What’s the purpose of gaining knowledge?
What's the purpose of gaining knowledge?
A
A'Let this college open its doors to anyone who wishes to study whatever subject they choose.' Those words, attributed to Bartholomew Vance, founder of Aldermoor College, could just as easily describe the very different American university where I now teach philosophy. Here a young person can train for a career in hotel management, civil engineering, landscape design, bookkeeping, jazz performance, policing — the list goes on. And yet what would Vance, or my own institution's founders, have made of a class we genuinely offer, listed in the catalogue as 'Hacking for Profit'? Undergraduates who meet the entry requirements are free to enrol in it through our degree in cybersecurity.
B
BThe class is meant, of course, for would-be security analysts, who master every trick of the trade so as to work out whether a network was breached on purpose, pin down who did it, and build the chain of proof a court needs before it can hand down a conviction. Yet wouldn't the same class suit an aspiring criminal hacker just as well? I say this not to attack degree programmes in cybersecurity, which I regard as thoroughly welcome — a sign that this occupation, like many others, is steadily becoming more professional. Even so, the very person paid to defend a system is sometimes the one who attacks it. Dishonesty and crime, aided rather than hindered by a university education, can work their way into every corner of public and commercial life.
C
CThis came home to me again when a colleague asked me to address her marketing students — marketing being yet another of the degrees on offer here — because, as a philosopher, I could offer the ethical angle she valued. I might have tackled the invitation in any number of ways, but the course's own name, 'Principles of Marketing', gave me my opening, and I put a question to the room: is marketing actually principled? A discipline, after all, can be governed by principles in the narrow sense — a settled body of rules, as chess or football is — while being nothing of the sort in the moral sense. To most of the students the answer looked self-evident, and it was no: one need only consider the shameless ways in which every product imaginable gets sold to see that marketing is hardly conducted on ethical lines.
D
DBut is it really so self-evident? I floated a proposal that, in light of all the evidence, may sound faintly absurd: that marketing is, by definition, principled. It came from the philosopher Viktor Halstrom, who held that every branch of knowledge is made up of two things — an end, meaning its purpose, and a means of reaching it.
E
ETake those two ideas, means and end, and hold them up against marketing. Students enrol on the course so as to learn to market well — but with what purpose in view? Two broad answers tend to surface. The first treats the matter as plain: marketing exists to sell goods and to generate money. The second shrugs the question off as immaterial, on the grounds that everyone arrives with private aims of their own, aims that may have nothing to do with marketing expertise in itself. My own view — and, I suspect, Halstrom's — is that both answers miss just how tightly the end bears on the means. Any discipline, any professional calling, is constituted by its means together with its end, so that the two alike call for examination. It is not enough for students to learn how to bring about some goal X; they must also ask what X is.
F
FHere is where 'Hacking for Profit' comes fully into its own. The course, on the face of it, deals only in means — the techniques for uncovering and prosecuting wrongdoing — and the end is simply presumed to be good, ethically speaking. Whenever I press cybersecurity students to spell out that end, the purpose behind their field, they arrive sooner or later at some phrase like 'keeping society safe and secure', which seems fair enough. And yet, as we have seen, an identical command of the means can be turned to a far less honourable end — private gain won through damaging, dangerous, reckless acts. That we decline to call security work; we keep a different word for it: cracking. In the same way, to deploy the 'principles of marketing' without principle is not to be marketing at all; here too a separate word waits: fraud. Halstrom offers the case of a healer and a poisoner who draw on one and the same knowledge to opposite ends: the first, we say, practises medicine; the second, murder.
Question 1 - 6
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each section.
1
Paragraph A
An unexpected name for a course
List of Heading
Programmes that demand serious dedication
Separate words for contrasting results
A course name that can be read two ways
How a course might draw unsuitable applicants
An unexpected name for a course
Why two elements matter equally
Using an idea in a surprising setting
How study can pay off financially
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