RESPONSIBILITY IN A SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL ERA

Abstract

“That unknown land of collective practice where we were brought by high technology, is still no man’s land for ethical theory, ” Hans Jonas said with resignation in his well-known work “The Imperative of Responsibility.” Although science, within the context of traditional ethics, has had a neutral status (ethics has not concerned itself with science), today, the situation is considerably different: if the ideal of ethics is the promotion of universal principles, the most important being the principle of respecting human life, and science itself, with its unregulated authority, threatens that ideal, than it is clear that ethics must redirect its attention from the near and the present towards the “distant” and the “future.” What is at stake is the survival of human life itself. And the question of human life surpasses the limits imposed by catastrophic predictions and warnings. To begin with, it implies fear, impotence and disorientation in a world devoid of charm in which the transcendental has been cast into the “smelter of technological alchemy.” The fact that the primary field of ethical activity is becoming the future is made clear by the quintessence of time in which we live, where eschatology is reduced to a fine moment in the present. Our time is essentially solipsistic. How does one establish responsibility, in such a time, towards those who still do not exist? On which basis does one construct ethics where there is no reciprocity? One such attempt to conquer this no-man’s land “where we were led by high technology” is the work of Dr. Dževad Hodžić, “Responsibility in a Scientific and Technological Era.” In this issue of Muallim the topic of “Responsibility in a Scientific and Technological Era” is predicated on the aforementioned book by Dr. Dževad Hodžić, which deals with the post-enlightenment chaos caused by the absence of any kind of subject upon which responsibility as a stable moral category could be constructed.