Weighing the future

What do modern technologies mean for the way we do ethics? They certainly present us with new cases for casuistry, but it would be another thing altogether if they actually hailed a change in our approach to ethics on a principial level. Yet this is just what Hans Jonas argues they do, in his essay ‘Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics,’ first published in 1972:

with certain developments of our powers the nature of human action has changed, and since ethics is concerned with action, it should follow that the changed nature of human action calls for a change in ethics as well: this not merely in the sense that new objects of action have added to the case material on which received rules of conduct are to be applied, but in the more radical sense that the qualitatively novel nature of certain of our actions has opened up a whole new dimension of ethical relevance for which there is no precedent in the standards and canons of traditional ethics.

By casting modern technological innovations as the accretion of new ‘powers’, Jonas is able to contrast the modern state of affairs with a premodern sensibility that man, while capable of wild ambitions with respect to his dominance over nature and other men, asserts himself thus in spite of his native smallness. Citing lines from Sophocles’ Antigone, Jonas contends that premodern man was ambivalent regarding his ‘inventive craft…which may drive him one time or another to well or ill.’ And while man himself contrives no escape from death, the Earth he strives to tame does not share his fate: ‘deathless she is, and unwearied.’

On this basis, Jonas then identifies four points on which the nature of human action differs between the premodern and modern condition:

1. Premodern human action was incapable of injuring the ‘non-human world’, and therefore man’s action in this sphere was ‘ethically neutral’. Modern man is capable of doing injury, and therefore must consider this as part of the scope of his ethics.

2. As a consequence, premodern ethics was circumscribed to man’s dealings with man; modern ethics cannot be so circumscribed.

3. Premodern man had a fixed nature, not subject to his own alteration; modern man takes himself as an object for reshaping.

4. The scope of human action for premodern man was relatively local in both time and space. Modern man experiences an expansion of his power of action in both of these directions, and therefore must consider his actions in light of very remote effects.

There are points in this analysis I would wish to question, and perhaps I will on another occasion. For now, my main interest is in Jonas’ claim about the great demands that are placed upon our knowledge because of modern technological powers, as he goes on to argue:

Knowledge, under these circumstances, becomes a prime duty beyond anything claimed for it heretofore, and the knowledge must be commensurate with the causal scale of our action. The fact that it cannot really be thus commensurate, i.e., that the predictive knowledge falls behind the technological knowledge which nourishes our power to act, itself assumes ethical importance. …No previous ethics had to consider the global condition of human life and the far-off future, even existence, of the race.

While the gulf between the scope of the effects of modern man’s actions and his actual knowledge of effects may in fact make for a bizarre kind of impotence (we might think of the giant Lennie in Of Mice and Men who is exceeding helpless and pitiful because he can neither understand nor control his own strength), I think Jonas is right to observe that we experience a far greater demand on our knowledge of distant places, far-off times and remote effects. Some people think we have or are capable of having this sort of knowledge, others are less confident, but all recognise the demand.

In considering Jonas’ articulation of this sort of knowledge of effects as a ‘prime duty’ in modern ethics, I was struck by the thought that this may help to explain the intuitiveness of consequentialist ethics for pretty much all modern people. My experience of introductory ethics classes at university was that every student, myself included, found virtue ethics nice-sounding but useless, deontology a little hard to wrap our heads around, and consequentialism straightforward and prima facie compelling. One had the experience of thinking something like, ‘I would never do something as weird as drawing up tables of utility calculations, but this does seem to be basically how I evaluate my actions’. Deeper consideration of problems like the ‘repugnant conclusion’ and what the theory might be omitting as morally irrelevant could then work to dissuade some students (such as myself) of its soundness.1 But it still had a basic intuitiveness which the alternative theories lacked, and it also seemed to be able to get a handle on prominent ethical questions such as those to do with population or environmental ethics in ways that the other theories seemed incapable of doing.

The fact that any kind of Natural Law had entirely fallen off the map, and the accompanying decline in our familiarity with the concept of ‘virtue’, means that of course there is another story to be told. For my purposes here, it suffices to draw out the relationship between Consequentialism and the demands on our knowledge.

