Let's Get Critical! A Short Novella, Apparently

Thinking critically is one of the most precious of human abilities, second only to a sense of morality. Because of this, our topic for TOK this week feels almost too weighty to discuss. If humans could not think critically, there is no way we would have survived this long. We would not have been able to recognize threats in our environment, and would have perished as a result. The same is true of morality; if humans did not have a sense of it, we would certainly have killed one another off, or at the very least, would not have been able to develop the civilizations we have today. Therefore, I believe humans have not only a moral imperative to be critical, but a critical imperative to be moral.

My greatest goal in life is to become a doctor. The ability to save people and be of importance to others appeals to me greatly. That being said, I recognize that because other people trust you with their lives and the lives of their loved ones, it is a morally and critically demanding job. Doctors need to make split second decisions, in which their critical thinking is pushed to be readily available and correct. Your patient is on the operating table, you are in the middle of life-saving cardiac surgery, you see their blood pressure and O2 stats begin to drop at a rate that ensures you will not be able to finish the surgery without permanent damage done to their brain. You need to ask yourself, in those two seconds: Do I have the time to complete this? Does their survival in a severely disabled state outweigh their possible imminent death? You need to consider: is it better to have them succumb right now, on the table, or two days in the future because you didn't finish the surgery? This is the sort of snap-second critical thinking I expect to encounter in the medical field. Of course, you have the moral imperative to make the correct critical decision based on these considerations. You took the Hippocratic Oath, and furthermore, you will have to face the family and tell them what happened in the operating room. But then, morality hits shades of grey. Will you be liable if, after you save your patient but leave them mentally incapacitated, their family sues? They couldn't possibly know how much thought went into your decision, but in this case, your critical thinking got you into trouble. Morality did not pay off.

Another medical situation that I found interesting considering the topic (which I will attempt to make much less convoluted than the previous one) is euthanasia. If you have a patient who will do nothing but suffer for years without hope of recovery and they ask you to help them die, what do you do? Your critical thinking allows you to know that euthanasia is the best choice for your patient, and you've fulfilled your moral imperative to think critically-but, euthanasia is illegal. The law tells you that your moral ideal is morally wrong. Once again, the moral conclusion you have reached is apparently immoral. Perhaps if you hadn't thought critically, you would've just accepted the law at face value, and your morals would not have come into question.

All things considered, while I do believe that it's morally important to think critically, I also realize that thinking critically can put you in a more difficult position morally (that was a verbal tangle, geez). Also, as demonstrated in both scenarios, morality is different for each person, and where critical thinking may fortify one person's morals, it might also conflict with another's. Clearly, thinking critically can be both morally refreshing, and morally complicating.