Who Draws the Circle?
Hans Jonas and Responsibility without a Cosmic Signature
Governing Claim
Hans Jonas published Das Prinzip Verantwortung in German in 1979; the English translation, The Imperative of Responsibility, appeared five years later. He was then in his mid-seventies, and the book rests on a philosophical biology he had been developing since the 1950s. Born in Germany in 1903, he had studied with Heidegger in Marburg during the 1920s and left the country in 1933. He fought in the Second World War with the Jewish Brigade. His mother died in Auschwitz. After the war he settled first in Israel and eventually at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he remained until his death in 1993.
In The Phenomenon of Life (1966), Jonas argued that living organisms are distinguished from inert matter by the structure of their existence: unlike a stone, which simply persists through whatever happens to it, a living organism continuously produces the conditions of its own continuation, exchanging matter with its environment while maintaining its form. This structure—persisting identity through material change—became for him a fact of philosophical importance. It would become the foundation of his later ethics.
The Imperative of Responsibility was written in a specific historical atmosphere. The 1970s had made the stakes of modern technology newly visible. Nuclear arsenals existed at a scale capable of ending organised human civilisation. Industrial chemicals were altering ecosystems that no model could fully describe. Genetic intervention was becoming technically feasible. Jonas's book is a response to this exposure. It asks not which dangers specifically threaten us but what structure of moral thought the situation requires.
His answer is a new imperative: act so that the effects of your action remain compatible with the continued existence of genuine human life. He wants this command to be categorical, binding on present people regardless of their preferences about the future. The difficulty is explaining where such a command comes from. Jonas turns to nature. Living beings continuously maintain themselves through metabolism. He reads this self-maintenance as an immanent purpose, a primitive affirmation of existence that belongs to the organism rather than to any observer describing it from outside. Purpose introduces the possibility of success and failure; success and failure introduce the distinction between good and bad; that distinction establishes objective value; and value carries an ought. Humanity becomes responsible because humanity can recognise this value and act on its behalf.
This argument has a genuine target. Modern science cleared the natural world of purpose as a condition of its own development: Galileo and Descartes mechanised nature, removing teleology from physics and opening the way for its explanatory reach. The cost, in moral terms, was to leave all value on the human side of the ledger, where it remained available to be dismissed as projection, preference, or convention. Jonas wants to show that nature was not emptied of value but only declared empty.
I follow Jonas until the road breaks. His account of what modern technology has done to the structure of moral responsibility is the strongest part of the book, and I take it over largely intact. His attempt to ground the resulting obligation in nature fails at three distinct points: self-maintenance does not establish that existence matters to the organism; the purposes of individual organisms do not combine into a unified good of life or of humanity; and objective value, even if it exists, does not assign obligation to a particular agent.
The failure leads to a more candid position. The normative circle has no cosmic signature. Human beings draw moral boundaries through practices of giving reasons, making commitments, answering others, caring for dependent persons, and holding power accountable. Jonas wants nature to certify the circle because a humanly drawn circle appears vulnerable to arbitrariness. I accept that vulnerability and ask the questions that follow from it: who belongs inside the circle, how far it extends, what gives anyone the authority to enforce it, and how present people can act for the future while leaving future people able to judge for themselves.
I. What Jonas Gets Right: Power Has Entered the Future
The moral examples that philosophy has returned to most consistently share a structural feature. An agent acts; the action reaches someone; the harm becomes visible in the same scene; a demand for an answer can be made. Lying, promise-breaking, injury, betrayal, the abuse of a position of trust: these examples have staying power because they preserve the conditions under which responsibility can be exercised. Agent, act, consequence, and accountability remain available to one another in time.
Modern technical power has broken that co-availability without producing a moral framework calibrated to the break. Carbon released into the atmosphere today continues to alter surface temperatures and ocean chemistry across timescales that dwarf the lifespans of the people who benefited from its release. Radioactive waste from nuclear facilities must be contained for tens of thousands of years—longer than any existing political institution, legal system, or language has yet survived. Genetic modifications introduced into a lineage will express themselves in bodies whose occupants played no part in the decision. In each case the action and its full consequence are separated by a distance that removes the affected party from any position from which they could have negotiated or refused. The result is an asymmetry that traditional ethics had no occasion to theorise. Our power now reaches people who cannot reach back.
