ABSTRACT
Hans Jonas' starting point is the fact that traditional ethics no longer suffices. The scope of human action has expanded so enormously that the very natures of agency, and the nature of ethics applicable to human agency, have undergone radical transformations. Jonas states that "responsibility is a correlate of power and must be commensurate with the latter's scope and that of its exercise". Jonas declares that our novel technological capacities create entirely new and unprecedented problems for ethics. According to Jonas, "The changed nature of human action changes the very nature of politics". To illustrate the insufficiency of traditional ethics, Jonas begins by discussing Kant's notion of practical reason. Kant's categorical imperative, based on the logical self-consistency of the willing self, is insufficient. Jonas' "ethics of futurity" is intended to apply not to any kind of human action, but just to "matters of a certain magnitude - those with apocalyptic potential".
