MARIA CHIARA PIEVATOLO

Hans Jonas: un'etica per la civiltà tecnologica

N. 154

Summary — Jonas asserts that the impact of the industrial applications of technology on the environment modifies, by its apocalyptic potential, human condition in so radical a way as to impose the necessity of a new ethics. This thesis is debatable from a dual point of view: in the first place, on the factual plan, one can ask oneself if the interaction and the environmental modification even massive be only a peculiarity of man, and of the technological man, and, moreover, if indeed our difficulties be only due to a quantitative excess of technology, and not also to its qualitative shortage. In the second place, in the background of the so-called law of Hume, that logically forbids to found to be on must be, one can doubt that a categorical imperative — that is a moral and not merely a technical necessity — may validly be inferred from a factual situation.