Ethics and technique: outline of a Heideggerian critique of Jonasian ethics

Abstract

Although recognizing the merit of Hans Jonas’s proposal of postulating an ethics in the current context, this paper intends to sketch a possible critique of his theory of action, considering a Heideggerian critical reading of the relation between ethics and technique. The problematic of this study, in particular, can be formulated as follows: born of the critique of the model of technological civilization, is Hans Jonas’s proposal of ethics capable of overcoming the challenges of the theory of action of the present time? Or is it an ethics that represents only the other side of the same coin of the technified world, whose moral action drives everything to calculation and planning and, therefore, another indication of the man of technique as anticipated by Heidegger’s suspicion?

Keywords: Jonas, Heidegger, ethics, technique, ontology.