HANS JONAS: PHILOSOPHICAL
ESSAYS
From Ancient Creed
To Technological Man
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Technology and Responsibility:
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Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics
Originally presented as a plenary address to the International Congress of Learned
Societies in the Field of Religion held in Los Angeles, September 1972, and included
in Religion and the Humanizing of Man, ed. James M. Robinson (Council on the
Study of Religion, 1972)
S.3 -3ff (passim)
All previous ethics—whether in the form of issuing direct enjoinders to do and not to do certain things, or in the form of defining principles for such enjoinders, or in the form of establishing the ground of obligation for obeying such principles—had these interconnected tacit premises in common: that the human condition, determined by the nature of man and the nature of things, was given once for all; that the human good on that basis was readily determinable; and that the range of human action and therefore responsibility was narrowly circumscribed. It will be the burden of my argument to show that these premises no longer hold, and to reflect on the meaning of this fact for our moral condition. More specifically, it will be my contention that with certain developments of our powers the nature of human action has changed, and since ethics is concerned with action, it should follow that the changed nature of human action calls for a change in ethics as well: this not merely in the sense that new objects of action have added to the case material on which received rules of conduct are to be applied, but in the more radical sense that the qualitatively novel nature of certain of our actions has opened up a whole new dimension of ethical relevance for which there is no precedent in the standards and canons of traditional ethics.
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And here is where I get stuck, and where we all get stuck. For the
very same movement which put us in possession of the powers that have
now to be regulated by norms—the movement of modern knowledge
called science—has by a necessary complementarity eroded the founda¬
tions foundations from which norms could be derived; it has destroyed the very idea
of norm as such. Not, fortunately, the feeling for norm and even for
particular norms. But this feeling becomes uncertain of itself when
contradicted by alleged knowledge or at least denied all sanction by it.
Anyway and always does it have a difficult enough time against the
loud clamors of greed and fear. Now it must in addition blush before
the frown of superior knowledge, as unfounded and incapable of founda¬
tionfoundation. First, Nature had been "neutralized" with respect to value, then
man himself. Now we shiver in the nakedness of a nihilism in which
near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with
knowing least what for. With the apocalyptic pregnancy of our actions,
that very, knowledge which we lack has become more urgently needed
than at any other stage in the adventure of mankind. Alas, urgency is
no promise of success. On the contrary, it must be avowed that to seek
for wisdom today requires a good measure of unwisdom. The very nature
of the age which cries out for an ethical theory makes it suspiciously
look like a fool's errand. Yet we have no choice in the matter but to try.
It is a question whether without restoring the category of the sacred. ,the category most thoroughly destroyed by the scientific enlightenment,
we can have an ethics able to cope with the extreme powers which we
possess today and constantly increase and are almost compelled to use.
Regarding those consequences imminent enough still to hit ourselves,
fear can do the job—so often the best substitute for genuine virtue or
wisdom. But this means fails us towards the more distant prospects,
which here matter the most, especially as the beginnings seem mostly
innocent in their smallness. Only awe of the sacred with its unqualified
veto is independent of the computations of mundane fear and the solace
of uncertainty about distant consequences. But religion as a soul-deter¬
mining determining force is no longer there to be summoned to the aid of ethics. The
latter must stand on its worldly feet—that is, on reason and its fitness
for philosophy. And while of faith it can be said that it either is there
or is not, of ethics it holds that it must be there.
It must be there because men act, and ethics is for the ordering of
actions and for regulating the power to act. It must be there all the more,
then, the greater the powers of acting that are to be regulated; and with
their size, the ordering principle must also fit their kind. Thus, novel
powers to act require novel ethical rules and perhaps even a new ethics.
'Thou shalt not kill" was enunciated because man has the power to
kill and often the occasion and even inclination for it—in short, because
killing is actually done. It is only under the pressure of real habits of
action, and generally of the fact that always action already takes place,
without this having to be commanded first, that ethics as the ruling of
such acting under the standard of the good or the permitted enters the
stage. Such a pressure emanates from the novel technological powers of
man, whose exercise is given with their existence. If they really are as
novel in kind as here contended, and if by the kind of their potential
consequences they really have abolished the moral neutrality which the
technical commerce with matter hitherto enjoyed—then their pressure
bids to seek for new prescriptions in ethics which are competent to
assume their guidance, but which first of all can hold their own theoreti¬
cally theoretically against that very pressure. To the demonstration of those premises
this paper was devoted. If they are accepted, then we who make thinking
our business have a task to last us for our time. We must do it in time,
for since we act anyway we shall have some ethic or other in any case,
and without a supreme effort to determine the right one, we may be
left with a wrong one by default.
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