Jonas's most durable contribution is his analysis of what kind of thing, under these conditions, can become the object of responsibility. He develops it by asking what features the newborn infant has that make its bare existence a demand on whoever is present. From that case Jonas draws three conditions that belong to the object itself.
The object is mortal: it already exists in some form and may cease to exist. It is perishable: present action can damage or destroy it irreversibly. It is unprecedented: its future form has not already been determined and cannot be derived in full from knowledge of what it is now. To these Jonas adds a fourth condition that belongs to the agent: effective power over the object's open process of becoming.
Each condition is doing real work. Remove mortality and the object may call for admiration but not for protection. Remove perishability and damage becomes temporary, which transforms the structure of obligation. Remove the unprecedented character of the future and responsibility collapses into execution: the task becomes one of competence rather than judgement. Remove effective power and the agent faces fate rather than obligation. Jonasian responsibility arises in the conjunction of all four: something that can be lost, whose future remains genuinely unfinished, and over which the present agent has disproportionate power.
This is the part of Jonas I keep. It does not require his metaphysics or his politics, and I leave both behind. Responsibility belongs to an open future precisely because present power can close it.
The same structure explains why uncertainty cannot function as a general excuse for inaction. If acting responsibly required the ability to predict consequences with certainty, the agent with the greater power to damage would hold a standing permission to continue until the damage became undeniable—at which point it would already be too late to prevent it. Jonas responds by proposing an asymmetry in how projections are weighted: the credible projection of serious and irreversible harm should govern decision even where the harm is not certain, because the cost of having acted on a harm that did not materialise is recoverable, while the cost of having failed to act on one that did is not.
But uncertainty cuts in a second direction, and here Jonas does not follow his own argument far enough. If no present agent can fully know what the future will become, no present agent can claim to know what it should become either. The condition that forbids waiting for certainty before acting also forbids treating any current judgement as the final word on what is being protected and why. We must act before we know enough, and we must act without appointing ourselves the last arbiters of what we are acting for. The tension between these two demands will surface again when Jonas draws his political conclusions. Jonas sees the problem clearly. He then turns to nature to make its moral force objective.
II. Where Jonas's Metaphysical Argument Breaks
Jonas knows where the decisive battle lies. Modern science achieved its explanatory power by stripping purpose from nature. Stones fall because forces act on them. Planets move according to mathematical laws. Organisms can be studied through chemistry, mechanics, heredity, and selection. None of these explanations requires nature to aim at anything. Purpose survives on the human side of the divide, as an intention, a projection, or a way of speaking.
For Jonas, the ethical consequences are severe. A purposeless nature contains no good of its own. If value enters the world only through human judgement, the continued existence of humanity can appear as one preference among others. We may care intensely about future people, yet our concern seems to rest on nothing deeper than the fact that we happen to be the sort of creatures who want a future. Jonas therefore returns to the living organism. A stone remains where it is until something moves or destroys it. A living being must continuously secure its own continuation. It takes in matter, transforms it, expels it, and preserves a recognisable form through the exchange. The organism is never simply given. It must keep producing itself.
Jonas reads this structure as the first appearance of freedom in nature. The organism is free from dependence on any particular piece of matter, since its material composition changes throughout its life. That freedom carries necessity with it. The organism must continue exchanging matter or die. Its existence is permanently at stake. In this needful freedom Jonas finds an elementary concern for being: life, at its most basic level, says yes to itself. Once that yes is admitted, the rest of the argument appears to follow. A purpose can succeed or fail. Success is good for the being whose purpose it is; failure is bad. Good and bad therefore belong to nature before human observers arrive. Value has entered the structure of existence. The supposedly impassable gulf between fact and value was created by a picture of nature that had already excluded everything capable of crossing it.
Jonas thinks the decisive battle has now been won. It has barely begun.
1. From Self-Maintenance to Purpose
Consider a computer while it is running. It monitors temperature, regulates voltage, allocates memory, clears temporary processes, responds to errors, and slows itself down when overheating threatens stable operation. These processes preserve the conditions under which the machine continues to function. If one of them fails, the computer may crash or shut down. Nobody concludes from this that stable operation is the computer's own purpose. Its internal processes produce stability because human designers built them to do so. The purpose enters from outside.
Jonas has a ready answer. An organism differs from a machine at the level of its identity. The computer remains the same physical object when switched off. Its components persist. The organism maintains itself while continuously replacing the material from which it is made. Its identity lies in the living process that holds through the change. A computer has an inert existence on which activity is later imposed. For an organism, existence itself is activity. The distinction is real. The conclusion still outruns it.
