Rethinking Responsibility
10/17/2019 10:00 AM in Bad Homburg (Germany)
After the publication of Hans Jonas' Das Prinzip Verantwortung forty years ago, the principle of responsibility has become a key concept in moral and political debates. Yet the unconditional responsibility for the possibility of the existence of future generations – not only of humans, but also of other living beings – is invariably accompanied by the "heuristics of fear," which presupposes imagining the worst-case scenario and a pronouncedly bleak future. The dystopian principle of responsibility was introduced as a response to Bloch's Das Prinzip Hoffnung, which envisions the possibility of a utopian future for humanity. The proposed project will discuss these two principles and will argue that they are not mutually exclusive, so that, while still preserving the imperative of responsibility, one can maintain a utopian ideal as a regulative idea for moral and political action.
Dmitri Nikulin ist Professor für Philosophie an der New School for Social Research in New York. Von August ‒ Oktober 2019 ist er auf Einladung von Professor Rainer Forst und dem Exzellenzcluster »Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen« Fellow am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität.
Um Anmeldung bis zum 14. Oktober 2019 wird gebeten