The others of the future and the ethics of environmental responsibility

Abstract

The text addresses the ethics of environmental responsibility on the basis of Hans Jonas's work: we are responsible for those who do not yet exist, for the forms of life yet to come, for the evolution these forms will acquire, for future existence, but also for its impossibility in the face of the transformations to which we subject the planet. It proceeds from the reformulation of the Kantian categorical imperative proposed in The Imperative of Responsibility — to act so that the effects of one's action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth — and draws on contemporary commentators of that work. It discusses the extension of the focus of ethics to distant times, the inability of the unborn to defend themselves against actions that may render their existence impossible, the limits of knowledge and power presupposed in traditional ethics, the need for dialogue between philosophy and the sciences that account for nature's reaction to aggression, and the risks of a scientism that conceals the axiological core of the problems. It holds that the ethics of responsibility extends classical ethics and imposes a duty to act in favour of being and existing in the future.