The Knowledge Framework — Ethics, and Thinking Critically

The fourth lens, ethics, asks how questions of value are entangled with the pursuit of knowledge. This lesson also gathers the critical-thinking skills, evidence, bias, and justification, that run through the whole course.

Ethics and knowledge

Ethics enters knowledge in two distinct ways, and TOK asks you to keep them separate. First, there are ethical constraints on how knowledge is produced: rules about consent in human experiments, honesty in reporting data, humane treatment of research subjects, and academic integrity. Second, there are ethical questions raised by the knowledge itself: whether some discoveries should be pursued at all, who controls a technology, or whether a historian has a duty to represent victims fairly. A separate and much-debated question is whether knowledge can