Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics

Chapter Summary

In this Chapter, Hans Jonas begins from the premise that ethics is concerned with action. Technology significantly increases our scope of agency or power to impact the world through our actions. Therefore, technology requires developing an expanded conception of responsibility. Prior to modern technology, it made sense for ethics to focus on local, immediate, and interpersonal interactions. However, technological advances, particularly since the industrial revolution, have empowered those with access to modern technologies to significantly affect people on the other side of the planet, future generations, and non-human nature; and biotechnologies raise the prospect of our modifying our own genetic natures. We must take responsibility for these new powers, Jonas argues, and develop ethics appropriate for them — global ethics, environmental ethics, future generation ethics, bioethics, as well as an ethic of technology more generally.

This chapter is excerpted from Hans Jonas, “Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics,” Social Research: An International Quarterly, 40 (1): 31–54. It appears here by permission of Social Research.