A river also persists through the continual replacement of its material. The water passing under a bridge today will be gone tomorrow, while the river retains its course, name, and form. Its persistence depends on an ongoing process. We may call that persistence an achievement if we like. The river has yet to acquire a purpose of remaining a river.
The gap appears in the phrase Jonas uses to cross it: the organism's existence is at stake for the organism. Once existence is said to matter to the organism, concern has already entered the description. There is now a perspective from which continuation counts as success and death as failure. This is the very purposiveness the argument was meant to establish.
Metabolism shows that living form is actively maintained. It shows that certain processes contribute to continuation and others bring that continuation to an end. These findings support a functional description of life. Jonas needs something stronger: continuation must matter to the organism itself, even in the absence of consciousness. His language makes that claim vivid. Vividness cannot carry the ontological weight placed upon it.
Viruses put further pressure on the boundary. A virus has no independent metabolism and usually falls outside a strict definition of life. It relies on a host cell for the machinery of replication. Viral populations nevertheless mutate, adapt to selection pressure, evade immune responses, and preserve their reproductive continuity across changing environments. Why should a bacterium's regulation of its internal chemistry count as evidence of primitive concern, while a virus altering its proteins to escape immune recognition remains a purposeless process? Both can be described in terms of persistence, adaptation, success, and failure. Jonas needs a principled account of why one description reveals an inner purpose and the other merely records the effects of selection.
The virus alone cannot defeat his position. One genuine case of immanent purpose would be enough to overturn the claim that nature contains none. The example exposes the burden of proof. Jonas must distinguish objective purpose from processes that invite purposive description. Metabolism gives him an especially compelling case. It does not yet give him the distinction. At the end of this first transition, the result is narrower than Jonas requires. Organisms perform processes that sustain their continuation. Their persistence has a dynamic and precarious structure. The claim that persistence is their own immanent end remains unproved.
2. From the Organism's Purpose to the Good of Life
Give Jonas the first step. Suppose an organism's self-maintenance really is an immanent purpose. The organism's continued existence then counts as good for that organism. The next move expands the subject of the claim. The purpose of an organism becomes the good of its species. The good of species becomes the good of life as a whole. From there Jonas arrives at humanity's categorical ought-to-be: genuine human life must continue.
Natural history gives no warrant for this enlargement. Nature produces living forms and destroys them on a scale no organism could survive. Ice ages, volcanic upheavals, changes in atmospheric chemistry, asteroid impacts, and other planetary transformations have eliminated most species that have existed. The organisms caught inside these events may have struggled to persist. The processes destroying them displayed no corresponding commitment to their survival. The conflict already exists within ordinary ecological life. A predator secures its continuation by ending the prey's. A parasite flourishes through the depletion of its host. One species expands into the conditions another species needs. Even within a single population, reproductive success can consume the resources on which later survival depends.
If these organisms possess purposes, nature contains a field of purposes pulling against one another. Jonas supplies no point of view from which their conflicts become one coherent good. "Life as a whole" has no metabolism, no unified perspective, and no project through which the successes of one organism and the failures of another could be reconciled. A multitude of local affirmations does not combine by addition into a single affirmation spoken by nature. This problem matters because Jonas's ethical conclusion requires far more than the claim that each living thing has a good of its own. He needs the continued existence of life to be good in itself. He then needs the continuation of humanity to possess a special categorical force.
Why humanity? Human beings are one species among others in natural history. They can be eliminated by the same indifferent processes that have erased countless other forms of life. If nature carries a purpose of preserving humanity, that purpose has left very little evidence in nature's conduct. Jonas eventually gives a different answer. Humanity is the being capable of recognising value and accepting responsibility for it. Other organisms pursue their own continuation. Human beings can understand the value present in life, foresee the destructive consequences of their power, and restrain themselves on behalf of beings unable to do the same. Humanity's special standing comes from moral subjectivity.
This answer may be powerful. It also reveals what now carries the argument. The moral importance of humanity arises from its capacity for responsibility. The metabolic striving shared by living organisms has ceased to explain the conclusion. Jonas began with the cell in order to ground value in nature. He arrives at the categorical preservation of humanity by appealing to a distinctly human normative capacity. The road from organism to humanity has therefore changed direction. It no longer follows a purpose that grew steadily larger until it encompassed life as a whole. It reaches humanity by introducing a new kind of value at the final stage: the value of the being capable of knowing value and taking responsibility for it.
