Global Ethics and Moral Responsibility

Hans Jonas and his Critics

John-Stewart Gordon, Holger Burckhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317127864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

The philosophy of Hans Jonas was widely influential in the late twentieth century, warning of the potential dangers of technological progress and its negative effect on humanity and nature. Jonas advocated greater moral responsibility and taking this as a starting point, this volume explores current ethical issues within the context of his philosophy. It considers the vital intersection between law and global ethics, covering issues related to technology and ethics, medical ethics, religion and environmental ethics. Examining different aspects of Hans Jonas' philosophy and applying it to contemporary issues, leading international scholars and experts on his work suggest original and promising solutions to topical problems. This collection of articles revives interest in Hans Jonas' ethical reasoning and his notion of responsibility. The book covers a wide range of areas and is useful to those interested in philosophy and theory of law, human rights, ethics, bioethics, environmental law, philosophy and theology as well as political theory and philosophy.

PART 1
The Philosophy of Hans Jonas

Chapter 1
Responsibility Today: The Ethics of an Endangered Future¹

Hans Jonas

Care for the future of mankind is the overruling duty of collective human action in the age of a technical civilization that has become 'almighty', if not in its productive then at least in its destructive potential. This care must obviously include care for the future of all nature on this planet as a necessary condition of man's own. Even if it were less than necessary in this instrumental sense - even if (science-fiction style) a human life worthy of its name were imaginable in a depleted nature mostly replaced by art - it might still hold that the plenitude of life, evolved in aeons of creative toil and now delivered into our hands, has a claim to our care in its own right. A kind of metaphysical responsibility beyond self-interest has devolved on us with the magnitude of our powers relative to this tenuous film of life, that is. Since man has become dangerous not only to himself but to the whole biosphere.

There is no need, however, to debate the relative claims of nature and man when it comes to the survival of either, for in this ultimate issue their causes converge from the human angle itself. Since, in fact the two cannot be separated without making a caricature of the human likeness - since, rather, in the matter of preservation or destruction the interest of man coincides, beyond all material needs, with that of life as his worldly home in the most sublime sense of the word - we can subsume both duties as one under the heading 'responsibility toward man' without falling into a narrow anthropocentric view. Such narrowness in the name of man, which is ready to sacrifice the rest of nature to his purported needs, can only result in the dehumanization of man, the atrophy of his essence even in the lucky case of biological preservation. It therefore contradicts its professed goal, the very preservation of himself as sanctioned by the dignity of his essence. In the truly human aspect, nature retains her dignity, which confronts the aibitrariness of our might. As one of her products, we owe allegiance to the kindred total of her creations, of which the allegiance to our own existence is only the highest summit. This summit rightly understood, comprises all the rest under its obligation. In other words, the duty toward nature is part of our humanist duty, well beyond the calculable material necessities that point in the same direction.

The Common Destiny of Man and Nature

This is not to take a harmonistic or idyllic view of the relationship. In the choice between man and nature, as the struggle for existence poses it time and again, man of course comes first and nature, even when allowing for her own rights, must give way to his superior right. Or, should the idea of anything intrinsically 'superior' be questioned here, the simple rale holds that egoism of the species - each species - takes precedence anyway by the order of life in general, and the particular exercise of man's might vis-à-vis the rest of the living world is a natural right based on the faculty alone. In other words, the mere fact of superior power legitimates its use. This has in practice and without reflection been the attitude of all times, when for long the odds were by no means so clear, when often man felt more on the defensive than the offensive, and when nature as a whole appeared invulnerable, thus in all particulars free for his untrammeled use.

Western religion and metaphysics added their sanction of transcendental uniqueness to this natural anthropocentric bent. But even if the prerogative of man were still insisted upon as absolute, it would now have to include a duty toward nature as both a condition of his own survival and an integral complement of his unstunted being. We have intimated that one may go further and say that the common destiny of man and nature, newly discovered in the common danger, makes us rediscover nature's own dignity and commands us to care for her integrity over and above the utilitarian aspect. A sentimental interpretation of this command is ruled out by the law of life itself, which is obviously part of the 'integrity' to be preserved. For encroaching on other life is eo ipso given with belonging to the kingdom of life, as each kind lives on others or codetermines their environment, and therefore bare, natural self-preservation of each means perpetual interference with the rest of life's balance. In simple words: To eat and to be eaten is the principle of existence of just that manifoldness which the command bids us to honor. The sum total of these mutually limiting interferences, always involving destruction in the particulars, is on the whole symbiotic but not static, with those comings, goings, and stayings known to us from the dynamics of prehuman evolution. The hard order of ecology (first seen by Malthus) prevented any excessive predation by a single life form on the whole, any monopoly of a 'strongest', and the coexistence of the whole was assured in the change of its parts. Even the increasingly one-sided interference of man was no decisive exception to this rule until quite recently.

