The Imperative of Responsibility

"My third choice is more classically within the philosophical canon. The Imperative of Responsibility is probably Jonas’s masterpiece. He wrote this book in 1979. It’s a contemporary classic, in the sense that it’s really foundational, in my view (but not just in my view), for environmental ethics because it’s a book—and this is over 40 years ago now—that really takes seriously, as very few had before, the change that needs to come to philosophy. We need to start taking seriously the change that has come to us as a species as a result of industrialism, as a result of our growing technological power. The argument that Jonas makes in an early part of the book is that this growing technological power forces upon us new questions and new responsibilities. He thinks that traditional ethics was not really well placed to answer or respond to the imperative of responsibility for our planetary home. I think he’s basically right. And, increasingly, that’s almost taken for granted, at least outside a few holdout departments of moral philosophy. But, at the time, it was quite a bold thing to argue. So Jonas says, for example, that nuclear war and environmental devastation are possibilities that mean that it’s not adequate anymore just to think within the confines of Kantianism , or Utilitarianism or similar perspectives. “Nuclear war and environmental devastation are possibilities that mean that it’s not adequate anymore just to think within the confines of Kantianism, or Utilitarianism” In particular, he emphasises the way that so much of ethics is designed to deal with person-to-person interactions, which are not cumulative; whereas the choices that have increasingly faced us over the past couple of generations, are on a vast scale, and are cumulative over time. They demand foresight. They demand—in terms which have been increasingly important to me and my work in recent years—precaution. They demand that we think ahead, and take care ahead of time; they demand, in particular, that we don’t wait until all the scientific evidence is in. If we wait until all the evidence is in with regard to these kinds of threats, we may have waited until a time when it’s no longer possible for us to head off the threat. This is especially relevant to problems like genetic modification and geo-engineering. But it’s still relevant to climate as well. We have vast evidence now on dangerous man-made climate change, but there are still issues that we don’t fully understand. And there always will be. That’s in the nature of any question being a scientific question. The question is not entirely settled yet, which sometimes makes it difficult for scientists to communicate well in the public domain. So, even with regard to climate, there are questions about climate sensitivity, for example, which mean that, beyond the evidence, we need to bring in a precautionary perspective. And it was on that notion that Jonas really did the spade work in this wonderfully written book. Those are great questions. I think they’re really important. I think that the thing about those two questions you ended up there with, is that there’s a real danger that, because we don’t really want to hear the answer to the questions, we try not to ask them very deeply. In other words, I don’t think we should be living on virtually nothing now. And I think that extreme consequentialist visions of what we should be doing don’t cut the mustard. But what I certainly think, is that we should be thinking far more carefully, and seriously, about what we owe to future people, what we owe to our descendants. If we allowed ourselves to really do that thinking, everything would change about the way that we live. Now, how do we motivate that? Well, this is the topic of my new book, Parents for a Future , and the argument that I make at the core of this book, which has been much influenced by Jonas in the background, is that, if you simply accept that we are in a period of potential environmental catastrophe—and I think everyone has to accept that now, that at the very least we are facing a potential true environmental catastrophe—and if you are serious about loving your own children, that itself is enough to impel a long-term care for the entire Earth, and to draw the consequences now for how we need to change living our lives now, including politically. “We should be thinking far more carefully, and seriously, about what we owe to future people, what we owe to our descendants” How so? Because my argument is that if you love your children, you have to make it possible for them to extend the same love to their children, and this swiftly iterates into the future. And then, in order to ensure that we are placing them in the best possible position to have a future, we have to provide them with the basic conditions for that, which is not so much a question of us denying ourselves everything, but rather a question of us ensuring that they’re not denied the right to have everything, or even anything—crucially, functional ecosystems, the capacity to live, breathe, eat, drink, and so on. We should assume that human beings are going to need that for a very, very long time to come. So the argument I would make on a broadly Jonasian basis, and the argument I do make in this book, is that we do, indeed, have deep responsibilities to the future. This means that we have to change the way that we live now. Anything less is reckless, and unethical, and means that we won’t be able to look our children in the eye in the future. If we don’t change everything and change it fast, there is highly likely to be a massive deterioration, an historic deterioration, or potential collapse in the quality of life in our children’s generation. If that happens, then every child, sooner or later, every descendant, sooner or later, is going to turn around and ask the one question they will be interested in knowing the answer to: What did you do while there was still time? So that’s another motivation that I’m trying to bring to bear in this book—regret-avoidance: avoiding being in the position of not being able to say, ‘I did everything that I could.’ Hopefully doing everything that we can will be enough. But if it isn’t, you still want to know that you at least did everything that you could. Well, it’s a bit of both. But it’s certainly not a light read. And I think you can’t get the full impact of it unless you’re willing to give it some serious attention, and probably to read most of it or all of it. Before we leave it, let me just give you one little example of the philosophical power and broader relevance of the book. One of the things that Jonas does in the book is offer a kind of refutation of the famous philosophical is/ought distinction or fact/value distinction. And this is how he does it. “When asked for a single instance, and one is enough, where the coincidence of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ occurs, we can point at the most familiar sight, the new-born, whose mere breathing uncontradictably addresses an ‘ought’ to the world around, namely, to take care of him.” So the suggestion that Jonas makes there is: simply looking at a new-born baby is enough to unleash the imperative of responsibility. I’m not certain that I agree with him. I’ve argued in print in the past that, actually, we need to have a sort of virtue of love or care that intervenes there to help us. But it’s a very, very powerful idea, a powerful attempt at disagreeing with one of the main dogmas of philosophy."