Life and the Ethics of Responsibility

Abstract

The history of the development of natural philosophy or cosmology shows the collapse of a reductionistic, timeless philosophical materialism. Building an alternative worldview that philosophically rehabilitates nature, life, mind, and objective values has culminated in Jonas’s theory of organic life. In this chapter, Donnelley turns to Jonas’s later work on the distinctiveness of the human type of organic being, with its great capacity for understanding and for destructive or beneficial activity. This provides an ontological groundwork for a new ethics of human responsibility for the conservation of life. Jonas’s philosophical style at times suggests that he has an essentialist or transcendentalist notion of the good and ethical duty. Mayr might accuse him of not being concrete and historical enough. Yet, Donnelley finds the key to Jonas lies in his fundamental approach to firsthand, immediate experience and his conception of the relation of philosophy and theory to such experience. In addition to the work of Leopold, this reading of Jonas forms the inspiration for Donnelley’s own philosophical method of drawing from direct encounters with animals and ecosystems insights into both a “nature alive” ontology and a human ethical responsibility rooted in the imperative that life continues to be and to become.