Technology as an Existential Threat

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. This paper will argue that 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. Such an account has a number of advantages over contemporary efforts to defend the value of future generations, which this paper will elucidate. 

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han claims, “The smooth is the signature of the present time.” The social imperative to reduce resistance and struggle in human life is so ubiquitous as to be nearly imperceptible. It is present in trivial ways (e.g., the aesthetics of the iPhone, the experience of Amazon Prime delivery) and non-trivial ways (e.g., the rapid rise of GPT as a substitute for the writing process, the prospect of widespread biomedical moral enhancements). This paper draws on the work of environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III–specifically the evolutionary biological concept of “dialectical stress”--to provide a positive account of the role of struggle, resistance, and friction in the intellectual and moral life and an alternative ethico-aesthetic paradigm for our age.