Does Environmental Ethics Need a Metaphysical Grounding

For the past several decades until his recent death, Hans Jonas alerted us to an "ethical vacuum" at the core of our culture: a vacuum caused by both traditional ethics and modern natural science.(1) Technology today has altered the very nature of human action by allowing us to affect nature, both outside ourselves and within, in ways that are long-range, cumulative, irreversible, and planetary in scale. But traditional ethics has presumed that the effects of our actions are quite limited. With the exception of medicine, techne was believed to be ethically neutral. Ethical significance belonged to relations between humans, not between us and nature. Humanity was a constant, not an object of reshaping techne. And while the moral good or evil of our actions lay close at hand, the long run was left to chance, fate, or providence. But all of this has changed with the advent of modern technology, and traditional ethics leaves us ill-equipped to account for our responsibilities when the very future of humanity is at stake. But this vacuum is intensified by the dominant scientific view of nature in the modern period: reductionistic materialism. On this view, nature is a machine; it harbors no values and expresses no purposiveness. The idea that there are ends in nature is rejected as an anthropomorphic conceit. Extrahuman nature is indifferent to itself and also to human beings who are cast adrift in it. We may matter to ourselves, but there is no larger scheme of mattering to which we belong. Though human beings may be subjects who posit ends and act in light of purposes, nonhuman organisms are mere objects: matter in motion. And eventually humans, as part of nature, become objects of their own fabrications to be shaped according to the designs of biotechnology. If nature presents us with no ethical norms, then no effort to change our own nature in the name of perfection, convenience, or experimentation could count as a transgression of essential limits or a violation of a natural standard of goodness. Herein lies the deepest root of our cultural crisis: nihilism. Lacking grounds for judging nature to be good and deprived of any stable "image of Humanity" to which we owe reverence, we are unable to answer the fundamental ethical challenge posed by our novel powers: "Why should we care about the distant future of mankind and the planet?" Unable to justify why the presence of humankind on the earth is a categorical imperative, we are unprepared for the attitude of stewardship that we must cultivate if we are not to squander the future in the interests of a profligate present. This is the emergency of ecological ethics today. If nihilism is the cause of this emergency, then the only sufficient response would be a philosophical critique of nihilism. This is precisely the task that Hans Jonas sets for himself, and not only in his later writings, but from the very beginning. I shall show how his project unfolds in three stages: (1) existential, (2) metaphysical, and (3) theological. Each stage is a response to the crisis of nihilism that Jonas diagnoses in his early essay, "Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism," the epilogue to his first major work, The Gnostic Religion. First, in The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas offers "an existential interpretation of the biological facts," arguing that purposive existence is not a special attribute of human beings, but is present throughout living nature. Second, in The Imperative of Responsibility, he provides a metaphysical grounding of our ethical obligations to nature and to ourselves as special products of its evolutionary labors. Third, in his lecture "The Concept of God After Auschwitz," he presents a theology of divine creation that is consistent with both his existential and metaphysical views. I shall ultimately argue that Jonas does not take theology to be necessary for an overcoming of nihilism. Rational metaphysics must be able to ground an imperative of responsibility without recourse to faith. …