Moral responsibility and the business and sustainable

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Int. J. Innovation and Sustainable Development, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2007

Moral responsibility and the business and sustainable development assemblage: a Jonasian ethics for the technological age Tommy Jensen Umeå School of Business, Umeå University, Sweden E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: In this paper, it is argued that sustainable development is stuck in the myth of progress, wherein instrumental rationality, trust in good prognoses and the ethics of ‘here’ and ‘now’ are unwarily followed. With this assumption at hand, an alternative view on morality is developed where a morality of fear, a categorical imperative and two axioms, are developed. The conclusion is that if a Jonasian (Jonas, 1984) ethics is approved, then it is possible to pursue real alternatives to the current myth of progress and to judge those decisions that endanger human existence, or the idea of man, as immoral. Keywords: business; categorical imperative; ethics; Hans Jonas; morality; sustainable development. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Jensen, T. (2007) ‘Moral responsibility and the business and sustainable development assemblage: a Jonasian ethics for the technological age’, Int. J. Innovation and Sustainable Development, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.116–129. Biographical notes: Tommy Jensen is an Assistant Professor at the Umeå School of Business. His research interests are in the areas of organisation theory, sociology and moral philosophy with focus on the intersection between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres and the social and environmental dilemmas that this intersection give rise to. He is co-author of ‘Economy and Morality: Routes to Increased Responsibility’ (in Swedish, Liber 2007).

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Introduction

Sustainable development is a dangerously slippery term. What it becomes and which parties control it have crucial consequences for how we perceive and act upon ecological and social problems. It is not, however, only a matter of to what degree we face problems, or how we best deal with problems using the knowledge and practices that we historically have equipped ourselves with; we need to reconsider and alter the conceptions of ourselves and our planet. This is a moral challenge. Sustainable development is a fairly new acquaintance to business studies. In recent years, though, it seems as if the momentum of sustainable development research has increased. This has resulted in a vast amount of scholars researching business and sustainable development, leading both to a wider diversity of approaches, but more acutely also to a sedimentation of a main approach to sustainable development. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Moral responsibility and the business and sustainable development

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In the early and mid-1990s, several key scholars took on and promoted a critical agenda for research into business and sustainable development (cf. Gladwin et al., 1995; Welford, 1995), but in the late 1990s the field became dominated by a business-as-usual approach characterised by a ‘good news rhetoric’ (Jamison, 2001) and in which ‘radical’ movements are confined to capitalism’s model of production, consumption and profit (cf. Hart, 1995, 1997; Kotler and Lee, 2005; Porter and van der Linde, 1995; Prahalad, 2006; Shrivastava, 1995; Sharma and Starik, 2002). The mainstream approach promotes ‘new’ approaches within the ‘business-as-usual’ rather than opening up critical and innovative discourses on business and responsibility, and on what sustainable development might mean (cf. Springett, 2003; Sandström, 2005; Kallio and Nordberg, 2006). It is this growing mainstream approach that is the target of this paper, from here on “the business and sustainable development assemblage”. Evidently, this phrasing reveals a critical view on this development. My criticism, however, is not towards the promotion of sustainability in business research (and business practice). There is a great need for sustainability to be integrated in research, teaching and practice, and there should be an on-going discussion about which sustainable principles business should act in accordance with. Instead, my criticism holds that sustainability research is incorporated into the business discourse in such a way that the potential for significant contributions to increased responsibility on the market (by business, consumers and regulators) are obstructed (cf. Bonnedahl et al., 2007). The term sustainable development has, as Welford (1997) concluded, been hijacked by positivistic, market liberal ideologists and has become a fashionable flag to sway in celebrative moments (cf. Bruno and Karliner, 2002). Based on that the growing business and sustainable development assemblage is stuck in the myth of progress, obstructing our moral capability to secure sustainable development, the aim of this paper is to provide an alternative view on morality for this assemblage. Hence, this paper is predominantly occupied with pointing a way out. As so often before, though, claiming new ground cannot be done without the help of old insights. In this paper, the bulk of the performed analysis and the suggestions made are based upon “The Imperative of Responsibility: In search of an Ethics for the Technological Age” by the German moral philosopher Hans Jonas. I start this exposé into the Jonasian ethics for the technological age by highlighting some key aspects of the technological age and the myth of progress.