Only with the superiority of thought and with the power of technical civilization made possible by it, one form of life, man, has been enabled to endanger all others (and therewith also himself). Nature could not have incurred a greater hazard than to produce man. As long as practical intelligence and theoretical intellect went their separate ways, his impact on the balance of things remained tolerable. But unlike the contemplative intellect of old, the aggressive intellect bred by modern science and discharged into the administration of things confronts nature not merely with its thought but with actions of a scope no longer compatible with the unconscious functioning of the whole. In man, nature has disturbed herself and has only in his moral endowment left herself an unsure substitute for the shattered sureness of her self-regulation. It is a terrifying thought that on this fickle ground her cause should now rest - or let us say more modestly: so much of what man can see of her cause. By the timescale of evolution and even the much shorter scale of human history, this is an almost sudden turn in the fate of nature. Its possibility lay hidden in the initial fact of free-roaming knowledge and will that with man had burst into the world, but its reality matured slowly and then suddenly appeared. In this century the long-prepared point has been reached where the danger becomes manifest and critical. Power conjoined with reason carries responsibility with it. This was always self-understood in regard to the intrahuman sphere. What is not yet fully understood is the novel expansion of responsibility to the condition of the biosphere and the future survival of mankind, which follows simply from the extension of power over these things - and from its being eminently a power of destruction. Power and peril reveal a duty which through the commanding solidarity with the rest, extends from our being to that of the whole, regardless of our consent.

Let me repeat: The duty we talk about has become apparent only with the threat to the subject concerned. Previously it would have been senseless to talk about such things. What is in jeopardy raises its voice. That which had always been the most elementary of the givens. taken for granted as the background of all acting and never requiring action itself — that there are men that there is life, that there is a world for both - this suddenly stands forth, as lit up by lightning, in its stark peril through human deed. In this very light the new responsibility appears. Born of danger, its first urging is necessarily an ethics of preservation and prevention, not of progress and perfection. In spite of this modesty of aim, its commandments may be rather difficult to obey and perhaps demand more sacrifices than any asked so far for the betterment of the human lot. It is a consequence of freedom's negative power in its present ascendancy that the 'permitted and not permitted' has priority over the positive 'ought'. This is only the beginning of morals and, of course, insufficient for a positive doctrine of duties. Fortunately for our theoretical task, and unfortunately for our situation today, we need not go into the theory of the human good and the 'best life', which would have to be derived from a conception of man's 'essence'. For the moment, all work on the 'true' man must stand back behind the bare saving of its precondition, namely, the existence of mankind in a sufficient natural environment. In the total danger of the world-historical Now we find ourselves thrown back from the ever-open question, what man ought to be, to the first commandment, hitherto never in need of enunciation: that he should be —indeed, as a human being. This 'as' brings the essence, as much as we know or divine of it, into the imperative of 'that' as the ultimate reason for its absoluteness and must prevent its observance from devouring the ontological sanction itself; that is. the policy of survival must beware lest the existence finally saved will have ceased to be human. Considering the severity of the sacrifices that could be necessary, this may well become the most precarious aspect of the ethics of survival that is being imposed on us now: a ridge between two abysses, where means can destroy the end. This ridge must be walked in the uncertain light of our knowledge and in honoring that which man has made of himself in millennia of cultural endeavor. But what now matters most is not to perpetuate or bring about a particular image of man, but first of all to keep open the horizon of possibilities which in the case of man is given with the existence of the species as such and - as we must hope from the promise of the imago Dei - will always offer a new chance to human essence. This means that the 'No to Not-Being' - and first to that of man - is at this moment and for some time to come the primal mode in which an emergency ethics of the endangered future must translate into collective action the 'Yes to Being' demanded of man by the totality of things.

The Apocalyptic Situation

All this holds on the assumption here made that we live in an apocalyptic situation, that is, under the threat of a universal catastrophe if we let things take their present course. On this subject I now have to say a few things, well known though they be. The danger derives from the excessive dimensions of the scientific-technological-industrial civilization. What we call the Baconian programme - namely, to aim knowledge at power over nature, and to utilize power over nature for the improvement of the human lot - lacked indeed in its capitalist execution from the outset the rationality as well as the justice with which it could have been conjoined. But its intrinsic and self-reinforcing dynamics, necessarily propelling into extravagance of production and consumption, would probably have overwhelmed any society, considering the short range of human targets and the truly unforeseeable magnitude of its success.

