?What’s The Purpose of Gaining Knowledge

It is at this point that ‘Arson for Profit’ becomes supremely relevant. That course is presumably all about means: how to detect and prosecute criminal activity. It is therefore assumed that the end is good in an ethical sense. When I ask fire science students to articulate the end, or purpose, of their field, they eventually generalize to something like, ‘The safety and welfare of society,’ which seems right. As we have seen, someone could use the very same knowledge of means to achieve a much less noble end, such as personal profit via destructive, dangerous, reckless activity. But we would not call that firefighting. We have a separate word for it: arson. Similarly, if you employed the ‘principles of marketing’ in an unprincipled way, you would not be doing marketing. We have another term for it: fraud. Kant gives the example of a doctor and a poisoner, who use the identical knowledge to achieve their divergent ends. We would say that one is practicing medicine, the other, murder.

Questions 1-4
Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage?
In boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet, write

YES    if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO    if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

1. It is difficult to attract students onto courses that do not focus on a career.
2. The ‘Arson for Profit’ course would be useful for people intending to set fire to buildings.
3. Fire science courses are too academic to help people to be good at the job of firefighting.
4. The writer’s fire science students provided a detailed definition of the purpose of their studies.