3. From Value to Obligation
Suppose Jonas wins both earlier arguments. Nature contains genuine purposes. Those purposes establish objective value. Life, perhaps even humanity, possesses a value that does not depend on present preference. One question remains: why does that value obligate me?
Imagine a painting of extraordinary beauty hanging in a museum. Its destruction would be a genuine loss. The painting's value still does not make every person responsible for protecting it. Responsibility falls differently on the curator who controls its care, the official who ignores a known fire risk, the visitor who sees smoke, and the stranger living on another continent. The painting's value tells us something about what would be lost. It does not identify who must act, what action is required, or what cost the agent must bear. The same gap remains when the object is life. Calling its value ontological increases the scale of the loss. It does not assign the obligation. An agent becomes responsible through some relation to the threatened good: causal involvement, control, knowledge, proximity, dependence, or the power to intervene. Value alone leaves these relations unspecified.
Jonas supplies one part of the answer. Humanity can recognise the value that nature contains and can act in response to it. A bacterium may destroy the conditions of its own survival through unchecked reproduction, yet nobody accuses it of irresponsibility. It cannot foresee the result, understand alternatives, or alter its conduct in light of an obligation. Human beings can. This explains why human beings are candidates for responsibility. It explains why a bacteria-induced extinction would be maladaptation while a knowingly engineered human extinction would be morally assessable. Capacity determines who can bear an obligation.
Capacity still does not determine the direction of the obligation. The ability to recognise and preserve value does not establish a duty to preserve every valuable thing. Jonas has moved from "life possesses value" to "humanity alone can answer that value." The missing proposition is the one that turns can into must. This is a second gap in the argument. The first runs from fact to value. The second runs from value to an agent's obligation. Jonas devotes his metaphysical effort to the first and crosses the second almost in passing.
The painting reveals the problem because its value and my obligation are visibly distinct. Life's greater importance can obscure the same distinction without erasing it. Value does not appoint its own guardian.
The three breaks can now be seen together. Self-maintenance has not established that existence matters to the organism. The purposes of individual organisms have not produced a unified good of life or a categorical ought-to-be for humanity. Objective value has not assigned responsibility to a particular agent. By the end of the argument, the real weight rests on human moral subjectivity: our capacity to foresee, to choose, to answer for consequences, and to recognise claims beyond our immediate interests. Jonas set out to derive responsibility from the structure of life. He arrives at responsibility through the structure of moral agency.
That relocation does not supply a new metaphysical foundation: moral agency carries no cosmic certificate of its own. This is the point at which I stop looking for one.
III. The Cat Draws a Circle
Imagine a cat that has drawn a circle on the floor. The cat is physically capable of stepping across it at any moment. It has decided that the line marks a boundary and that crossing it counts as a violation. It then looks up and asks: what force in the universe prevents me from leaving?
The universe offers no answer, because the boundary was never a physical constraint. Its force lies entirely in the cat's own normative practice—drawing the line, treating it as binding, counting some movements as permitted and others as transgressions. The demand for an external prohibition misunderstands the kind of thing a normative boundary is.
This is the position Jonas finds intolerable. If human beings constitute the moral circle through their own practices, the circle might express nothing more than preference, habit, fear, or the accumulated weight of historical convention. Any circle drawn by human hands could in principle be redrawn by different hands with different interests. Jonas wants an authority that human preference cannot revise. He therefore tries to show that the circle was drawn before any human being arrived to trace it: nature affirms itself through life, self-affirmation generates value, value generates an ought, and humanity's task is to discover and obey an obligation already written into the structure of existence. The three failures in Section II are failures of this project. What remains, once the derivation has collapsed, is exactly the position Jonas was trying to avoid. The circle is drawn in human practice.
Admitting this does not mean that an individual invents morality at will. The circle takes shape through practices that are already shared and already normatively structured before any individual reflects on them. A promise creates standards of fidelity and betrayal. Care for a dependent person creates standards of responsiveness and abandonment. Giving a reason creates standards of relevance, consistency, and the difference between justification and evasion. Exercising authority over others creates a standing demand to answer those who live under the decisions made in one's name. These practices are not chosen from a position outside normativity; they are the medium in which human agents already find themselves, and within which the question of what to do already makes sense.
