ABSTRACT
In ethics responsibility is traditionally determined by causally effected human activity, which is attributed to different individuals. Discourse about responsibility would be senseless, at least in the moral sense, and limited to morally neutral causality. In accordance with Kurt Bayertz, this chapter distinguishes the imputation insight of responsibility from the causality insight and the principal insight. In the early stages of moral development responsibility can be understood as a collective responsibility, independent from individual autonomy. The closest thing to the transcendentally pragmatic two-stage discourse ethics of responsibility inaugurated by Karl-Otto Apel is a reflexion on the historical dimension of the ethics of responsibility. For Jonas, the boundary of responsibility remains a 'question': a question of how nature will continue, how it will be continued, how it can or should continue. Jonas can motivate us towards this procedure of discourse-ethics and sensitize us to difficulties in rationality with ourselves.
