The Threat of Extinction and the Value of Humanity: Re-reading Hans Jonas The Imperative of Responsibility in Light of AI

This paper mines Hans Jonas’ response to the ‘existential’ risks posed by nuclear technologies, The Imperative of Responsibility, in order to account for why humanity’s extinction ought be resisted in the first place and to argue that something like Jonas’ mode of responsibility is necessary to generate the types of moral relationships with future generations that would prompt us to take such existential risks seriously. This paper will argue that Jonas’ path toward caring about future generations does not arise from intuitions about the need to create happy people or the final value of humanity. Rather, he begins with a concept of responsibility that is iterative which grounds a responsibility to perpetuate the existence of the race. Such an account has a number of advantages over contemporary efforts to defend the value of future generations, which this paper will elucidate.