Features of Intergenerational Moral Responsibility in the Age of the Emerging Technologies

Abstract

Emerging technologies require an ethics of responsibility which includes a notion of responsibility toward future generations. In this analysis, while recognising the importance of Jonas’s and Enghelardt’s well-known approaches, I make the case that these approaches should be integrated with utilitarian principles, so as to provide a public policy on which basis to regulate the emerging technologies. I will thus focus on a set of utilitarian principles, since I believe that a utilitarian view offers the proper perspective from which to deliberate responsibly on future choices regarding future generations in a way that is neutral and rational. There are many factors that make it difficult for us to steer such a course. One of them is that we are expected to foresee the preferences that individuals will have in their decision-making processes. And another is that the choices we currently make involve forms of cooperation among millions of people who do not collaborate with one another but each act according to their own interests, and this amounts to a collective loss. So, if we want to build philosophical and ethical working principles, we need moral criteria aimed at guaranteeing at the very least the vital interests of future generations, no less than those of existing generations, in the same way as states should frame their policies with a view not only to their national interests but also to global ones. I argue that an ethics of responsibility for the emerging technologies is best understood as a dynamic tool, and so that what it needs is not a new concept of moral responsibility toward future generations, but rather a reframing of it in light of the processes of technological development.