The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age by Hans Jonas

The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age Reviews

• 
  Bru Fritsche

  Meio confuso, difícil de ler em alguns trechos, mas incrivelmente importante. Nunca tinha parado pra
  pensar tanto na necessidade de uma ética ambiental
  por causa do progresso desenfreado que estamos vivenciando, como humanidade, há tanto tempo. Também não sabia se todas as suas implicações - políticas, ideológicas, sociais. Tudo isso está no Princípio Responsabilidade, que tenta compreender até porque chegamos a esse nível através de uma investigação filosófica super relevante. Recomendo, um livro para ser lido novamente.
• 
  Zachary

  In The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas insists that traditional ethical theories are not conceptually sufficient to address the most dire moral problems humans now face in the technological era. The scope and intensity of collective human power has, over the past century, expanded to unprecedented levels, and the brute fact of this power means that we are responsible for the future of human and non-human life in an unprecedented way. We therefore need an ethic of responsibility that can justify and explain to us the moral imperatives incumbent on humanity in view of its capacity to destroy itself, and Jonas strives to outline such an ethic and its aims. Overall, he claims to offer five theses: (1) that traditional ethical theories are ill-equipped for the major moral problems of the technological era due to the expanded breadth and depth of human action; (2) that metaphysics must underpin ethics if we are to properly understand and justify our moral duties, the most important of which is to ensure the future existence of humanity; (3) that, in view of the moral issues of our time, we need an ethic of responsibility, where responsibility is a correlate of power and commensurate with the latter’s scope and exercise; (4) that a so-called heuristics of fear is needed to tell us what is possible in the future, and hence what may be at stake morally; and (5) that, contrary to more utopian objectives (like the classless society of Marxism), the end of responsible moral action should be to save humanity from the excesses of human power. I will treat each of these theses in turn.
  
  With respect to the first thesis, Jonas identifies five standard features of traditional ethical theories that render them problematic in the technological era. On his view, classical ethical systems are characterized by: (A) the fact that the whole realm of techne (i.e. interaction with the non-human world) is morally neutral; (B) anthropocentrism in that their central concern is interhuman interaction; (C) the assumption that human nature is constant in essence and not the object of techne; (D) a narrow spatiotemporal horizon in which moral action takes place—i.e. the idea that the end of any action is spatially and temporally proximate (4-5). Each of these assumptions, Jonas contends, is now unwarranted. First, it has become clear that how humans interact with the non-human world is far from morally neutral; the consequences of how we farm, maintain livestock, manufacture, mine, and travel have obvious moral import, not only for the environment but for humans as well. Second, because the realm of techne is imbued with moral normativity, the narrow anthropocentrism of classical ethics is clearly untenable; we need an ethic that takes into account how environmental exploitation ultimately harms humans and, what is more, helps identify what we owe the other-than-human. Third, because modern technology offers us novel powers over humanity itself (see CRISPR), we need an ethic that appreciates the mutability of human nature and provides norms for the proper use of these powers. Finally, the spatiotemporal horizon of human action has expanded drastically: our individual actions have future effects that can be hard, if not impossible, to predict, and collective human action often operates concurrently across continents and over the course of several decades. The epistemic conditions for moral action are therefore very different than they were in previous eras, and any modern moral theory must take this into account.
  
  Jonas’s second major thesis is that metaphysics must underpin ethics in order to properly explain why we have a responsibility to ensure that future humans exist, which, in view of our unprecedented capacity to destroy the human species, he takes to be the first and most important moral duty of an ethic of responsibility for the technological era. His concern is to be able to confront the moral skeptic who questions why we should worry about the future of humanity. First, Jonas rejects the idea that our duties to future humans are rooted in their rights, since the idea of the anticipated rights of future individuals presupposes that there will be future individuals, and the moral skeptic could claim that the desirability or mandatoriness of a future humanity depends on the foreseeable conditions of its existence, such that if we can reasonably predict that future humans will live wretched and undesirable lives, we have no duty to perpetuate the species, and hence no duties that correspond to the anticipated rights of future humans. To circumvent this objection, Jonas needs to explain why there is an a priori duty to ensure that future humans exist, and this duty, he contends, derives from the fact that humans should continue to exist.
  
