Responsability and consequencialism in Hans Jonas's ethics

The present paper aims to analyze some aspects of Hans Jonas's ethics of responsibility and its relation with what he calls problematic aspects in traditional ethics. One of these aspects is the issue of ethics consequences, which is supported by some strands of utilitarianism as being key to the moral judgment of acts. On considering the consequences of action through Jonas's ethics of the future perspective, it is essential to clarify whether it can be classified as a strictu sensu consequentionalist ethics. To reach this aim it is necessary to understand the arguments from the author, especially from the work The imperative of responsibility: in search of an ethics for the technological age and to understand why the perspective from which he refers to the consequences of human actions is not the same as that of utilitarianism.