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The technological age and the myth of progress

In trying to capture the essence of modern technology, Arendt (1958/1998) reminds us of the profound impact Galileo Galilei’s telescope had. All of a sudden,the geocentric model in which the sun orbited around the earth was replaced withthe heliocentric model. Today, Arendt continues, the essential question is no longer if the earth orbits around the sun, or the other way round. Not anymore, because the previously earth-bound ‘Archimedean point’ has been relocated to outer space. This shift has had an equally profound impact as the shift triggered by Galilei’s telescope.The relocation of the Archimedean point to outer space implies that science and technology, when understanding and explaining, exploring and exploiting earth, no longer are restricted to the earth’s surface.

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Science and technology nowadays use numerous fixed positions in outer space to perform their earthly endeavours, regardless of whether carrying out controlled laboratory experiments triggering cosmic evolutionary processes, or generating and controlling energies and creating elements that do not exist in earth’s nature. Since Arendt’s writing on this matter, other technological and scientific breakthroughs also need to be included, among which genetic manipulation (cloning of genes, gene therapy and genetically modified organisms) perhaps is the most evident one. The technological age, according to Jonas, has brought with it the following fundamental characteristics: “By the kind and size of its [the conditions of modern technology] snowball effects, technological power propels us into goals of a type that was formerly the preserve of Utopias. To put it differently, technological power has turned what used and ought to be tentative, perhaps enlightening, plays of speculative reason into competing blueprints for projects, and in choosing between them we have to choose between extremes of remote effects.” (Jonas, 1984, p.21)

The distress that Hans Jonas and Hanna Arendt seem to share about the technological age is, in short, that historical processes have led mankind up to a point in which humans, through their actions, risk obliterating organic life through exposing earth to cosmic powers, unknown to this planet. That we ‘do the evolution’ and ‘play God’ in a way summarises the anguish felt by these authors. Another attempt at interpreting the thoughts and writings of these two philosophical writers (although Arendt preferred to be labelled as a political theorist) would suggest that they searched for alternatives that could counterweight homo faber. What should be certain, following these authors’ warnings, is that, as we ‘do the evolution’ and ‘play god’, our actions give rise to ‘unknown unknowns’, i.e., negative effects and imbalances that have a cumulative character, adding up to unpredictable and potentially devastating chain of events (cf. Beck’s, 2006, notion of second-degree side effects). Despite warnings of the destructive potential of homo faber in the technological age, the temptation and the mere fact that we are capable of making much stronger and more powerful tools to tame nature seem, however, to be too encouraging for us. We proceed with our attempts at making progress, at an ever-increasing pace. Why do we not listen to the warnings and react accordingly? According to Georg Henrik von Wright, who had the same pessimistic view of the technological age as Jonas and Arendt, the underlying reason to this is modernity and the notion of progress. Progress has historically been central to modernity and by now it has achieved mythical status in western societies (von Wright, 1993, 1997). The term and actions associated with progress are deeply ontologically embedded in westerners’ everyday life as well as in western science, technology, economy and morality (not implying, however, that west actually invented all the components of modernity. On the contrary our science, technology, economy and morality have numerous connections to other cultures, cf. Sen, 2006). Essentially, “‘progress’ as such is an objective phenomenon inherent in its autonomous motion, in the sense that every ‘next’ is necessarily superior to its ‘before’.” (Jonas, 1984, p.168; see also Arendt, 1958/1998; von Wright, 1993)

It is as if homo faber’s striving to conquer nature is justified in a similar vain to Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophical claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds. With the assistance of Voltaire’s (1758/1979, p.10) satirical reply to Leibniz, made in the novel Candide, by one of the novels main characters Pangloss, the philosopher


