The crisis of individual responsibility in technological societies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14422/pen.v81.i314.y2025.009Keywords:
ethics, technology, cybernetics, complex systems, responsibilityAbstract
Until the publication of The Principle of Responsibility (1979), most Western ethical systems focused on the exclusively intersubjective nature of actions and paid no attention to the way in which those actions related to the environment. The reason for this is that the environment had been conceived as something completely independent from actions taken or, at least, as a reality endowed with a determined and easily predictable behavior. The development of technology and the knowledge of complex systems have put that notion of the environment under strain, which has altered the type of ethical responsibility of certain actions. This article explains the way in which non-trivial systems challenge Hans Jonas’ notion of responsibility through a new understanding of responsibility suitable to understand the type of interconnection (subjective and objective) characteristic of complex systems.
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