Defending Hans Jonas' Environmental Ethics: On the Relation between Philosophy of Nature and Ethics

摘要

Hans Jonas' anti-visionary conservation-oriented environmental philosophy-prominently articulated in his seminal book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1979)-had a tremendous impact on public and philosophical debates throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Jonas argues that the "environmental crisis" reveals an underlying fundamental "crisis" in the human-nature relation. The crisis challenges the metaphysical foundations of our Western culture-including the dominant way humans view and deal with nature. Environmental ethics, therefore, requires critical reflection on and revision of the underlying philosophy of nature: ethics and philosophy of nature, Jonas argues, are twin sisters .This approach provokes severe criticism:(1) the diagnosis objection, (2) the origin analysis objection, (3) the justification objection, and (4) the problem-solution objection. Most objections are not as sound as they claim to be-although Jonas' argumentative justification is in fact a bit weak. However, a systematic critique of the objections of the critics from an analytic perspective shows that he developed a political and practical "philosophy of nature" in which anthropology, ethics, and politics are conceptualized as a converging domain as one of the core constituents of environmentals ethics for this century.