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of ‘metaphysico-theologico-cosmolonigology’, our current belief in progress can be expressed like this: Since all is created with a purpose, and this purpose has to be the best purpose, all that is created is the best possible. In other words, that homo faber can create tools that are capable of conquering nature, to even fundamentally alter nature’s processes, must mean that homo faber should continue making ever more powerful tools. However, individuals outside the realm of experts are beginning to be aware that we live in a world in which reciprocal dependency between humans, and between humans and nature, has a radical new meaning – the survival of humanity (Beck, 1996, 2006). The individual strategy of living a life in a global world-risk society, in which the dangers are erratic and endemic, has meant that as individuals we are on our own; there are no global institutions (legal, scientific, political) to handle the global problems. This is the prime force in the individualisation of society in which people seek daily excitement, escaping fear through ‘gliding on surfaces’ and through constantly ‘shifting identities’ (Bauman, 2001, 2002; 2006b). Expressed differently, to cope with life, individuals have to develop an instrumental, self-centred, life politics. This seems to be the most rational thing to do, since as individuals we are left on our own (Beck, 2006; Bauman, 1995). Occasionally, critical questions about the way in which the idea of progress and its side effects actually strengthen our causes, and what this world-risk society actually prompts us to do, are heard (Beck, 1996). However, the negative consequences of human conduct still seem to strengthen the very causes from which they originate. Generally, we trust the myth of progress, its promise of “the best of all possible worlds”, and we are assured that we can repair any damage that we cause, and this, in a true cost–benefit spirit, at costs below the revenues provided by scientific and technological progress. The belief in science and technology might be slightly cracked, but yet still intact. Here is where post-modernism, somewhere along the line, got it all wrong: The anticipated separation between science, technology and the public is not happening. Daily routines by ordinary western people, acts of identifying and consuming (or to be more specific, wasting and depleting resources just to satisfy our desires, cf. Arendt, 1968/1993; Bauman, 2002) would not be possible at all without modern technology and science. As people desperately want to hang on to their routines, or change them without too much sacrifice (i.e., no de-growth, no de-materialisation.), there is still high hope that science and technology will come to our rescue. In other words, societies can be depicted as something in which post-modern (identifying and consuming) and modern (science and technology) conditions are simultaneously present (Bauman, 2000). The myth of progress, and science and technology’s ability to avoid and repair severe side effects, is also cherished and upheld by the business and sustainable development assemblage, meaning that the possibility of ‘unknown unknowns’ is largely overlooked (cf. Sandström, 2002). Moreover, the business and sustainable development assemblage is still firmly anchored to, and led by, an instrumental rationality and the belief in the ability to control technology. Sustainable development is predominantly reduced to new technology and to the creation of new markets. What is overlooked is that: “(---) developments set in motion by technological acts with short-term aims tend to make themselves independent, that is, to gather their own compulsive dynamics, an automotive momentum, by which they become not only, as pointed out, irreversible but also forward-pushing and thus overtake the wishes and plans of the initiators.” (Jonas, 1984, p.32)

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In the following three sections, I will outline Jonas attempt to break free from traditional ethics and its acute shortcomings considering the technological age we are in. These shortcomings, I argue, fit well with those of the business and sustainable development assemblage.

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Heuristics of fear

Theory of ethics is just as science and technology, predominantly shaped by modernity and stuck to the myth of progress; it assumes that nature is indestructible and that coming generations of humans will be morally (as well as scientifically and technologically) superior when compared with previous generations (Jonas, 1984; von Wright, 1986; 1993). Traditional ethics are, thus, normally rooted in the assumption that human life will always exist, and that existence will be continuously improved (Jonas, 1984). Furthermore, in traditional ethics, the human course of action is connected to human change only – an effort in which the mighty, powerful and unalterable nature sometimes makes it hard for us, sometimes not. Consequently, our moral responsibility does not reach far; it embraces only what is in our immediate surroundings (in time as well as in space). Expressed differently, we enact nature as being something constant and in this sense our moral concerns are still predominantly ancestrally rooted (Jonas, 1984; cf. Bauman, 1993; von Wright, 1986, 1993). In our technological age, however, the dynamic tension between humanity and nature (nature turned out to be vulnerable after all), and the cumulative character of the side effects mercilessly remove this containment of ‘here’ and ‘now’. In Jonas’ words: “The containment of nearness and contemporaneity is gone, swept away by the spatial spread and time span of the cause-effect trains which technological practice sets afoot, even when undertaken for proximate ends. Their irreversibility conjoined to their aggregate magnitude injects another novel factor into the moral equation. Add to this their cumulative character: their effects keep adding themselves to one another, with the result that the situation for later subjects and their choices of action will be progressively different from that of the initial agent and ever more the fated product of what was done before.” (Jonas, 1984, p.7)

In closer detail, Jonas brings forth four main arguments for why traditional ethics are not suitable to the technological age. First, in traditional ethics “All dealing with the nonhuman world, that is, the whole realm of techne (with the exception of medicine), was ethically neutral [and] action on nonhuman things did not constitute a sphere of authentic ethical significance.”

Second, “Ethical significance belonged to the direct dealing of man with man, including the dealing with himself: all traditional ethics is anthropocentric.”

