ABSTRACT
There is, Jonas observes, a crisis, unique to the present age, caused by the power of modern technology and our ignorance of its long-term effects. The ethics of the past have been concerned with action towards our neighbours and do not take into account either future generations or non-human nature. Hence, they do not provide us with an account of how we ought to deal with the ecological crisis. And so we need a new ethics of ‘responsibility’ for the future, an ethics that is grounded in objective fact. Such a grounding is provided by the fact of nature’s ‘volition’ towards the evolution of conscious life. This is the ‘good in itself’. Hence the first principle of ethics is that the existence of human life must never be put at stake. Since consumer capitalism is placing a dangerous strain on the environment, we must transition to a new ‘frugality’.
