Lewis Coyne - Böcker

Hans Jonas (1903–1993) was one of the most important German-Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. A student of Martin Heidegger and close friend of Hannah Arendt, Jonas advanced the fields of phenomenology and practical ethics in ways that are just beginning to be appreciated in the English-speaking world. Drawing here on unpublished and newly translated material, Lewis Coyne brings together for the first time in English Jonas’s philosophy of life, ethic of responsibility, political theory, philosophy of technology and bioethics. In Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility, Coyne argues that the aim of Jonas’s philosophy is to confront three critical issues inherent to modernity: nihilism, the ecological crisis and the transhumanist drive to biotechnologically enhance human beings. While these might at first appear disparate, for Jonas all follow from the materialist turn taken by Western thought from the 17th century onwards, and he therefore seeks to tackle all three issues at their collective point of origin. This book explores how Jonas develops a new categorical imperative of responsibility on the basis of an ontology that does justice to the purposefulness and dignity of life: to act in a way that does not compromise the future of humanity on earth. Reflecting on this, as we face a potential future of ecological and societal collapse, Coyne forcefully demonstrates the urgency of Jonas’s demand that humanity accept its newfound responsibility as the ‘shepherd of beings’.

The papers collected in this volume examine moral enhancement: the idea that we should morally improve people through the manipulation of their biological constitution. Whether moral enhancement is possible or even desirable is highly controversial. Proponents argue that it is necessary if we are to address various social ills and avert catastrophic climate change. Detractors have raised a variety of concerns, some of a practical nature and others of principle. Perhaps most fundamentally, however, the proposal forces us to ask anew what being moral actually means, in order for the idea of moral enhancement to make sense at all. The present collection both addresses these issues and moves the debate beyond its current parameters, bringing together authors with a wide range of perspectives and areas of expertise. Chapters variously draw on experimental psychology, social philosophy, pragmatism, Kantian and Aristotelian moral philosophy, and the ethics of care, sex, and psychedelics.