Hans Jonas and Responsibility

 

When I read the argument of Hans Jonas in his Das Prinzip Verantwortung (The Imperative of Responsibility) in the early 1990’s, it struck me as coming as close to an irrefutable argument as can possibly be made in ethics. I still think so. I don’t think about it as often as I should because it is disturbing.

   First, a brief introduction of the author.  Hans Jonas (1903–1993) was a German-Jewish philosopher whose life and thought were shaped by the intellectual and political upheavals of the twentieth century. As a student, he studied under Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Rudolf Bultmann, and was deeply influenced by Heidegger's Being and Time. After Hitler came to power, Jonas left Germany and eventually settled in Palestine, where he joined the Jewish Brigade and fought against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The murder of his mother in Auschwitz and Heidegger's support for National Socialism deeply affected him. Jonas came to believe that Heidegger's philosophy, despite its depth, was deficient in that it lacked a sense of moral responsibility. Much of his work is an attempt to preserve Heidegger's question of Being while grounding it in moral reality.

     Jonas first gained recognition through his studies of ancient Gnosticism – very interesting stuff – but his mature work focused on the meaning of life, nature, and responsibility. In The Phenomenon of Life, he argued against the modern tendency to view nature as mere mechanism, as dead raw material obeying mechanical laws, arguing instead that even the simplest living organisms exhibit a striving toward self-preservation and thus a primitive form of freedom and value (which to me recalls Aquinas). Human consciousness, on this view, is not an alien intrusion into nature but the highest development of tendencies already present within life itself – a view that I absolutely affirm. These ideas culminated in The Imperative of Responsibility, where Jonas argued that modern technology has given humanity unprecedented power over the future and therefore unprecedented moral obligations. Because human life and its capacity for freedom, truth, and responsibility possess intrinsic value, no generation has the right to gamble with the continued existence of humanity or the conditions necessary for a genuinely human life. 

. . . 

I want to try to reconstruct Jonas's argument in Das Prinzip Verantwortung / The Imperative of Responsibility.  I think it is one of the best philosophical responses to the technological age.

The argument unfolds roughly in four steps. 

I. Traditional ethics assumed limited human power

      Most earlier moral theories assumed that human actions had relatively limited effects. A farmer could ruin a field or a king could ruin a country, but no individual or generation could threaten the existence of humanity itself. Therefore, ethics focused on relations among contemporaries, that is, justice toward one's neighbors, duties to existing persons,

honesty, courage, charity, and the like. The future was largely beyond human control.     Modern technology changes this. With nuclear weapons, ecological destruction, genetic engineering, and large-scale industrial systems – and now the Internet and AI – humanity has acquired the power to affect the entire future of life on earth. For the first time, we can destroy the conditions of human existence. This creates a completely new moral situation. I do not think this can be denied.

 

II. The existence of future humanity becomes a moral duty

    Traditionally, moral duties were thought to exist only toward actual persons. Jones changes the focus to duties toward future people. True, they do not yet exist. Therefore, they cannot make claims or vote or protest. Still, our form of life, and thus the actions we take within that form of life, determine whether they will exist and what kind of world they will inhabit. This asymmetry does not remove our responsibility. As a parent I fully understand this. A baby cannot demand care, yet the parent's responsibility is obvious. The child's vulnerability itself creates the obligation. Jonas thinks humanity as a whole now stands in a parental relation to future generations.

 

III. Humanity must continue to exist

        Jonas asks whether humanity has a duty to preserve the possibility of genuine human life. His answer is yes. The reasoning is partly metaphysical. Unlike many modern thinkers, Jonas (like me and every other thinker I treasure) does not believe value is merely subjective. Life itself manifests an intrinsic striving toward being. Living beings affirm their own existence. Humanity represents the highest known realization of freedom, responsibility, consciousness, truth-seeking, love, and moral agency. If humanity disappeared, the entire space or opening for Being to disclose itself would disappear with it. (My friend and mentor, the late Dr. Georg Bluhm, put it like this: we are the only beings we know of capable of knowing and loving the universe, existence, Being.) Therefore, the continued existence of humanity is not morally neutral. It is a good that ought to be preserved. This leads to his famous reformulation of the imperative: Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth. Or negatively: Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life.

 

IV. Therefore, we may not gamble with humanity's future.

    If humanity's continued existence is a fundamental good, then no generation has the right to risk that existence for its own benefit. Jonas argued that the present generation is merely a trustee, not an owner, of the human future. The future is not our property. Hence, we may not pursue prosperity at the cost of ecological collapse. We may not pursue technological power at the risk of extinction. We may not consume irreplaceable resources as though no future generations matter. We may not run catastrophic risks whose consequences would be irreversible. Jonas calls for a "heuristics of fear" (Heuristik der Furcht), meaning that when dealing with unprecedented technologies, we should give greater weight to the possibility of catastrophic outcomes than to optimistic promises. If the worst-case scenario involves the destruction of humanity or civilization, prudence requires extreme caution. The burden of proof lies with those introducing the risk.

 

The deepest premise of Jonas’ argument is that future human beings have a claim on us simply because they are human beings. The existence of humanity itself is a good that each generation has a duty to hand on. That is why the argument often strikes readers like myself as almost self-evident once stated. To deny it seems to imply that our generation may legitimately consume, destroy, or endanger the entire human future for its own purposes. Which of course condemns our form of life root and branch. 

