Human progress has required a constant curiosity among mankind for possessing greater knowledge. Many good things have come out of these pursuits, which have helped to make the lives of all humans better. Enrichment of grains, such as rice, were made possible through the scientific inquiries of a few well intentioned and curious scientists, and was a procedure that led to the green revolution and abated a growing concern over the sustainability of food sources as the world's population increased rapidly throughout the twentieth century. Medicines have similarly been constructed to benefit innumerous people and would not have existed if mankind did not believe that the pursuit of knowledge was a respectable avenue to traverse down. Both of these activities have led to the improvement of life and would rarely if ever be objected against as unjust.
Yet sometimes the act of pursuing knowledge can become overly destructive, and in these situations, pursuing knowledge cannot be considered justified. The building of museum collections has often been cited as an activity which can be considered both constructive (i.e. creating store houses of knowledge which can be accessed by the public) and destructive (i.e. the removal of important cultural items from outside societies). In cases such as this, the good of pursuing knowledge becomes less clear. Questions of ethics and morals must be raised to determine if knowing how other cultures functioned in the past is worth the removal of potentially important cultural items in the present. Likewise, the vast and far reaching collection of biological specimens undertaken by scientists in the nineteenth century, such as Charles Darwin, helped provide knowledge of far away places that advanced theories on biological adaptations of organisms and ultimately led to the positing of the theory of evolution, but many individual animals had to be killed in order for these ideas to be cultivated. Even more questionable, human test subjects can be killed because of the level of danger involved in their area of research. Famous female scientists, such as Madam Curie and Rosalind Franklin, provided the world with data that would be turned into invaluable theories about the unseen processes of the molecular and atomic world, but they both died as a result of their investigations.
The pursuit of knowledge is indeed an inherent mission that drives humans further along. However, it is not always justified because the harm done cannot always match the good derived from such pursuits. Fortunately, as a result of progress made thus far, many pursuits are now guided by legislature written with morals in mind. The United States Government, for example, has explicit guidelines for how American Indian artifacts can be used by researchers so that findings are not unnecessarily removed from living people who might still have an attachment to such items but do not have the power to stop themselves from being exploited. Slowly, museums over the world are returning goods from foreign countries that were pilfered throughout various times in history. And within research facilities, test subjects are protected through a series of guidelines and restrictions concerning research with human subjects. Likewise, researchers are benefited from the inclusion of important data within their workplaces, such as MSDS sheets, that outline the known danger of chemical compounds. Pursuit of knowledge, when applied with morals and ethics, is thus justified.
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