The "Imperative of Responsibility" According to Hans Jonas (original) (raw)

In his book "The Imperative of Responsibility," published in 1979, the German philosopher Hans Jonas pleads for the extreme emergency to give ourselves an ethics for technological civilization based on "the imperative of responsibility." His theory starts from the finding that the promise of modern technology has turned into a threat of disaster: science confers to man previously unknown forces, the economy constantly pushes forward in an unbridled impulse. Economic achievements have amplified the mass production of possessions while reducing the quantity of human work required, leading to overconsumption and an immensely increased metabolic interaction with the natural environment. At the source of the current threats is the old idea of dominating nature to improve human fate. However, success in the submission of nature has achieved excessive proportions and has spread to the very nature of man. According to Jonas, power has become its own master, whereas its promise has turned into threat and its perspective of salvation into apocalypse. A single form of life, man, is now in a position to endanger all forms of life (his own included). Added to the scope of the long-term effects of human action, is their irreversibility. What man can do today has no equivalent in past experience. We need an ethics of the state of crisis, an ethics of responsibility, of conservation, of preservation. Traditional ethics, which govern relationships among human beings, can no longer inform us on the norms of "good" and "evil" to which we must submit. In this ethics, nature does not constitute an object of human responsibility. It takes care of itself as well as of man. Now that our power is undermining the natural balances, our responsibility spreads beyond interhuman relations to the biosphere and should incorporate long-term effects in any forecast. Just as humankind's very future is threatened, the ethics of responsibility results in an imperative to human existence: man imperative is to be, and to lead a life worthy of being called human. The future of nature is understood as an essential condition for this obligation: man's interest coincides with that of the rest of life, which is his Earth home in the most sublime sense of the word. The preservation of nature is the condition of our own survival. Thus, we can speak of "man's imperative" in reference to two imperatives-to man and to nature-that are intrinsically linked. Further yet, the solidarity of man's and nature's destinies (of which we have become aware through danger) also makes us rediscover the autonomy of the dignity of nature and commands us to respect its integrity beyond its utilitarian dimension. Jonas meticulously demonstrates the internal contradictions and the limits of the Utopian dream of man's emancipation from the servitude of needs, pursued with the same dedication as much by the proponents of the supremacy of economic, technological, and scientific "progress," as by the Marxist current. Thus, a good part of this book is devoted to a critique of Utopias. As highlighted by the author, this critique is not so much meant to refute an error in thinking as to build a foundation for its alternative, which is nothing else than an ethics of responsibility. Jonas reviews man's current attacks on nature (such as genetic manipulation) as well as