  Yet, Jonas insists, to demonstrate this point—that there should be future humans—one must first demonstrate why existence is valuable in the first place. That is, Jonas must show why existence is good. If he can justify the value of existence, then he can establish the value of the existence of future humans, from which stems our present duty to ensure that there will be future humans capable of a certain form of human life. And yet to demonstrate the value of existence, Jonas claims he must first justify the reality of value as such. To do this, he takes a detour via the notion of ends and their status in reality—i.e. he explores the idea of purpose in nature.
  
  Jonas takes pains to show how purposive action is not metaphysically circumscribed to subjectivity or consciousness (which, in the appendix, Jonas demonstrates must exist and is not, as materialism would have it, a mere epiphenomenon). That is to say, preconscious nature is purposive, and more broadly, nature itself, which Jonas claims is one, has a telos. Jonas’s defense of this radical claim is deeply nuanced and ultimately persuasive, and while its details cannot be set forth here, it suffices to say that his position upends not only materialist metaphysics, but also basic assumptions in natural science that rest on untenable evolutionary theories (in that these theories cannot adequately account for the appearance of consciousness insofar as they deny the idea of purpose in nature; Jonas, to be sure, affirms evolutionary theory, but rejects the presupposition that evolution lacks a final cause). In the end, Jonas offers that at least one determinate purpose of nature is life itself. As Jonas puts this point, the end of nature is “above all the tendency to be, ceaselessly at work in each of its creations” (74).
  
  With this purpose or end of nature established, Jonas contends that life as the end of nature is not value-neutral. Rather, the value of life as an end of nature follows from the fact that nature has this end, which is also an end for each and every individual in nature. An end, in other words, cannot be value-neutral, since it matters to whom it is an end for whether that end is attained. Jonas, however, thinks that he can offer a more robust case for why one should affirm the value of life—that is to say, why one should find the value of life valuable. First, he takes it as axiomatic that purposiveness is intrinsically valuable: even “the mere capacity to have any purposes at all [is] a good-in-itself,” he asserts (80). Next, he observes that purposiveness is necessarily an affirmation of being as valuable; even the rejection of being betrays a purpose, which by definition is an affirmation of being, and hence this ‘no’ to being paradoxically affirms the value of being. Consequently, “the mere fact that being is not indifferent toward itself makes its difference from nonbeing the basic value of all values.” Being, as valuable in itself, is the condition for the possibility of all values. And because “life is the explicit confrontation of being with not-being,” life, too, is valuable in itself (81).
  
  Jonas, then, has justified the reality of value in nature, which strives toward an affirmation of its being as one of its ends. Concomitantly, he has also demonstrated that being is good by virtue of this purposiveness in nature. What is especially noteworthy about this conclusion is that, while it resonates with the Judeo-Christian idea that creation is good, Jonas in no way presupposes a creator God to establish the goodness of being, but relies entirely on his own metaphysics of nature. Moreover, Jonas’s metaphysics of nature renders moot the naturalistic fallacy and upends the traditional fact-value distinction: being is good because being is purposive, and purposiveness implies intrinsic value. With the goodness of being substantiated, Jonas has established the first and most important premise needed to show why, first, a future world should exist, and, second, humans should exist in that world. Why we have a present duty to ensure this outcome, however, remains to be seen.
  
  It is at this point that Jonas introduces his ethic of responsibility, his third major thesis. To explain how the goodness of being translates into our present duty to preserve it, Jonas points to the power humans now collectively wield in the technological era. While humans do not have much power as individuals, they collectively possess immense power over themselves and the non-human environment, such that certain forms of collective human action can, over time, make human life as we have known it impossible on this planet. The most obvious example of this is the imminent prospect of climate catastrophe from widespread fossil fuel consumption—a concern which Jonas mentions briefly, but whose contours were not yet entirely salient when Jonas published The Imperative of Responsibility. The immense breadth and depth of collective human power therefore mediates the transition from the goodness of humans’ future existence to our duty to ensure that humans will exist and that a certain form of life will be possible for them. As Jonas explains, “responsibility is a correlate of power, so that the scope and kind of power determine the scope and kind of responsibility.” Whereas Kant claims that “you can because you ought,” Jonas insists that “you ought because you act—which you do because you can; which means, your exorbitant capacity is already at work” (128).
  
  Jonas articulates two principal commandments that stand at the center of his ethic of responsibility: first, one must act so as to ensure that future humans exist; and second, one must act so as to ensure that future humans can live well (99). More specifically, Jonas is concerned that future humans can exercise the same capacity for responsible action that we now possess, as in this capacity lies human dignity. It is not sufficient for his ethic of responsibility that we only act so as to ensure the mere preservation of the species; we must also ensure that future human life is dignified, or at least that it can be dignified by responsible human action.
  
  Importantly, Jonas does not think that human responsibility starts and ends with our duty to promote future human life. Given the intrinsic value of life more broadly, and due to the fact that humans now wield the power to eradicate massive swaths of non-human life, Jonas claims that human responsibility extends toward the other-than-human as well. At one level, he maintains that our duties toward non-humans are constitutive of our duty to preserve humanity; we rely on non-human life for our own survival, and so we must preserve the integrity of the non-human environment as a condition for the possibility of future human existence. Moreover, a myopic anthropocentrism that “is ready to sacrifice the rest of nature to [our] purported needs can only result in the dehumanization of man [sic.]” in some more fundamental sense (136). Yet at a deeper level, Jonas claims that we have duties to non-humans for their own sake, rooted specifically in our power to permanently eliminate whole species from existence. “Power and peril reveal a duty which . . . extends from our being to that of the whole,” Jonas explains, and hence humans become “the custodian of every other end-in-itself that ever falls under the rule of [their] power” (138-9, 130).
  
  Jonas’s fourth thesis, which advocates for a so-called heuristics of fear, is central to his ethic of responsibility. He claims that such an ethic necessarily warns about the summum malum over and above the hopeful prospect of the summum bonum, since it is only “an anticipated distortion of man [sic.] that helps us to detect [what] in the normative conception of man [should] be preserved from [this distortion]” (26). Put differently, we must know what in the future to avoid if we are to know what in humanity must be saved. On this principle, Jonas articulates two more practical duties for his ethic of responsibility: first, there is an imperative to visualize the distant consequences of technological enterprise, which requires both our reason and imagination. Second, there is an imperative to cultivate the appropriate emotion in relation to this future projection, so that it will motivate responsible action. Jonas speaks here of “a spiritual sort of fear which is, in a sense, the work of our own deliberate attitude,” since we must “educate our soul” to let itself be affected by the possible calamities suffered by future human communities (28). We see here the importance of sentiment to Jonas’s ethic.
  
  Jonas’s fifth thesis, a critique of utopianism, follows naturally from his advocacy for a heuristics of fear that emphasizes the prophecy of doom over the prophecy of bliss. If, in view of the immense power humans collectively wield, responsible moral action is cautious above all, then any form of the utopian ideal should clearly be avoided. Nevertheless, Jonas is especially interested in Marxism, since, in an admittedly attenuated form, it initially seems much better suited than either other forms of totalitarianism or liberal-democratic capitalism to promote a future-oriented ethic of responsibility. Jonas offers several reasons for this assessment: Marxism is explicitly focused on the future, as it promotes action ordered toward the consummation of a classless society; the scope of its object is all of humanity, which corresponds with the first commandment of an ethic of responsibility; a centralized socialist economy can be more easily constrained than a free-market economy, which Jonas views as absolutely necessary to avoid future apocalypse; and, in a Soviet-style communist autocracy, the enthusiasm for utopia native to Marxism can be more easily transmuted into an enthusiasm for austerity than in other types of polities, where collective desires are more difficult to manipulate.
  
  Still, despite the (admittedly bleak) superiority of Marxism in terms of its ability to foster and enforce an ethic of responsibility, Jonas ultimately rejects Marxism as a vehicle for human preservation, both because we have reason to believe that its worldwide implementation would only exacerbate the dominance of technology and its destruction of the environment, and because the Marxist ideal is not desirable in itself. With respect to the first objection, Jonas notes Marxism’s obsession with technology (both in theory and practice) and believes that, insofar as material prosperity is a causal condition for the classless society of the Marxist utopia, technological enterprise in a worldwide Marxist society would be zealously ordered toward “the pursuit of plenty” (160). To attain the “leisure-cum-plenty” economy envisioned by Marxism, human technological dominance over nature would need to increase considerably, and Jonas doubts that the planet could endure such levels of further exploitation (187-90). Practically, then, Marxism is ill-equipped to foster a cautious ethic of responsibility, despite first appearances.
  
  More deeply, however, Jonas criticizes the desirability of the Marxist utopia. He claims that both Marx and Ernst Bloch offer unpersuasive theories of leisure, so central to life in the classless society, since both separate the realm of freedom (i.e. freedom from work) from the realm of necessity (i.e. the necessity to work) and hence fail to see how there is no freedom without necessity (196-98). The kind of leisure that Bloch, especially, envisions would lack the spontaneity and authenticity that accompany truly enjoyable forms of leisure familiar to us today. Finally, Jonas rejects the Marxist premise that the classless society would mark the dawn of a new kind of human, one who is somehow superior to humans of the past and present. Human nature may not be as static and essential as philosophers once believed, and “in virtue of [human] freedom and the uniqueness of each of its situations, man [sic.] will indeed be always new and different from all before him,” but humans will never be more authentically human than they have been in the past. In sum, Jonas concludes that “it is vitally necessary to unhook the demands of justice, charity, and reason from the bait of utopia,” which ultimately stands opposed to an ethic of responsibility (200-1).
• 
  Bryan Kibbe

  I have read a number of books in the arena of the philosophy of technology, and many have been suggestive of a technological ethics, but few have offered major substantive proposals. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, Hans Jonas aims to fill that gap by proposing an ethics built around the concept of responsibility for the continued existence of humankind and is informed by the distinctive ways in which modern technologies have fundamentally transformed the range and effect of human action. I have some reservations/concerns about the ways in which Jonas attempts to ground his ethical imperative of responsibility, but there is much to appreciate in what Jonas has to say. In particular, Jonas is insightful regarding the changed nature of human action in a high tech age, a point that cannot be emphasized enough. Additionally, while many are likely to disregard Jonas as a technological luddite, they would miss the valuable theme of epistemic modesty that he introduces into discussions about the can and should of technology. Finally, Jonas displays a helpful sensitivity to the weaknesses and shortcomings of human beings as users of technology, which is often lacking in discussions about technological devices. That is, we often focus so much on what technology can do for and give to us, that we fail to consider how the peculiar weaknesses of human persons in combination with the tremendous power and potential of technological devices and systems can sometimes result in tragic events and patterns of behavior. For those striving for an ethical framework that addresses the pressing realities of modern technology, Jonas is a very useful resource (even if only as a dialectical conversation partner).
  
  
• 
  Edén Mercado

  La obra cumbre del filósofo Hans Jonas quien nos muestra la importancia de la responsabilidad en un mundo en donde el humano muestra su poderío mediante la tecnología y el abuso por la naturaleza.
• 
  Diego F. Cantero

  DICE: "Al reproche de «pesimismo» dirigido contra tal parcialidad por las «profecías catastrofistas» puede responderse diciendo que el mayor pesimismo es el de quienes tienen lo dado por algo malo o por algo carente de valor suficiente, hasta el punto de asumir cualquier riesgo por una posible mejora."
  
  Y TAMBIÉN DICE:"La justicia es una virtud, es decir, una forma de conducta, y no un ideal del orden objetivo de las circunstancias. Lo que ahora es bueno para el hombre en cuanto ser personal y público seguirá siéndolo en el futuro; por eso, la mejor preparación del futuro estriba en la bondad del estado presente, el cual, por sus propiedades internas, promete continuar. La política no puede aplazar, por tanto, el bien hasta la próxima generación o hasta otra más lejana, sino que, en la medida en que el bien se halle presente, tiene que preservarlo, y en la medida en que no lo esté, tiene que realizarlo en el presente."
  
  O: "En cada niño que nace la humanidad da comienzo de nuevo frente a la muerte"
  
  De todas formas, a mí me gusta presentar a Jonas como lo hace su traductor, Andrés Sánchez Pascual:
  "En Occidente siempre ha sido —y es— pequeño el número de quienes son capaces de ejercer públicamente el oficio de «grandes viejos sabios»; personas de las cuales se espera una palabra sensata y esclarecedora en los grandes debates políticos y morales; hombres cuya voz se escucha como la más prudente, pues viene avalada por toda una vida en la que han ido alcanzando, con tanteos y esfuerzos, eso tan improbable que se llama «sabiduría». Hasta hace muy poco tiempo Hans Jonas desempeñó con energía y elocuencia esa comprometida función. Cuando falleció, el 5 de febrero de 1993, pareció extinguirse una voz, una conciencia siempre alerta y preocupada por el porvenir del mundo. Mas si esas personas han dejado como legado suyo libros en los que continúa resonando su voz, los sobrevivientes pueden seguir escuchando, sin duda por mucho tiempo, indicaciones y advertencias que harán bien en tener en cuenta. Es el caso de la obra que aquí se publica."
• 
  Van Duong

  Sàigòn một chiều mưa, ngồi bên cửa sổ đọc Hans Jonas. Trong Mệnh lệnh Trách nhiệm (The Imperative Responsibility: In search of an Ethics for the Technological Age), ông bàn về một con người đạo đức dưới cái nhìn trách nhiệm trong thời đại công nghệ kỹ thuật này. Ông bảo trách nhiệm đạo đức của con người không chỉ nằm trong tương quan giữa tôi với tôi và với tha nhân đang hiện diện cùng tôi trên thế giới này, nhưng nó còn nằm cả trong tương quan, và điều này cấp thiết hơn trong thời đại công nghệ kỹ thuật này, với những thực tại hay nhân vị khả hữu trong tương lai, hay nói cách khác đi là cách ta đối xử với thế giới, với môi trường sống của ta với ý thức trách nhiệm về tương lai của nhân loại.
  Đem ra sánh chiếu với Kant ở mệnh lệnh tuyệt đối và giá trị tự thân này kia, có vẻ như ông đã thêm chiều kích thời gian và không gian vào đó, để rồi nó không còn là đòi buộc trong hành vi can hệ tới tha nhân và chính mình nữa, nhưng trực tiếp can hệ tới những ảnh hưởng của hành vi của tôi trong sự tương hợp với tĩnh vĩnh của của đời sống của toàn bộ nhân loại. Nó can hệ tới những cân nhắc luân lý ám chỉ tới những ảnh hưởng của hành vi trong tương lai.
  Ông bảo, “Trong khí cạnh con người đích thực, thiên nhân vẫn có phẩm giá của nó để đương đầu với sự võ đoán của sức mạnh của chúng ta. Chính hữu thể người chúng ta là những đứa trẻ của thiên nhiên, chúng ta có nghĩa vụ và bổn phận đối với toàn bộ nguồn gốc của tạo vật thiên.” The Imperative Responsibility: In search of an Ethics for the Technological Age , 137.
  
• 
  Tim

  So wie im Studium auch diesmal nicht bis zum Ende gelesen. Die Marxismuskritik war in den 70ern vielleicht relevant, jetzt wirkt sie überflüssig. Aber der erste Teil ist so weitsichtig, dass man sich manchmal die Augen reibt - und das obwohl Klimazerstörung und Pandemien zeitbedingt gar nicht vorkommen.
• 
  David Pagnanelli

  Chi ha creato Thanos degli Avengers forse ha letto questo libro...
• 
  Georges Assaf

  Coming Soon :)
• 
  Whoof

  Dense and good and imperative (lol), although I found the appendix on the mind/body problem totally incomprehensible
• 
  Ivi

  3,5*
• 
  Belle Meade School

  170.42