Hans Jonas’s Ethics of Responsibility and Ethics of Social Consequences

Abstract In her book Hans Jonas’s Ethic of Responsibility: From Ontology to Ecology (2013), Theresa Morris explores many aspects of Jonas’s ethics of responsibility, including his focus on the potential negative consequences of human scientific and technological progress for the future. Morris argues that Jonas’s understanding of consequences should not be equated with consequentialism, which she associates with classical utilitarianism and its Greatest Happiness Principle. Unlike Morris, I concluded that, when analyzing Jonas’s view of consequences and his value structure, Jonas’s ethics of responsibility aligns more closely with the ethics of social consequences, a type of non-maximizing consequentialism.