Thus the danger of disaster attending the Baconian ideal of power over nature through scientific technology arises not so much from any shortcomings of its performance as from the magnitude of its success. This success is in the main of two kinds: economic and biological. Their necessarily crisis-bound mutual relation is by now becoming manifest. The economic success, long considered alone, meant increased per capita production of goods, both in their quantity and variety, together with reduction of human work, thus heightened prosperity of many and even involuntarily heightened consumption of all within the system - ergo, enormously increased metabolism of the social body as a whole with the natural environment. This itself had its dangers of overstraining finite natural resources. But these dangers are raised to a higher power and accelerated by the - at first less visible - biological success: the numerical swelling of this metabolizing collective body, that is, the exponential population growth within the geographical reach of the health benefits of technological civilization, which far exceeds the reach of its economic benefits and by now covers the globe. This not only adds a new quantitative dimension to the first process, increasing its tempo and multiplying its effects on the balance of global metabolism; it also very nearly deprives it of whatever freedom it may otherwise have to call a halt to itself. A static population could say at a certain point: enough but a growing one has to say: more! Today it becomes frighteningly clear that the biological success not only may nullify the economical by leading back from the short feast of affluence to the chronic weekday of poverty, but that it also threatens mankind and nature with an acute catastrophe of enormous proportions. The population explosion, seen as a problem of planetary metabolism, takes the helm away from the welfare aspiration and may increasingly compel an impoverishing mankind to do just for the sake of immediate survival what for the sake of happiness it was free to do or leave: the ever more reckless plundering of the planet. Inevitably the latter will have the last word when eventually it denies itself to the overdemand. Imagination recoils from the prospect of mass dying and mass killing that will accompany such a situation of sauve qui peut. The equilibrium laws of ecology, for so long held off by art. which in their natural state prevent the overgrowth of any one species, will assert their right all the more terribly the more they have been bullied to the extreme of their tolerance. How after this a remnant of mankind will start afresh on a ravaged earth defies all speculation.

This is the apocalyptic perspective calculably built into the structure of the present course of humanity. It must be understood that we are here confronted with a dialectic of power which can only be overcome by a further degree of power itself, not by a quietist renunciation of power. Bacon's formula says that knowledge is power. Now the Baconian programme by itself, that is, under its own management, has at the height of its triumph revealed its insufficiency in the lack of control over itself, thus the impotence of its power to save not only man from himself but also nature from man. Both need protection now because of the very magnitude of the power man has reached in the pursuit of technical progress, where the growing power engendered the concurrently growing necessity of its use and thus the strange impotence to stop the ever-continued and foreseeably self-destructive progress of itself. Bacon did not anticipate this profound paradox of the power derived from knowledge: that it leads indeed to some sort of domination over nature (that is, her intensified utilization), but at the same time to the most complete subjugation under itself. The power has become self-acting, while its promise has turned into threat, its prospect of salvation into apocalypse. Power over the power is required now before the halt is called by catastrophe itself - the power to overcome that impotence over against the self-feeding compulsion of power to its progressive exercise. After the first-degree power, directed at a seemingly inexhaustible nature, has changed into a second-degree power which wrested control of the first from the user's hands, it is now up to a third-degree power to enforce the self-limitation of the rule that carries along the ruler, before it shatters on the barriers of nature. This third degree means power over the second-degree power, which was no longer man's but power's itself to dictate its use to its supposed owner, to make of him the compulsive executor of his capacity, thus enslaving man instead of liberating him.

Marxism and the Apocalypse

From which direction can this third-degree power be expected which still - in time - reinstates man in the control of his power and breaks its tyrannical self-activity? It must in the nature of the problem, emanate from society, as no private insight, responsibility, or fear can measure up to its task. And as the 'free' economy of Western industrial societies is the very source of the dynamics which drifts to the mortal danger, we look quite naturally to the alternative of communism. Can this bring the necessary help? Is it tuned to it? Under this point of view alone. Marxist ethics should be examined today - that is. under that of salvation from disaster, not under that of fulfillment of mankind's dreams. One looks at Marxism because its professed concern is with the future of the whole human enterprise (as it talks of 'world revolution'), for the sake of which it dares to ask from the present any sacrifice and, where it rules, can also enforce it. It is at least more difficult to see how the capitalist West could accomplish this. That much is clear that only a maximum of politically imposed social discipline can ensure the subordination of present advantages to the long-term exigencies of the future. But as Marxism is a form of progressivism, and by no means sees itself as an emergency policy but as the road to a higher realization of man, it partakes also of the dangers common to the whole meliorism of modern times.

It is not by chance that socialism appeared with the beginnings of the machine age and that its scientific accreditation by Marx was based on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: THE PHILOSOPHY OF HANS JONAS
• PART 2: HUMAN NATURE AND THE IMPERATIVE OF RESPONSIBILITY
• PART 3: ON RELIGION, ETHICS AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
• PART 4: THE ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
• Bibliography of Hans Jonas' Works
• Index