Constructivism makes one claim about this situation that can be established without settling the content of any particular obligation. A person who argues that all norms are meaningless is already arguing—deploying criteria of relevance, validity, and the difference between a good reason and a bad one. A person who rejects every normative claim is already making one: that rejection is not arbitrary, that it is supported by something the person takes to count in its favour. The cat cannot erase every circle while continuing to act, reason, promise, and hold others to account. Some normative structure is not an optional addition to a life already in progress. It is constitutive of what it means to be an agent engaged with others in a shared world.
What constructivism does not settle is whom the circle must include and how far it must extend. The bare structure of agency—the unavoidability of some normative commitments—does not by itself show that the circle must reach another person, a dependent infant, someone living under my political power, or a child who will be born in forty years. The form is unavoidable. The content remains to be explained.
Vulnerability gives the circle its reach, but not because vulnerability is a natural fact that generates an ought on its own—that move would replicate Jonas's error with different materials. The normative force comes from within practice itself. Any agent who claims that power exercised over them must remain answerable has already asserted something about standing: that being unable to refuse, negotiate, or answer back does not erase one's claim to justification. This commitment is already present whenever an agent treats their own demand for reasons as binding rather than arbitrary. Once made for oneself, it extends to every recurrence of the same relation of unanswerable power. Vulnerability marks that position: another's situation can be damaged by decisions they did not make and cannot control, through a power they have no means to reach. Dependence marks it: someone enters a world already shaped by arrangements whose terms they played no part in setting. Asymmetric power marks it: one party can close possibilities for another before that other is in any position to object. Irreversibility marks it: some of those closures admit no later correction. In each case what is normatively significant is the recurrence of a relation of unanswerable power—a relation in which the agent has already recognised a claim to justification when occupying the exposed position themselves.
The difference between Jonas and me can now be stated simply. Jonas and I both draw a normative circle. He holds that nature drew it first and that human beings are its discoverers and guardians. I hold that human beings draw it through the practices in which they make claims, answer to others, and hold power responsible. He promises a derivation from the structure of being and cannot complete it. I make no such promise. The honest work begins after the circle has been drawn: deciding whom it includes, answering for the people it excludes, and preventing those who hold the thickest marker from drawing it around themselves alone.
IV. What Future Responsibility Actually Protects
The object of future responsibility is mortal, perishable, and unprecedented: something that can be lost, damaged irreversibly, and whose future has not already been written. It generates a claim when present agents exercise power over people who cannot refuse, negotiate, or answer back. The difficulty is that some of those people do not yet exist.
We do not need to imagine a direct relationship with a person living in the year 2526. The relation is already present. Children exist now. The next generation is already entering the trajectories being created. They will inherit the climate, the institutions, the technologies, the debts, and the repair work left behind. They had no position from which to negotiate the terms of that inheritance.
Their situation can be damaged by decisions they did not make. They depend on ecological and institutional arrangements already in place when they arrive. Present agents can close possibilities before those affected are in any position to object. Some of those closures will admit no correction. The relation of unanswerable power is not a metaphor for future generations. It is the literal description of how present decisions reach forward.
Responsibility extends further than the next generation through the same logic. Each generation owes the generation already entering its world conditions under which that generation can live, judge, act, and become responsible in turn. The distant future enters the present's responsibility through the requirement to preserve each adjacent link. We do not become parents to every future human being. We must avoid breaking the chain through which responsibility can continue.
A harm need not fall on the next generation to violate this responsibility. If we set in motion a danger that will mature later, beyond our successors' power to stop or repair, we have already damaged their capacity to answer for those who come after them.
A broken chain does not always announce itself. It can look like an ecological system pushed past the threshold at which self-repair is possible. It can look like a technology so deeply embedded in the organisation of daily life that later generations inherit it as a feature of reality rather than as a decision someone made. It can look like a political institution that has made itself unchallengeable, or a mountain of inherited damage that consumes the next generation's capacity to pursue anything beyond emergency management. In each case present actors have used their power over an open future to narrow what that future can become.
Future responsibility must preserve the ecological, material, and institutional conditions under which later people can live and act together. An uninhabitable atmosphere, exhausted land, or public institutions reduced to enforcement leaves them with no ground from which to build a future.
