Author(s): Abdulah Šarčević / Language(s): Bosnian
Issue: 03/2004
What does an ethics of responsibility imply? How can it be possible?
Is it necessary? Hans Jonas contemplates an entirely new situation for humanity, created by the scientific and technological civilization. A new ethics is needed, a post-conventional ethics of mutual responsibility for the “collective, technological and scientific activities of humanity”
(K. O. Apel, DuV, 170). The question this ethics poses itself is a crucial one: under what circumstances do we best succeed as human beings? With our dignity and freedom, with our attitude to nature both inner and outward, accessible and inaccessible, with an awareness of limits and human nature and of the human history of nature, of the ways in which horrific consequences and major disasters associated with the exploitation of nature and the mythical forces of scientific and technological advances can be avoided, in our way of life, in production, medicine, biology, psychology and more.
The way in which Hans Jonas explores the ethics of responsibility, with the principle of preservation and its tendency to turn into an exclusive principle, owes its significance and its advantages over other attempts to its philosophical insight into human history and the situation of modernity. It boldly sets out a new moral experience: that things could, after all, be different, meaning better. He considers the technological spectrum of human activities, of the kind of collective threat that arises as soon as technology makes the human individual the direct subject of its attentions, reducing us to our instrumental and technical knowledge. The point of Jonas’ work – in particularly his Principle of Responsibility – can be seen as the exposition of “wholly new problems of an inter-individual and, what is more, international organization of mutual responsibility.” It can also, though wrongly, be understood as a utopian expectation directed at private morality, at mere human subjectivity.
In counterdistinction to this point of view is the one long since expressed by Arnold Oehlen: that all of us operate within the framework of an institutionalized calling, and thus bear responsibility within the context of our institutionally-defined jurisdiction. Odo Marquand would add to that: and above all within the context, and only within the context of the “customary,” the usual. Hence his “defence of the usual,” a hypoleptic ethics of usualism. It is perfectly clear that this means that “every attempt these days to organize the necessary collective responsibility of humanity for our collective activity is not only hopeless but, at the level of ethical justification, pointless” (K. O. Apel, ibid, 171).
But while this is one of the consequences of the hypoleptic ethics of usualism, the recognition of the framework of responsibilities and traditional life options that is effectively valid, Jonas’ philosophy is closer to the Aristotelian position. It seems perfectly capable of bringing to mind the “anachronism now so b
More...
