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 Futuremoral order. This entails, among other things, the dutyto preserve this physical world in such a state that theconditions for that presence remain intact; which inturn means protecting the world’s vulnerability fromwhat could imperil those very conditions.”?Destruction of the natural environment, the use ofatomic energy and radioactive waste, gene manipulationand its impact on our human descendants and theecosystem: these phenomena and their consequencesare difficult or principally impossible to know perfectlyand predict because of the long time span, thegathering of data, the threshold of interpretation, etc.Now that the power and influence of technology mightmean the total destruction of the world, however, thisdifficulty allow for no excuse any longer (“beyondexpectation”). It would be irresponsible to use difficultyor impossibility as an excuse to refuse questionsand arguments about what technology should be andhow it should be used. On the basis of our understanding,knowledge, and information, an ethics oftechnology must go further. Such work will be impossibleon the basis of scientific, technocratic, technicienlogic alone. It needs collective arguments and responsiblesystems that are beyond specialties. We have tothink“together”as a multiple, yet single being aboutwhat is desirable, what the world should be, and notonly about what is made possible by technology.Ethics for all beingsThe second key point for a new ethics is theexpansion of ethical objects from humans to allbeings, all lives. Hans Jonas writes:And what if the new kind of human action wouldmean that more than the interest of man alone isto be considered?that our duty extends farther,and the anthropocentric confinement of formerethics no longer holds? It is at least not senselessanymore to ask whether the condition of extrahumannature, the biosphere as a whole and in itsparts, now subject to our power, has become ahuman trust and has something of a moral claimon us not only for our ulterior sake but for its ownand in its own right. If this were the case it wouldrequire quite some rethinking in basic principlesof ethics. It would mean to seek not only thehuman good but also the good of things extrahuman,that is, to extend the recognition of“ends inthemselves”beyond the sphere of man and makethe human good include the care for them. ?Jonas’s argument here seems to limit the object ofethics to the“biosphere,”but he affirms elsewhere thenecessity of expanding ethical objects to all beings inthe environment. It is certain that Jonas made greatprogress in extending ethics, but it is undeniable thathe considers the human being to be a privileged, representativeethical subject who bears full responsibilityfor all the beings because of the enormous technologicalpower humans possess. For this reason, there mustbe some concern that anthropocentrism lingers on inhis work. He seems to be aware of this problem himself.He saysThere is no need, however, to debate the relativeclaims of nature and man when it comes to thesurvival of either, for in this ultimate issue theircauses converge from the human angle itself.Since, in fact, the two cannot be separated withoutmaking a caricature of the human likeness?since, rather, in the matter of preservation ordestruction the interest of man coincides, beyondall material needs, with that of life as his worldlyhome in the most sublime sense of the word?wecan subsume both duties as one under the heading“responsibility toward man”without falling into anarrow anthropocentric view. ?We do not have the time to treat this delicateproblem, here taking his words in the banal sense thatthose who possess more power are obliged to takemore responsibility.If there is something left to be desired in Jonas’sargument, it is that we need to count among the newethical object/subjects that are“extrahuman”suchentities as robots, computers, cyborgs, and geneticallymodified humans, because from now on our environmentwill include the ubiquitous computing network,whether or not equipped with artificial intelligence,and robots, which (who) perform hard and dangeroustasks impossible to humans, will be the importantmembers of human society. We have to regard as companionsof our world beings about whom or aboutwhich it would not make sense to ask whether theywere natural or artificial, such as gene-manipulatedhumans. In such a situation, where should we draw the169