The Threat of Extinction and the Value of Humanity: Re-reading Hans Jonas The Imperative of Responsibility in Light of AI

The emergence of A.I. has been met with much more fanfare and optimism than the development of nuclear technology, not least because the latter came to prominence through the nuclear holocaust imposed on Japan at the end of World War II. Though pessimistic worries about the effects of artificial intelligences on the economy and politics are widespread, in 2023 industry leaders raised the specter that such technologies might lead to the extinction of the race, suggesting that mitigating such dangers should be “given priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

This paper mines Hans Jonas’ response to the ‘existential’ risks posed by nuclear technologies, The Imperative of Responsibility, in order to account for why humanity’s extinction ought be resisted in the first place and to argue that something like Jonas’ mode of responsibility is necessary to generate the types of moral relationships with future generations that would prompt us to take such existential risks seriously. While some analytic philosophers have attempted to defend our concern for future generations (especially Johann Frick and Samuel Scheffler), they’re efforts to do have often led to weak, qualified reasons to care that are defeasible in light of other concerns. As this paper will argue, Jonas’ path toward caring about future generations does not arise from intuitions about the need to create happy people or the final value of humanity. Rather, he begins with a concept of responsibility that is iterative which grounds a responsibility to perpetuate the existence of the race. As he puts it, the “possibility of there being responsibility in the world, which is bound to the existence of men, is of all objects of responsibility the first.” Such an imperative is “groundless in itself,” but is asserted authoritatively as a “naked ontic fact.” If it is derived from anything at all, it is derived from the ‘idea of man.’ Having found ourselves here, within human existence, we are obligated to preserve the capacity for future individuals to fulfill their “duty to be truly human.” Such a “primary duty” does not mean making a “gift” of existence to future generations, but taxing them with the “sort of existence that is capable of the burden which is the true object of our duty to bestow that existence on them.”

This ‘ontological imperative’ to continue the species is, on Jonas’ view, immune from considerations about the quality of future lives—placing Jonas even further out of step with analytic philosophers. Pessimistic or optimistic renditions about the value of human existence have no salience for the responsibility to care for future generations, which is founded upon the possibility of value that is founded within continued existence itself. There is no ‘theodicy problem’ that can be raised against the ongoing existence of humanity. Value has no relevance to the issue, except that there is an ontological imperative to preserve the possibility of value—that is, to preserve valuers who might choose between ends. Because Jonas grounds the good or value within being, any action on behalf of such values—and any reason that might generate such action—must presuppose the latter. The life that is the contest between ‘life and death’ is such that there can be no choice for the nonexistence of value itself. (Suicide does not negate the ongoing existence of value—only mass suicide could do that.)

This paper, then, evaluates the strengths and limits of Jonas’ account of the responsibility to perpetuate human existence and the implications that flow from it for managing and mitigating threats to the species. I propose that Jonas’ attempt to move quality of life considerations to a secondary position leaves open the question of why we value the possibility of valuing, and whether we should be neutral toward such a possibility. For Jonas, the predicability of value by itself is sufficient to “decide the superiority of being…over nothingness.” Yet this seems to presume the impossibility of something like negative value, or the pessimistic construal of the world that would treat infinite suffering as worse than non-existence. Iterating the question of what we value this way raises the specter of an infinite regress. Even so, though, the question matters for how stable or suasive Jonas’ attempt is to cordon off considerations of life’s value from the ‘ontological imperative’ to preserve the existence of humanity. Jonas at points seems to put optimistic and pessimistic accounts of humanity on a par, and even seems to acknowledge that pessimistic accounts have sway. But even if the value of value’s predicability suffices to explain why there is something and not nothing, it only seems to explain why there ought be this something, namely humanity, if humanity’s goodness and joys really exceed our evil and sufferings. The ‘idea of man’ cannot be neutral if the species is to continue. Or so this paper shall attempt to argue.

If Jonas’ normative account is less secure than he contends, the moral psychology that accompanies his account of responsibility provides an important corrective to contemporary analytic attempts to account for our concern for future generations. Jonas’ contention that sentiments must make the “heart receptive to duty,” and his emphasis on the parent-child bond as the paradigmatic disclosure of responsibility, improve considerably upon the (ironically) depersonalized discussions of future generations that currently prevails. Specifically, I suggest that Jonas’ suggestion that there is an “element of impersonal guilt” in the generation of an individual with “thisness” lends credence to Jonas’ idea that the sense of responsibility parents have for their children generalizes toward some responsibility toward human beings as a general category.