Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics

Abstract

Jonas argues that our new technology requires a new ethics because: • technology affects the very nature of acting, ethics is about action, and so technology has consequences on ethics [pp 32] • once, ethical significance applied to between humans, now it extends beyond human affairs to nature [pp 35] • with greater power, greater ability, comes new responsibility over what we now can do "the whole biosphere of the planet — has been added to what we must be responsible for because of our power over it" [pp 38]; • can implies ought? "the dark cloud of inevitability seems to lift" [46], and so things once unavoidable become avoidable and determinable, so we must decide how to determine them; "responsibility ... for a new kind of humility ... owing to the excessive magnitude of our power" and lack of ability to foresee and evaluate [52] • more far-reaching effects means things that were once not within our control now are [pp 37] • proximal in-the-moment ("here and now", "[e]thics ... was of the here and now" [p 36]) and close-to-home matters have been replaced with temporally- and spatially-distant consequences, over which we need to reflect; we thus need ethics not just for those with whom we share the present moment, our contemporaries; no longer just "proximate range of action"; "Ignorance no longer provides it with an alibi. Knowledge ... becomes a prime duty ... the duty to know" [pp. 39; also pp 45] • the human condition itself – i.e. what it is to be human, and what is good humanity – are themselves determinable, so choice must be made about what we have reason to be like; • the human good is no longer a constant, it too can be technologically altered, and so ethics needs to consider what we might have reason to become like [pp. 37] • humans have become makers of their own natures; • "man now is evermore the maker of what he has made and the doer of what he can do, and most of all the preparer of what he will be able to do next" [my emphasis, pp 41] WE CHANGE WHAT WE CAN DO, OUR FUTURE SCOPE OF ACTION IS DETERMINED BY OUR CURRENT DECISIONS; also "In your present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of your will" [pp 44] • "man himself has been added to the objects of technology. Homo faber is turning upon himself" [pp 45] • would it be good or bad, for humanity as a whole, to become immortal? "How good or bad would that be fore the general condition of man? Would the species gain or lose?" [47] • nothing has prepared us for answering the sorts of questions that arise when we take what were "human constants" that we took "for granted" and make them into potentially changeable things [48] • behavior control is another topic Jonas discusses, which becomes problematic when we move from medical disease treatment to social control contexts ... "passage from medical to social application" [48]; and on [49] induce learning attitudes in school childred, overcome aggression, stimulate happy feelings and contentment, performance-boost for employees. • genetic control also raises questions of what sorts of humans should we become, what standarts to use to assess this, and right to experiment on future humans • our power (to change) outstrips our knowledge and ability to predict and even evaluate; knowledge required is now greater, requires experts and scientists [pp 36, 37-8]; "[l]iving ... in ... built-in, automatic utopianism, we are constantly confronted with issues whose positive choice requires supreme wisdom — an impossible situation for man in general, because he does not possess that wisdom" [50-51] • political inadequacy of representative government because nobody represents future generations in current decisions, whose views and interests may be differnt to ours; "the future is not represented, it is not a force that can throw its weight into the scales. The non-existent has no lobby, and the unborn are powerless." [51]