ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Hans Jonas' masterwork, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. The path that begins with the comparative study of ancient and modern forms of nihilism culminates in the formulation of an ethics for a technological age. Modern science was not wrong to reject the ancient view that every being was purposefully determined to seek its proper place in an innately ordered cosmos. Jonas' thinking encompasses a theology, but it is essential to his position that we should recognize that properties of goodness and rationality are not a function of faith in a supernatural God, envisaged as the author of creation, but are knowable to reason alone. In an essay on biological engineering, collected in his 1974 anthology of philosophical essays, Jonas engages with the ethical problems entailed with the extension of human technological agency into a field, human cloning, that was when the essay was written, only a possibility dimly foreseen.
