Abstract
Foreseeing a technologically produced disaster on the horizon, Hans Jonas proposes an ethics of care. Caring consists in accepting and then discharging one overarching responsibility—to act to ensure that the world does not become uninhabitable for human beings and other organisms. Why do we have such a responsibility? How did we get to this point of crisis? How far can we go in sacrificing current human interests to secure future human welfare? Is this Jonasian approach too individualistic to deal with current and future challenges? Is Jonasian caring really a form of responsibility, or have we again substituted accountability for responsibility?
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
—Abraham Lincoln
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Koehn, D. (2019). Jonasian Ontological Responsibility. In: Toward a New (Old) Theory of Responsibility: Moving beyond Accountability. SpringerBriefs in Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16737-0_3
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