ブックタイトルRILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

概要

RILAS 早稲田大学総合人文科学研究センター研究誌

WASEDA RILAS JOURNALand thought. In particular, ethics needs to be reconsideredentirely in what is a genuinely convulsivesituation that overturns the traditional ways of thinkingand value systems. Ethics has a mission to thinkabout such issues as good and evil and how to lead agood life in order to point us in the right direction. It isurgent that we reconstruct ethics, unless we want tothrow it away as obsolete and ineffectual. However,all of the traditional and established ethical systems inhuman history have presuppositions that are absolutelyincapable of coping with the new circumstances presentedby globalization. This premise is what we couldcall Presentism. Without“deconstructing”this Presentism,there will be no possibility of reconstructingan ethics for the future.PresentismWhat does it mean to say that previous ethicshave been molded out of Presentism? We refer here toa text of Hans Jonas. In his work The Imperative ofResponsibility, he points out that traditional ethics hasbeen based on“simultaneousness,”“directness,”and“reciprocality.”In traditional ethics,“the range ofhuman action and therefore responsibility was narrowlycircumscribed.”?All enjoinders and maxims of traditional ethics,materially different as they may be, show thisconfinement to the immediate setting of theaction.“Love thy neighbor as thyself”;“Do untoothers as you would wish them to do unto you”;“Instruct your child in the way of truth”;“Strivefor excellence by developing and actualizing thebest potentialities of your being qua man”;“Subordinateyour individual good to the commongood”;“Never treat your fellow man as a meansonly but always also as an end in himself”?andso on. Note that in all these maxims the agent andthe“other”of his action are sharers of a commonpresent. It is those who are alive now and in somerelationship with me who have a claim on myconduct as it affects them by deed or omission.The ethical universe is composed of contemporaries,and its horizon to the future is confined bythe foreseeable span of their lives. Similarly confinedis its horizon of place, within which theagent and the other meet as neighbor, friend, orfoe, as superior and subordinate, weaker andstronger, and in all the other roles in whichhumans interact with one another. To this proximaterange of action all morality was geared. ?It means that previous ethics have been focusedonly on presence in the spatio-temporal sense of theword. Traditional ethics is restricted to subjects as wellas objects in the range of presence, modeled after aface-to-face and contemporary relationship: this is anethics for and among present beings who exist in thehere and now, whether this being is subject or object.In short, this is an ethics of what is countable, an ethicsof countability. Of course, it is natural that weshould look after or respect those beings who are presentbefore us as ethical subjects, or within the reach ofour actions and influences. This is an important ethicaltruth as valid today as ever. However, the conditionsof globalization, with its advanced technologies,demolish this premise of the ethics of presence. Theglobal market and its transport and information networksreduce distances, removing peoples andproducts from their native places and origins in orderto circulate goods, materials, resources, knowledge,ideas, and information. Hence the juxtaposition andmixture of foreign objects/subjects. In a world that isconnected by highly developed transport and informationsystems, all heterogeneous, distant, absent beingshave the potential to become neighbors, a part of the“global village”constructed by this ubiquitous network.Thus, it becomes possible for one individual’ssmall actions to have a significant effect for someoneelse living on the other side of the globe. This hasenvironmental consequences, for it also means thatindustrial activities can have a tremendous effect farbeyond their immediate location.The generation of electricity by nuclear power isan obvious example. If a severe nuclear accident, likethose of Chernobyl and Fukushima, occurs in China, itwill cause widespread damage to neighboring countries,particularly those to the east, including Japanand Korea. What is more, it will have serious aftereffectson the environment for generations to come.Even if there is no accident, a nuclear power plantcannot generate energy without radioactive waste,which means future generations pay for our prosperity.Nuclear energy policy thus confronts us with an ethicalquestion beyond our immediate time and space?does the present generation have the right to live in166