. . . 

The place where philosophers usually challenge Jonas is not the conclusion but the foundation. Why exactly must humanity continue to exist? Why is Being better than non-being? Why does future humanity possess moral standing before it exists? Jonas’ response rests on a deeper metaphysical intuition, one that I and I hope everyone else shares: that life, value, freedom, and responsibility are objectively good realities whose continued existence ought to be affirmed. In that respect he stands closer to older traditions (Aristotle, Aquinas, certain forms of Platonism) than to modern contractarian or utilitarian ethics. Jonas's argument ultimately depends upon the intuition that human life possesses a kind of intrinsic dignity or sacredness. Without that deeper intuition, the imperative to preserve humanity loses much of its force. 

. . . 

The argument has unsettling political implications. Jonas was not simply arguing for conservation or environmental protection. He believed that the technological powers acquired by modern humanity had created dangers so unprecedented that traditional liberal assumptions might no longer be adequate. If the continued existence of humanity is the highest political responsibility, then safeguarding that future must take precedence over values such as unlimited economic growth, unrestricted consumer choice, or even certain forms of democratic decision-making.

     One of his most discussed claims concerns what he called the "privilege of bad prognoses." When the stakes involve the possible destruction of humanity or irreversible ecological catastrophe, he argued that we should give greater weight to the more pessimistic forecast. If one side predicts inconvenience and slower growth while the other predicts civilizational collapse, prudence requires taking the latter possibility seriously, even if it cannot be proven with certainty. This leads him toward a strong version of the precautionary principle.

    A good example. Climate change is expected to weaken the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) during the twenty-first century. The scientific consensus, reflected in recent IPCC assessments, is that a significant weakening is likely, while a complete collapse before 2100 cannot be ruled out with confidence. A major slowdown or eventual collapse could have severe consequences, including altered rainfall patterns, sea-level rise along parts of the Atlantic coast, disruption of marine ecosystems, and substantial, catastrophic changes to Europe's climate.

     What makes this such a good example for Jonas is not that scientists are certain the AMOC will collapse. They are not. Rather, it is that we are dealing with a relatively low-probability but potentially civilization-altering risk. Jonas would say that if one scenario predicts inconvenience and economic costs while another predicts the possibility of irreversible climate disruption affecting generations yet unborn, moral responsibility requires that we give considerable weight to the latter possibility. His "heuristics of fear" is essentially an argument that when the stakes are the future habitability of the world, uncertainty is not a reason for complacency but for caution. The burden of proof falls on those willing to gamble with the future, not on those urging restraint.

     The AMOC case almost reads like an illustration written for The Imperative of Responsibility: we possess the power to alter a planetary system; the consequences may unfold over centuries; future generations bear much of the risk while having no voice in present decisions; therefore the present generation has a special obligation not to place that future in jeopardy merely for short-term advantage. That is Jonas's argument in its most concrete form.

     From this, Jonas occasionally drew conclusions that many liberals found unsettling. He worried that democratic societies, driven by short election cycles and immediate interests, might be structurally incapable of making the sacrifices required for the distant future. Future generations cannot vote, yet their interests may outweigh many of our present desires. I would add that we are in the grip of a global capitalist system whose inner logic has brought about the risks and which cannot be reformed without ceasing to exist. As a result, Jonas sometimes speculated whether more paternalistic or technocratic forms of governance might be better equipped to protect the long-term future than societies governed primarily by the logic of liberal states and capitalist economies. I also sense the capitalist elites feel no moral obligation to those outside their class, that indeed they are in the process of dividing humanity up into two distinct types of human, and the working part need not be taken into account.

   I don’t want to exaggerate the point. Jonas was not advocating dictatorship, nor was he endorsing totalitarian solutions. Having fled Nazism and fought against it, he was well aware of the dangers of concentrated power. Rather, he was posing a disturbing question: what happens when the requirements of long-term human survival come into conflict with the preferences of currently living populations? He never fully resolved the tension. But he understood the problem. Liberal democracies as promoters of capitalist economies are designed to protect certain rights of existing citizens and private property. But climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and certain technological risks raise questions on a timescale of centuries. Jonas asks whether our political institutions are capable of representing the unborn and safeguarding a future they cannot yet claim for themselves. 

 I personally like the alternatives of E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, and the ideas of the alternative technology philosophy. All seems just as utopian. Berry seeks solutions through local communities, traditions, stewardship, and cultural renewal rather than through stronger centralized authority. Jonas's analysis of the danger is often admired even by those who are uneasy about some of the political implications he seemed willing to consider. In the meantime, my involuntary participation in an economy that is in stark violation of the moral principle Jonas lays out so clearly makes me guilty in any bad future my children and their children (and everybody else’s children) will inherit. Worse than dying and leaving my children with massive debts.

 

Works 

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. 2nd ed., Beacon Press, 1963. 

Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Harper & Row, 1966. 

Jonas, Hans. Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man. Prentice-Hall, 1974. 

Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Translated by Hans Jonas with David Herr, University of Chicago Press, 1984. 

Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz. Edited by Lawrence Vogel, Northwestern University Press, 1996. 

Jonas, Hans. The Religion of the Gnostics. Beacon Press, 1958. 

Jonas, Hans. The Jonas Reader. Edited by Lawrence Vogel, Northwestern University Press, 2001.