Jonas (Ensaios) – Technology and Responsibility…(VI)

Kant  ’s categorical imperative said: "Act so that you can will that the maxim of your action be made the principle of a universal law." The "can" here invoked is that of reason and its consistency with itself: Given the existence of a community of human agents (acting rational beings), the action must be such that it can without self-contradiction be imagined as a general practice of that community. Mark that the basic reflection of morals here is not itself a moral but a logical one: The "I can will" or "I cannot will" expresses logical compatibility or incompatibility, not moral approbation or revulsion. But there is no self-contradiction in the thought that humanity would once come to an end, therefore also none in the thought that the happiness of present and proximate generations would be bought with the unhappiness or even non-existence of later ones — as little as, after all, in the inverse thought that the existence or happiness of later generations would be bought with the unhappiness or even partial extinction of present ones. The sacrifice of the future for the present is logically no more open to attack than the sacrifice of the present for the future. The difference is only that in the one case the series goes on, and in the other it does not. But that it ought to go on, regardless of the distribution of happiness or unhappiness, even with a persistent preponderance of unhappiness over happiness, nay, even of immorality over morality ((On this last point, the biblical God changed his mind to an all-encompassing "yes" after the Flood.)) — this cannot be derived from the rule of self-consistency within the series, long or short as it happens to be: it is a commandment of a very different kind, lying outside and "prior" to the series as a whole, and its ultimate grounding can only be metaphysical.

An imperative responding to the new type of human action and addressed to the new type of agency that operates it might run thus: "Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life"; or expressed negatively: "Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life"; or simply: "Do not compromise the conditions for an indefinite continuation of humanity on earth"; or most generally: "In your present choices, include the future wholeness of Man among the objects of your will."

It is immediately obvious that no rational contradiction is involved in the violation of this kind of imperative. I can will the present good with sacrifice of the future good. It is also evident that the new imperative addresses itself to public policy rather than private conduct, which is not in the causal dimension to which that imperative applies. Kant  ’s categorical imperative was addressed to the individual, and its criterion was instantaneous. It enjoined each of us to consider what would happen if the maxim of my present action were made, or at this moment already were, the principle of a universal legislation; the self-consistency or inconsistency of such a hypothetical universalization is made the test for my private choice. But it was no part of the reasoning that there is any probability of my private choice in fact becoming universal law, or that it might contribute to its becoming that. The universalization is a thought-experiment by the private agent to test the immanent morality of his action. Indeed, real consequences are not considered at all, and the principle is one not of objective responsibility but of the subjective quality of my self-determination. The new imperative invokes a different consistency: not that of the act with itself, but that of its eventual effects with the continuance of human agency in times to come. And the "universalization" it contemplates is by no means hypothetical — i.e., a purely logical transference from the individual "me" to an imaginary, causally unrelated "all" ("if everybody acted like that"); on the contrary, the actions subject to the new imperative — actions of the collective whole — have their universal reference in their actual scope of efficacy: they "totalize" themselves in the progress of their momentum and thus are bound to terminate in shaping the universal dispensation of things. This adds a time horizon to the moral calculus which is entirely absent from the instantaneous logical operation of the Kantian imperative: whereas the latter extrapolates into an ever-present order of abstract compatibility, our imperative extrapolates into a predictable real future as the open-ended dimension of our responsibility.

Jonas – Technology and Responsibility…(VII)

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