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Possession Of Knowledge Carries An Ethical Responsibility Essay

773 Words4 Pages

Ethical responsibility is the duty to follow a morally correct path, to correct a wrongful situation that may affect you, your surrounding and other people. One becomes responsible for the possession of knowledge when they become aware of any destructive scenario. The title itself carries a direct assumption that knowledge carries an ethical responsibility. One can understand the consequences of a scenario by having the knowledge of it which then makes him/her carry the weight of responsibility (ethical). The Knowledge issue question is how can we determine that having the possession of knowledge about something should lead to ethical responsibility? We can answer this question by analyzing the statement “Possessing of knowledge sometimes does carry an ethical responsibility”. We can investigate this claim by exploring and applying the areas of knowledge, specifically …show more content…

The word eugenics invented by Francis Galton in the late 1800’s had a goal to improve the human population by getting rid of the undesired traits and increasing the desired ones with the help of selective breading. With our claim “possession of knowledge does carry an ethical responsibility”, Galton is somewhat responsible for all the deaths related to eugenics throughout the years. Eugenics in later years evolved in such a way that not only did they increase the birthrate of the ‘fit’ by selecting parenthood (positive eugenics), but also reduce the birthrate of people that were ‘unfit’ (negative eugenics). For example in 1913, few American states had laws that allowed the compulsory sterilization of those held in custody who were also tagged as ‘unfit’. This resulted in around 70,000 victims being forcefully sterilized, some of these victims include criminals, mentally retarded, drug addicts, the blind, deaf

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