Consequentialist moral theories are theories which take the consequences of our actions to be the only morally relevant consideration when evaluating possible courses of action. For instance, when evaluating what to say to a friend who wants feedback on her mediocre singing performance, I would consider what kinds of benefit or harm to her (or to me) would come as a consequence of my words. The most common form of consequentialist ethics is Utilitarianism, which evaluates actions according to the pleasure or pain that would result. So in this case, I might consider the pain I would bring to my friend in telling the truth compared to the pleasure that would result if I flattered her, but I might also consider the future pain that could come to her if I don’t tell the truth and she continues to embarrass herself publicly with further performances as a result of my encouragement. This approach to ethics can then be contrasted with alternative approaches which would instead place moral weight on things like a duty to tell the truth, or on my acting charitably and justly or in a manner befitting our friendship.

Even in the above very simple example, we can see how the sorts of calculations about effects which consequentialist ethics invites can quickly become complex. A lot turns on whether or not I think my friend is likely to further embarrass herself (and annoy other people) by continuing to perform publicly. If I think the probability of her doing this is low—perhaps she was pushed into this first performance against her will and only wants to be reassured by me that she didn’t totally disgrace herself—then the likelihood of future pain is also low, which would suggest that flattery is the pleasure-maximising and pain-minimising option in this case. A good moral judgement now turns on my ability to judge the probabilities of various outcomes, as well as my ability to compare the possible harms and benefits (e.g. perhaps I should still act to avoid a really big future pain, even if the likelihood of it occurring is small).

In the case I have been describing, those sorts of judgements would happen on the gut-instinct level, based upon my experience of my friend’s character and habits of behaviour. But it is when our moral questions increase in complexity that consequentialism really comes into its own. It is not hard to see the family resemblances between a consequentialist pain/pleasure calculus, and the risk analysis tables and statistical models of the policy makers and advisors of modern governments. When the effects of our actions become remote to an agent’s immediate experience, the various possibilities magnify in number and complexity and the action-guiding heuristics we acquire through experience become impotent. As we then reach to creating pictures of distant alternative futures, it is little wonder that in deciding how to act we would be asking ourselves, ‘which future is best?’, and choosing our actions accordingly.

Technical powers demand that we look beyond our own characters or the persons immediately before us when evaluating our actions, and consider the whole swath of downstream effects on objects as remote to our experience as entire species or future populations (not one of us ever has direct experiential knowledge of a ‘population’). We cannot really know such objects, and therefore it is hard to conceive of duties towards them and even harder to love them. In light of this difficulty, it makes sense that we would eradicate the requirement for specific persons to be the objects of our moral evaluations, and instead try to rest the whole significance of our actions upon a globalised state of affairs comprising net benefits and harms.

Consequentialism is thus the ethic of choice in modernity because of the epistemic conditions created by new technologies—not only because it seems to offer a simple way through great complexity, but also (and perhaps primarily) because the ‘neighbour’ is no longer the chief consideration in the most intractable of our moral problems. Most of those whose good we feel obliged to consider we simply cannot view as our ‘neighbours’ without evacuating the concept of meaning. Their, or its (in the case of the nonhuman ‘environment’), only connection to our actions is by a long causal chain, and therefore we can only take into account their/its having a moral claim on us by way of some state of affairs being the consequence of our actions.

We find this approach to ethics to be pervasive despite the fact that the actions of most modern individuals, taken separately, do not have any such long-chain effects. One reason for this may be that we each tend to think it our business (rightly or wrongly) to have opinions about such enormously complex things as ‘the economy’ or ‘the environment’, even though these matters are far outside the sphere of our own actions. I suppose we take this as our business because of our participation in democratic political systems, even though the potency of each person within the system is very unclear. And that sense of ourselves as participants in a system which does bear enormous moral weight extends beyond the system of democratic government. Through the various modern systems we participate in, we can all feel the moral burden of an unseen future which is (somehow, who knows how) causally connected to our actions. Take, for example, the moral problem of whether to buy clothes made in a sweatshop, and the sorts of questions we find ourselves asking in order to make that choice: Is it good that the (distant, unidentifiable) workers have work at all, or are the conditions so bad as to nullify that good? What would be the downstream effects if a large enough group of people did not make those purchases, compared to the downstream effects when they do? Should we hold our individual choices responsible for those distant effects? If we don’t, who is responsible for them?

Modern technical power is built upon a profound knowledge of causes, through which we take causation itself by the hand and turn it this way or that according to our purposes. Consequentialism is the moral theory we get when we experience our actions as freighted with the responsibility for a future of our own ‘making’. If we do bear the burden for such distant effects, we must have knowledge of them and we must be able to evaluate them. Whether we like it this way or not, we cannot shake the sense that when we make moral choices we are choosing between futures—something of such enormous moral significance that all other considerations fade into irrelevance.