Our Duty to Knowledge
By Jackson Dale Styner
I find Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to be interesting because I could see the parallels in the metaphor used by Aristotle, Political science, and current day technology. In the beginning of Book 4, Aristotle claims that the pursuit of knowledge about political science, or in fact any pursuit of knowledge, aims at some good. In an ideal world this would be a metaphor for creating new technology. In human’s search for newer and faster phones, computers, technology, etc. that we are doing so in pursuit of some good. I believe when creating new technology it would be naïve to think its always the case that it’s in search of “new knowledge” or the common good. I think a large motivator, at least in our society, is to make money. Aristotle later states in Chapter 7 that one can do something for money (i.e. creating technology for the money) as well as seek a common good as well. However, I think technology has a much larger capacity for harm and control in people’s lives than the examples Aristotle was thinking of in his time.
Plato’s Republic also raised a lot of ethical questions I hadn’t previously thought about in association to technology. In his extensive metaphor about the cave, Plato comes to assert, in my opinion, the goal of education should not to be and teach each man your knowledge or opinion. The goal should be to enlighten him and show him the full capacity of the world. I made a lot of connections to technology with this idea. Computers, for example, have almost any bit of knowledge we could desire to know contained on the internet. However, even better is we can use technology to get a better sense of the world around us and learn more about not only ourselves but life. We can use technology to “get us out of the cave” as well but it must be used correctly.
Andrew Marantz’s Antisocial felt to me to show what can happen to technology when it doesn’t live up to the ideals set out by Aristotle or Plato. Instead what we see is more in line with what the internet feels to be today. On a platform where anyone has an opinion or can spread “knowledge” some people use this power dangerously. Soon consumers can’t tell the difference between a lie and the truth on the internet. The cave metaphor from Plato seems useless because we don’t know what knowledge to trust anymore. It is important, I feel, to be aware of the potential technology has to do good in this world, like many other things, but the great capacity it also has for harm.