Third, “For action in this domain, the entity ‘man’ and his basic condition was considered constant in essence and not itself an object of reshaping techne.”


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Finally, “The good and evil about which action had to care lay close to the act, either in the praxis itself or in its immediate reach, and were not matters for remote planning. [---] Ethics accordingly was of the here and now, of occasions as they arise between men, of the recurrent, typical situations of private and public life.” (Jonas, 1984, pp.4, 5)

What Jonas (1984) sets out to accomplish is to develop ethics concerned with long-range future effects. This could be done by taking into consideration the rights of what does not yet exist – intergenerational justice, for example – and to develop new ethical principles that “stand guard over the future in the technological tempest of the present” (1984, p.33). In a sense, this implies preferring the ethical tradition of ‘thou shall not’ before ‘thou shall’. Consequently, “the prophecy of doom is to be given greater heed than the prophecy of bliss” (1984, p.31). What Jonas brings to ethics is a heuristics of fear, which involves a shift from perfectibility (in reaching the highest good through ‘thou shall’) to responsibility that “consult our fears prior to our wishes to learn what we really cherish” (1984, p.27, see also pp.201, 202). Fear is, according to Jonas (1984, p.28), needed to initialise discussions and prompting implementation of radical frameworks for action, and he argues that: “Responsiveness to it [fear] has to be acquired on purpose. The psychology of the matter is thus not as simple as it was for Hobbes, who also, instead of love for a summum bonum, made fear of a summum malum, namely, the fear of violent death, the starting point of morality. This is an evil well known or imagined, its potential ever present, and its acute threat arousing the extreme of fear as the most compulsive reaction of our innate instinct of self-preservation. The imagined fate of future men, let alone that of the planet, which affects neither me nor anyone else still connected with me by the bonds of lover or just of coexistence, does not of itself have this influence upon our feeling.And yet it ‘ought’ to have it – that is, we should allow it this influence by purposely making room for it in our disposition”.

Fear, for Jonas, is possible to acquire on purpose and to cultivate, and he prompts us to “educate our soul to a willingness to let itself be affected by the mere thought of possible fortunes and calamities of future generations” (Jonas, 1984, p.28). Bringing ourselves to this emotional readiness is the second duty in the Jonasian ethics, the first is to bring about the very thought itself. From the quotation above, the sort of fear that Jonas wishes for in the age of technology should not be thought of as equivalent to the Hobbesian regime of terror – “every man, against every man”, caused by competition (‘men invade for gain’), diffidence (men invade ‘for safetyí’) and glory (men invade ‘for reputation’) (Hobbes, 1651/1968, p.185). Rather, it is more of a spiritual kind. The specific kind of spiritualism Jonas has in mind is based on Gnosticism (Jonas, 1984; Scodel, 2003), but that is of little concern here; what matters is that spiritualism is grounded in the morality of fear (see Welford, 1997, or Schumacher, 1973, for other accounts of spiritualisms needed, although without the foundation of the morality of fear). An outcome of this is that if the business and sustainable development assemblage cultivates spiritual fear and allows it to be a duty to follow, a long-range ethics for business in the technological age could be developed. The suggestion made is that the business and sustainable assemblage, instead of paying attention to good prognoses and hope, need to turn its attention to bad prognoses and to consult our fears. This does not

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mean that hope is replaced fully by fear, but as Jonas (1984, p.203) keeps reminding us: “There are times when the drive needs moral encouragement, when hope and daring rather than fear and caution should lead. Ours is not one of them.” So, what is the moral basis for fear then? In the following section, the foundation of the Jonasian morality is investigated.

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The Jonasian foundation of moral

According to Jonas (1984), a good moral person is not the one who has acted in certain ways, but the person who follows the very imperative of doing good for its own sake. As we saw in the previous section, the Jonasian view on morality implies that trying to do good for its own sake demands that the bad prognosis is the foundation for decision-making rather than the good one. Furthermore, in my reading of Jonas’ moral philosophy, it is an individual unconditional duty to follow the very imperative of doing good for its own sake. This leads to an investigation of the ontology of ‘morality-for-its-own-sake’ and of human intentions. For Jonas (1984, p.27), reason can never stand on its own, which according to him clearly distinguishes him from the Kantian ethical tradition, and he investigates into human ontology to provide an answer to why feelings are so important: “As long as the danger is unknown, we do not know what to preserve and why. Knowledge of this comes, against all logic and method, from the perception of what to avoid. This is perceived first and teaches us, by the revulsion of feeling which acts ahead of knowledge, to apprehend the value whose antithesis so affects us.”

