Hans Jonas and Sophocles on the ethics of the Anthropocene

What, if anything, is new about the ethical demands that the Anthropocene places on human action? We refer to this question as the Anthropocene question, since only an ethics that provides a precise answer to that question is properly an ethics of the Anthropocene. While scholars in the environmental humanities have addressed the Anthropocene question, we bring this question to normative theory. To this end, we put forward a critical reading of Hans Jonas’s 1979 The Imperative of Responsibility, in which he develops normative principles on the basis of a historical diagnosis of novelty. Recent developments in scholarship on 5th-century B.C.E. Athenian tragedy allows us to challenge Jonas, who at crucial points misdiagnoses and overstates this novelty. Using Jonas’s work as an exemplar of a complete ethics of the Anthropocene, we highlight the importance of principles for ethical deliberation: an ethics for the Anthropocene needs not only principles for action, but also principles for how to deliberate on action. Criticizing Jonas’s and more recent views that democracy is unfit for the Anthropocene, we show that 5th-century Athenian tragedy was a sophisticated democratic practice of deliberation of the sort that is required for the Anthropocene.