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

Globalization and Ethics for the Futureprosperity at the cost of others to come, who areabsent here and now? J.-P. Sartre said that the adventof nuclear weapons made humanity into an entity thatshared a common destiny. In order to face the problemof nuclear power, we are required to expand the conceptof ethics and responsibility to an extent thatprevious ethical systems did not have to consider: anethics of responsibility for our species, humanity, andfor the entire environment, for the world itself.Presentism, Anthropocentrism,IndividualismHere, let us point out three principal features oftraditional ethics. We can refer to them as Presentism,Anthropocentrism, and Individualism (or voluntarism).We have explained the first of these already. Itmust have been impossible for past ethical systems toimagine that one might have a responsibility forhuman beings living a thousand years later. Anthropocentrismcan be described as the restriction of ethicsand responsibility to human subjects and objects. AsJonas says,“ethics accordingly was of the here andnow, of occasions as they arise between men, of therecurrent, typical situations of private and publiclife.”? In a sense, it is reasonable or common sense torestrict ethical beings to humans. It seems nonsensicalto accuse anyone of using violence when they punch astone. What about animals, though? If one beats a dogor cat, a whale or dolphin, it probably can be regardedas“violence”or animal abuse, but it may be difficultto use terms like“abuse,”“ill-treatment,”and“murder”when describing the killing of a mosquito or a cockroach.This shows that the ethical criterion for judgingwhat agents have to be respected consists in“proximity”(that is to say, degree of presence) to humankind.Individual voluntarism refers to the idea that thetraditional ethical agent was based on the individualand its will. Jonas writes as follows in his criticism ofKant’s categorical imperative:Kant’s categorical imperative was addressed tothe individual, and its criterion was instantaneous.It enjoined each of us to consider what wouldhappen if the maxim of my present action weremade, or at this moment already were, the principleof a universal legislation; the self-consistencyor inconsistency of such a hypothetical universalizationis made the test for my private choice. ?Upon reconsidering the matter, it is this restrictionof ethical agents to individuals and their wills thatmade it possible to ignore ethical responsibility foracts of violence or outrages in wartime committed inthe name of the state or some other group. It was onlyin recent times that crimes against humanity duringwartime began to be denounced or judged in the courtroom.What was the cause of this limitation to the classicconcept of ethics? According to Jonas, when theconventional concept of ethics was developed, thepower of human action was not so great that it coulddestroy the world. When the force of scientific technologyexceeds the scale imagined by previous ethics,we have no choice but to widen the scope of responsibilityas new conditions might require. The measure ofresponsibility must correspond with that of power.It will be the burden of the present argument toshow that these premises no longer hold, and toreflect on the meaning of this fact for our moralcondition. More specifically, it will be my contentionthat with certain developments of our powersthe nature of human action has changed, and,since ethics is concerned with action, it shouldfollow that the changed nature of human actioncalls for a change in ethics as well: this notmerely in the sense that new objects of actionhave added to the case material on which receivedrules of conduct are to be applied, but in the moreradical sense that the qualitatively novel nature ofcertain of our actions has opened up a whole newdimension of ethical relevance for which there isno precedent in the standards and canons of traditionalethics. The novel powers I have in mindare, of course, those of modern technology. ?In his Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas accusesFrancis Bacon and his famous phrase“scientia estpotentia”of being the source of a human arrogancethat provoked the wholesale exploitation of the planetby technology for the purpose of expanding humanhealth, wealth, and individual or social possibilities.Bacon himself, however, was not so naive as to affirmsuch a human mastery, which justified treating andtransforming nature as required or desired. Or rather,such a notion was beyond the reach of his imagination167