Reason, however, is not abandoned by Jonas (which is an Aristotelian position, i.e., to not see reason and feelings as opposites; see also Nussbaum (2000), for her philosophical attempt to develop a moral foundation by integrating reason and feelings), but the status of it is reduced. Behind reason is ‘will-to’ (Jonas, 1984, p.235, endnote 5); will-to objectivity and the capacity of neutral knowing, which can stand against other neutral ‘knowing’s’; will-to have a purpose to seek appropriate means in which techniques and technology are close at hand; and, will-to command reason and rational judgement to subordinate itself to feelings. Will as well as reason are submitted to feelings, making feelings the very foundation of moral action, or in Jonas’ (1984, p.86) sharp formulation: “The gap between abstract validation and concrete motivation must be bridged by the arc of sentiment, which alone can sway the will. The phenomenon of morality rests a priori on this correlation [---].”

From Jonas’ account of morality, it can be concluded that human beings by nature are morally sensitive (here Jonas comes close to Kant’s view, 1793/1960), but that we individually can deliberately choose to exclude feelings as such or exclude certain types of feelings. Turning to the deliberate choice to exclude feelings, it is commonly depicted as having instrumental rationality as its root cause (Jonas, 1984; Bauman, 1989), which puts aside other possible types of reason that, potentially at least, embrace feelings (cf. Nussbaum, 2000; Rorty, 1999; or von Wright, 1986, 1993). Moreover, instrumental rationality overrules the second formulation of Kant’s categorical (but unsatisfactorily anthropocentric and short-range) imperative that we ought to not consider humans merely as means to some other end, but always as an end in himself or herself. It is when turning


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to the choice to exclude certain types of feelings at the expense of others that we find the true novelty of the Jonasian view on morality. As emphasised earlier, what concerns Jonas is the prevalence of the good prognosis before the bad, which excludes premonitions of fear. Some humans, however, do seem to suffer from ‘moral deafness’ (Jonas, 1984). To judge whether someone has committed an immoral or moral act, or have such intentions, is truly difficult, but despite this difficulty, it is, or ought to be, an unconditional human duty to investigate such moral dilemmas as well as to judge in these instances (Bauman, 1989, 1995; Jonas, 1984). Central to this is the dilemma brought up by Giddens (1991). In our modern society, individuals’ capability to distinguish between moral and immoral intentions and acts are diminishing because so many morally difficult situations, in the west, are being institutionalised. We have now approached an ontological view on morality that implies that morality is something that needs to be practiced by every new generation of humans (Kant, 1793/1960; Bauman, 2003). Consequently, if Giddens (1991) observation is correct, individuals’ moral capability is dropping rapidly. Translating this to the business and sustainable assemblage, the Jonasian foundation of morality can be put in sharp contrast. First, the assemblage is predominantly founded on instrumental rationality in decision-making (manifested in homo economicus), thus excluding feelings, as well as relying too much on hope and good prognoses (if feelings are actually brought in). There is little attempt to bring a morality of fear into business and sustainable development, and there are no suggestions on how spiritual fear could be cultivated and educated. Consequently, the duty to bring about the very thought of fear and to bring ourselves to emotional readiness are neglected. This implies that the business and sustainable development assemblage cannot break free from its function as an alibi for business and as a managerial technology (cf. Jones, 2003). Second, individual duty to moral responsibility is sidestepped by the business and sustainable development assemblage and the result is that the assemblage puts moral hope and trust into artificial collective bodies that metaphorically speaking have no real face and consequently no possibility to have moral responsibility for the ‘Other’ (Bevan and Corvellec, 2007). Moral responsibility by doing good is an individual concern and duty, and it is from this that the position that human collectives (e.g., private or public organisations) cannot have moral responsibility, is entered (McMahon, 1995). As Bauman (1989) points out in his analysis of the Holocaust, regimes of terror and bureaucracy might be an explanation of why evil acts take place, but it never takes away the individual’s moral duty to act on behalf of the ‘other’. Moving to the next stage of a Jonasian ethics appropriate for the business and sustainable development assemblage in the technological age, we turn now to Jonas’ categorical imperative.

