Discussion on Jonas's Technology and Responsibility

Question #9:

Pick a passage in Hans Jonas’s paper that you find interesting. Write down the first sentence and the page number, and then say why you picked it.

I found passage I through II most interesting in Jonas’s paper. Passage 1 says, “The novel powers I have in mind are, of course those of modern technology. My first point, accordingly, is to ask how this technology affects the nature of our acting, in what ways it makes acting under its dominion different from what it has been through the ages”. (Page 120).

I picked this passage because of the meticulous way in which Jonas highlighted and discusses the characteristics of human actions, which he said are relevant for a comparison with the state of things today. He discusses all dealings of man with non-human world as ethical neutral without ethical significant, as ethical significant he said, belongs to the direct dealing of man with man. In other words, all the traditional ethic is human centered. Ethic then was of the present as occasions warrants. He talks of ethic as being base on “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, “Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you”, “Instruct your child in the way of truth’, etc. Jonas is categorically saying that all these has changed as modern technology has brought actions of novel scale, object and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them. The wondrous power of man has changed, the neighbor ethics of justice, love and honesty has been beclouded by modern technology’s responsibility.

Questions # 10:

Jonas argues that we need a ‘new ethics of long-range responsibility’. Do you think we would need to change the way we think to live up to this idea?

I think Jonas is absolutely right in this direction. This is a worthwhile idea and I think that for us to live up to this idea, we need to change the way we think. Jonas said that technological power has turned what used and out to be tentative, perhaps enlightening, plays of speculative reason into competing blueprints for projects, and in choosing between them we have to choose between extremes of remote effects. He had earlier said that 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. Therefore we should not be concerned only with the present; rather the future should be represented. Politics should go beyond self-interest. Government should have sufficient representation to meet the new demands on its normal principles and by its normal mechanics. For this to be achieved calls for change in the way we think. We should be thinking about the future and the effects of the ever-increasing nature of human action.