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Summary
Hans Jonas' important work “The imperative of responsibility” develops new conceptual resources for ethics in the age of all pervasive technology. Jonas' notion of collective moral responsibility with regard to the unforeseen and unintended consequences of collective action has been especially well received, at least in Germany, both in public debates about the demands for a New Ethics in the face of the environmental crisis as well as in political discourse about eco-ethical concerns. I discuss the key innovative features of Jonas' ethical framework against the background of currently predominant universalistic approaches in philosophical moral theory. I clarify the links between Jonas' concept of moral responsibility and a general theory of (moral) and non-moral value. I then examine Jonas' argumentative strategy of founding moral responsibility in a (Neo-Aristotelian) concept of nature that countenances objective teleology in nature. According to that strategy, if there are natural goal-directed processes, and if goal-directedness is a sufficient condition for valuation, then there are objective values; furthermore, if there are objective values, then there are some values, that morally oblige everybody to respect them as values. I argue that this strategy of rooting moral responsibility in value-theory and, in turn, value-theory in a philosophy of nature, must fall short of being rationally convincing, although its persuasive appeal may be strong.