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The ought of existence and preservation of humanity

A fundamental assumption of the traditional and short-ranged ethics is that only those humans that live today have rights. For Jonas (1984) this is irresponsible considering the destructive technological potential we possess and the dynamic nature of the cause-and-effect-train. Therefore, it ought to be forbidden to perform “any va-banque game in the affairs of humanity” (Jonas, 1984, p.38) and the categorical

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imperative that Jonas (1984, p.37) formulates is: “Never must the existence or the essence of man as a whole be made a stake in the hazards of action”. The main difference between the categorical imperative that Jonas proposes and Kant’s categorical imperative, to pick the most important imperative of western modernity, is that: “The new imperative invokes a different consistency: not that of the act itself, but that of its eventual effects with the continuance of human agency in times to come. And the ‘universalisation’ it contemplates is by no means hypothetical – that is, a purely logical transference from the individual ‘me’ to an imaginary, causally related ‘all’ (‘if everybody acted like that’); on the contrary, the actions subject to the new imperative – actions of the collective whole – have their universal reference in their actual scope of efficacy: they ‘totalise’ themselves in the progress of their momentum and thus are bound to terminate in shaping the universal dispensation of things.” (Jonas, 1984, p.12)

Jonas’ categorical imperative thus adds a time horizon to the responsibility that Kant’s categorical imperative excludes. In other words, a short-range ethics only concerned with responsibility ‘here’ and ‘now’ is replaced by a long-range ethics in which the imperative contains an “open-ended dimension of our responsibility” (Jonas, 1984, p.12). To understand the magnitude of Jonas’ categorical imperative we need, however, to investigate in its metaphysical foundation and the two metaphysical questions phrased: •

Why is there life

•

What is the idea of man

Objective and value-free scientific and philosophical programs are of no assistance here, or rather, the questions go beyond the very realms of validation in all its forms, since for Jonas there is no rift between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Even though we must not disqualify attempts at forecasting future conditions, such attempts apply, however, only if the ‘forecast’ is subordinated to metaphysical investigations into why there ought to be humanity and what the idea of man is. As Jonas (1984, p.43) puts it: “Only the idea of man, by telling us why there should be men, tells us also how they should be”. Consequently, ‘ought’ statements should have the same status as ‘is’ statements. In relation to the categorical imperative and the two metaphysical questions, Jonas proposes two ethical axioms. The first one is that we, through our actions, must not endanger human existence. The second is that we must not endanger the essence – or idea of man (“their right, when their time comes, to a worthwhile quality of life, both as to its internal powers and its external conditions”. p.42). For Jonas, the latter, the idea of man, is subordinated to the former, the protection of future life. The choice between existence and non-existence is a non-negotiable question and any living condition, however bad, is preferred over non-existence. Another important aspect of Jonas’ categorical imperative is that it is an inversion of Descartes rational principles of doubt: “In order to ascertain the indubitable truth we should, according to Descartes, equate everything doubtful with the demonstrably false. Here on the contrary we are told to treat, for the purposes of decision, the doubtful but possible as if it were certain, when it is of a certain kind.” (Jonas, 1984, p. 37)

Consequently, the phrase ‘certain kind’ refers to any situation where we morally sense, through premonitions of fear, that we endanger human existence or the idea of man.


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For the business and sustainable development assemblage, this means that it needs to seriously consider Jonas categorical imperative. Then it is possible to develop an ethical program that can respond to the type of moral responsibility needed in the technological age; a responsibility along the lines: Phrased negatively, “Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life”, or “Do not compromise the conditions for an indefinite continuation of humanity on earth.” (Jonas, 1984, p.11)

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The techno-economic-scientific joint-venture makes a Jonasian ethics even more important

