artist
A museum devoted entirely to AI-generated art opened in Los Angeles in 2026, while courts have held that copyright protects works of human authorship, leaving…
Current · The arts
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- Global
Ninety seconds to midnight
The Doomsday Clock compresses expert judgment about nuclear and climate risk into a single metaphorical time, set each year by a board and reported worldwide.…
Current · The human sciences
- Interpretation
- Responsibility
- The Middle East and North Africa
Measuring heat where people must work
Gulf states ban outdoor work during set summer hours, defined by clock and calendar rather than by measured heat stress on given sites, while researchers argue…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Global
The pirate library of science
Sci-Hub, built by a Kazakhstani graduate student, serves paywalled research papers free and is heavily used in countries whose universities cannot afford…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility