<研究論文(原著論文)>未来世代への責任と傷つきやすさ ヨーナスの自然哲学とその討議倫理的な再構成について

Abstract

The paper attempts to demonstrate whether and how the philosophy of nature in the thought of Hans Jonas (1903?1993) is still important today. Jonas was a philosopher and studied under Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Rudolf Karl Bultmann; he discussed the philosophy of life and new ethics concerning technological civilization after the Second World War. His most famous book, The Imperative of Responsibility, presents an ethics of responsibility for humans existing in the future, based on thought about nature. Jonas argued that ethical worth can be found in the vulnerability of life. According to Jonas, when man sees a vulnerable life and has the power to injure it, he must feel the responsibility to care for it. In this way, we can see the grounds for human responsibility as based in being. In this way, Jonas tries to connect ethics with being, so his concept of responsibility is ontological. This argument from nature has been interpreted as Aristotelian and has been criticized. The first part of this paper describes Jonas’s construction of the ethics of responsibility and natural philosophy; the second part explains the foundation of Jonas’s natural philosophy. In the third part, this paper surveys earlier studies on Jonas, while the fourth part investigates the most influential recent angle of Jonas studies: reconstructing his natural philosophy using discourse ethics. The fifth part of this paper considers this reconstruction critically. Finally, this paper clarifies the limitations of the interpretation based on discourse ethics and demonstrates the superiority of Jonas’s natural philosophy over discourse ethics as an ethics for humans who will exist in the future.