The intention with this paper has been to provide an alternative view on morality for the sustainable development assemblage. It has been suggested that the assemblage ought to consider a Jonasian ethics. If the necessity of emotions of (spiritual) fear, the categorical imperative and the two axioms of long-range ethics (that we through our actions must not endanger human existence or the idea of man) are approved for, then it might be possible to make real alternatives to the current myth of progress. To steer away from the myth of progress is a slow and complicated process. The last decades’ development of business studies on sustainable development shows this. Making it even more difficult, there is also the escalating economic globalisation (cf. Beck, 1996), or put differently, Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’, which to a large extent has occurred after Jonas’ diagnosis of the technological age. Ours is a world in which our technologies, techniques, scientific research and power (to decide whether or not we should continue this va-banque relationship with nature, our existence and the idea of man or not) are largely in the hands of the global corporate world, the globally buoyant capital and market liberal political discourses (Bauman, 1998, 2002; Welford, 1995, 1997). The business and sustainable development assemblage ought not, therefore, neglect the symbiotic relationship that has developed between science, technology and the economy. As outlined in this paper so far, we have, on the one hand, a faith in science and technology that achieves progress at the expense of nature; its conquest over and merciless raping of nature, which is recognised as that “homo faber towers over Homo sapiens” (Jonas, 1984, p.168). On the other hand, we also have faith in economisation (consumption-driven economies, deregulation, privatisation, global trade and global markets, cf. Amin, 1997; Hardt and Negri, 2000) in which homo economicus towers over Homo sapiens. The capability of markets to govern human activities towers over governed economies (state, legislators, ethics and moral etcetera, cf. Bauman, 1998; 1999). Having said this, however, does not imply that the belief in economisation is something that is necessarily always bad. On the contrary, and as Sen (1999) and Nussbaum (2000) have acknowledged, economisation is necessary to secure for humans the capability to live a life they have reason to appreciate (their development approach, however, is vastly different from the mainstream economic liberal discourse). The point to be made here is that: “there is more to the idea of progress than a ‘better life’ in terms of greater consumption of greater varieties of goods at greater ease” and “by heightening the productivity of the global economy [---] at the same time lightening the burden of labour.” (Jonas, 1984, p.163)

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Yet, the business and sustainable development assemblage very seldom criticises the prevailing economic linear growth models (cf. Kallio, 2007). Even rarer is a critical examination of the symbiotic nature of the techno-economic-scientific link. On the contrary, there is a widespread support for this link among business and sustainable development scholars, making it an even stronger self-reinforcing drive behind the myth of progress. The assemblage needs to pay attention to the fact that the market and all its actors (and, which needs to be pointed out, not only global corporations) are all part of the process in which nature and culture are colonised and future humans, including natural life, are jeopardised (Bonnedahl et al., 2007). There are certainly positive signs that actors on the market take moral responsibility by committing to a stronger version of sustainability. Good prognoses and hope are not, however, our main guidance here. What the business and sustainable development assemblage needs to be guided by are spiritual fear and bad prognoses. However, although the argument is that we should seek moral guidance through spiritual fear, we must also acknowledge that our (western) societies are driven primarily by another sort of fear. Zygmunt Bauman has devoted himself to explore this dimension of our society, and from his work we can find that we fear not having the right identity (which we believe is solved by increasing our visits to the consumption temples, Bauman, 2001, 2002); we fear death (death, as Bauman, 1992, 2006b, point out, has become a disease in itself; and, additionally, with a tremendous market potential, Bonnedahl et al., 2007); we fear making prolonged bonds to other humans (we are constantly in a red alert mode of breaking-up, to engage in new and more promising commitments, Bauman, 2003, 2006a). Following Bauman, this fear has arisen due to the intertwined connection between modern and post-modern conditions, and it is a sort of fear that a consumer society fosters (and which in turn further promotes the consumer society). Fears also too frequently come with a price tag. It is, thus, not enough merely to consider science and technology when we critically assess the myth of progress – economisation is an important part as well, creating and amplifying materialistically bred fears, desire-driven consumption and market-driven commercialism. To break free from the myth of progress and the ‘materialistically’ grounded and un-spiritual fears, is a daunting task, but one that has to be embarked upon in order to ensure that our “projections on futurology will not remain mere food for idle curiosity or equally idle pessimism” (Jonas, 1984, p.28). In the contemporary techno-economic-scientific age, people working in the field of business studies have considerable opportunities to influence people both inside and outside academia. If the assemblage opens up for innovative discourses on business and responsibility, and on what sustainable development might mean, then the needed change sketched here could serve as an alternative. The general conclusion is that the business and sustainable development assemblage must seek to construct a new kind of humility, replacing the old commitment to “the smallness of our power” to a humility that realises the “excessive magnitude of it, which is the excess of our power to act over our power to foresee and our power to evaluate and to judge”, (Jonas, 1984,p.22). Let us begin with bringing about the mere thought of a morality of fear and after that make suggestions to how it could be cultivated. Then it is also possible to develop a business and sustainable development assemblage that judges those decisions that risk the future extinction of humanity, or that risk the essence and idea of man, as immoral. This presupposes that Mother Earth has not already surrendered to the ‘cowboys in the spaceship’ (Boulding, 1968).


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