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1.5 TOK Journal TASK

The first journal entry describes a video about studying insects trapped in amber that are up to 100 million years old. It notes the ethical issues with excavating amber in Burma where mining conditions are dangerous and many miners are killed. The situation links to biology for understanding evolution and values in weighing the human costs of knowledge production. This prompts the question of whether knowledge production should have ethical restraints, which is important to consider for scientific experiments and manipulation that often have moral implications. Different perspectives like one's profession, religion, or culture could affect views on this question, and there is no easy answer balancing benefits of knowledge with human suffering.

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52 views2 pages

1.5 TOK Journal TASK

The first journal entry describes a video about studying insects trapped in amber that are up to 100 million years old. It notes the ethical issues with excavating amber in Burma where mining conditions are dangerous and many miners are killed. The situation links to biology for understanding evolution and values in weighing the human costs of knowledge production. This prompts the question of whether knowledge production should have ethical restraints, which is important to consider for scientific experiments and manipulation that often have moral implications. Different perspectives like one's profession, religion, or culture could affect views on this question, and there is no easy answer balancing benefits of knowledge with human suffering.

Uploaded by

Earth
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Escaping the madness: two exemplar TOK journal entries

Colour code these different elements of the two journal entries below

● A description of the real-life situation


● Links to AOKs/themes
● The question it prompts us to ask about how we know something (the ‘knowledge question’)
● An evaluation of the importance of this question and real-life situation
● How different perspectives might affect the way we view the knowledge question

Exemplar TOK journal 1

My first real-life situation is based on a video made by the Atlantic Magazine, which discusses what
we can learn from studying insects trapped in amber, which, in some cases, are 100 million years old.
It weighs up this “mind-blowing” knowledge against the ethical issues associated with excavating the
amber, particularly in Burma. Here, conditions for those working in deep mines are incredibly
dangerous, and hundreds of miners are killed every month, many of them teenagers.

The real-life situation links to the natural sciences, specifically biology, as the knowledge produced by
looking at the insects helps us to understand the way in which life has evolved over time. It also has a
strong link to values, as we are forced to make a moral judgement about whether the knowledge
provided by the amber is worth the human cost in gaining it.

This leads me to ask the knowledge question, ‘Should the production of knowledge have ethical
restraints?’ This is an incredibly important question to answer, as scientific experiments, and other
forms of producing knowledge, often have moral implications, such as animal testing in order to
produce medicine (and cosmetics), and the manipulation of genes in both animals and humans. There
need to be some ethical limits on how knowledge is produced, and figuring out who should decide
these rules, and how they should be drawn up, is obviously an issue that is of huge significance to
modern society.

Who you are will probably determine your answer to this knowledge question: professional scientists
will view it very differently to those who do not have a scientific background; our religious perspective
may affect the way we view this moral issue; if we benefit from scientific knowledge (such as
medicine) that has been produced ‘unethically’, then we would also probably feel strongly about the
question. There are also big cultural differences: in China, for example, there are fewer ethical limits
on scientific development than Western countries such as the United States, which is one of the
reasons why this region of the world is developing so quickly in terms of its scientific and
technological knowledge.

There’s no easy answer to this question, because on the one hand scientific discoveries can bring
huge benefits to society; on the other, it’s obviously preferable that no human should suffer in the
production of new ideas and knowledge.
TASK

Compose a journal entry:

1. Give a brief description (summary) of your RLS, with a link if possible.


2. What AoK does it belong to? Can you connect any themes / core
concepts to it?
3. Discuss some possible different perspectives on this issue.
4. Come up with a first-order knowledge question.
5. Come up with a second-order knowledge question and evaluate it.

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