ABSTRACT
Hans Jonas’s pioneering attempt at developing an environmental ethics is in large part presented as a criticism of what he calls “secular eschatology.” This term is meant to characterize utopian projects of social transformation, which Jonas argues involve an exploitative relationship to nature. This chapter explains the centrality of this criticism to Jonas’s environmental philosophy as a whole. The central task of the latter is to evaluate ethically the new potentialities of technologically modified human agency, specifically its ability to negate the future condition of its possibility – life as such. For Jonas, environmental ethics must be organized around the avoidance of the future actualization of this possibility, a consideration which plays no role in traditional ethics. The chapter sets out the account of normativity which Jonas argues grounds this duty toward the future and which he derives from a teleological understanding of nature. Finally, the chapter reconstructs Jonas’s criticism of utopianism: while utopianism provides a future-directed account of human action, it fails to account for the qualitative change in agency brought about by modern technology. The orientation of utopianism toward the future is thus “eschatological” in the sense that it is not conditioned by the overriding duty to restrain the tendency of technologically modified agency toward destruction of life as such.
