Hans Jonas

Hans Jonas was a German-born Jewish philosopher who studied with Heidegger and Bultmann, left Germany in 1933, and after years in Palestine, wartime service and teaching in Canada settled at the New School for Social Research in New York. After early work on Gnosticism and a philosophy of the organism, he argued in The Imperative of Responsibility that modern technology's reach demands a new ethics of responsibility toward future generations and nature, scaled to the size of our power.

Key ideas

• Technological power has outrun traditional ethics, which assumed that the effects of action were near in time and space.
• We have a duty to act so that our effects are compatible with the continued existence of genuine human life.
• Where outcomes could be catastrophic, the prophecy of doom should be given more weight than the prophecy of bliss, a 'heuristics of fear'.
• Living organisms already show purposiveness and a rudimentary freedom, so mind is continuous with life.

Major works

• The Gnostic Religion (1958)
• The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966)
• The Imperative of Responsibility (Das Prinzip Verantwortung, 1979)
• "The Concept of God after Auschwitz" (lecture)

In the conversation

• Question I design systems that steer behaviour. Where does my responsibility end? Hsieh Wei-ting · 5 replies
• Reading group Reading group: Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, the first two chapters Henrike Vogel · 5 replies