It must also leave them able to form their own values, challenge what they inherit, and reorganise their shared life. Keeping the species alive while deciding in advance what its future members may become preserves human bodies under permanent tutelage.
The chain-based account faces its own danger. Any theory of future responsibility can generate a guardian structure once it turns the future into a single silent subject requiring an authorised interpreter. The chain leaves no vacant office for a spokesman of humanity as a whole. It still requires adults and institutions to speak for infants and others who cannot speak for themselves, but here the person represented is identifiable and the representative can be challenged, replaced, and held to account. Nothing in that relation grants anyone a final mandate to speak for the species or for people five centuries away.
Jonas creates precisely this vacant office. Once humanity's future becomes the highest value, that future needs someone to speak for it. Future people are silent. Humanity as a whole has no mouth. An interpreter steps forward. Present people are described as short-sighted and self-interested. A higher value—survival, history, the future of the species—is placed beyond their current judgements. Someone claims the authority to act in its name. Disagreement becomes evidence of irresponsibility. The interpreter's power confirms itself: resistance to the guardian demonstrates why guardianship was necessary.
A guardian regime may keep the species biologically present while destroying the capacity that made its continuation worth protecting. People remain alive and lose the authority to judge, contest, revise, and reorganise their shared world. World-form is preserved. Subject-form is eliminated. Humanity survives under permanent moral tutelage—which is to say, in a condition that fails by Jonas's own standard, since what made humanity's continuation specially important was precisely its capacity to recognise value and take responsibility for the future.
Political institutions can extend their reach, lower the resistance to coordinated action, accumulate information and resources, and turn temporary interventions into lasting defaults. They possess exactly the features Jonas identifies as characteristic of modern technology: unprecedented causal reach, long-term and often irreversible effects, and consequences that extend far beyond what any present actor can fully predict. An institution authorised to restrain dangerous technology is itself a concentration of power that immediately becomes an object of responsibility analysis. A final guardian who requires no supervision is precisely the kind of unaccountable risk a responsibility ethics should fear.
Yet a health emergency cannot wait for every epistemic dispute to be resolved, and climate policy cannot wait for a model that contains every future variable. Provisional closure allows action without granting final authority. A decision can become final enough for execution: rules take effect, resources move, institutions act. The decision-maker never acquires final authority in principle. A government cannot make an irreversible act provisional simply by promising to review it later. Once the future has been closed, the review arrives too late. New evidence can reopen the judgement. Affected people retain standing to contest it. Powers can be withdrawn. Errors remain correctable where correction is still possible.
The decision closes for now. The right to judge it stays open.
V. What Survives Jonas: Power Creates Responsibility
Jonas's most durable contribution is a reversal. Traditional moral thinking tends to proceed from obligation to capacity: first identify what must be done, then ask whether the agent is in a position to do it. Jonas runs the sequence the other way. The existence of a new power is itself a moral event. The question is what obligation that power has generated.
His formula can be condensed: you ought because you act; you act because you can. Responsibility is a correlate of power, and its scope changes when the scope of human power changes. An institution that can redirect an industry, alter the atmosphere, or restructure the conditions of millions of lives carries a different responsibility from an individual whose causal reach ends at the door.
Taken seriously, the relation becomes recursive. Existing capacity generates responsibility. Recognised responsibility creates a duty to develop the capacity required to discharge it. New capacity then produces further responsibility. The loop is the mechanism through which human power and human accountability grow together, or fail to.
A claim of incapacity does not always end the analysis. Sometimes the incapacity is genuine. Sometimes it is the accumulated result of earlier choices: no monitoring system was funded, no agency was created, relevant information was kept private, coordination was fragmented until every actor could point elsewhere. The inability to act may describe a political achievement—the successful preservation of the conditions under which no one need answer.
Capacity is itself produced. Institutions decide which harms receive sustained research attention, whose losses count in the relevant calculations, what costs are treated as tolerable, which agencies receive resources, and whether dispersed powers will ever be brought into coordination. An actor can maintain its own incapacity as a strategy, refusing to build the infrastructure that would make response possible and therefore unavoidable.
Formal assignment does not settle responsibility. Responsibility follows the actual structure of control over conditions. Who created the trajectory that produced this harm? Who benefits from its continuation? Who possesses the power to interrupt it? Who controls the information on which intervention depends? Who can make the decision reversible? Who has transferred the cost to people excluded from the original decision?
These questions distribute responsibility across governments, corporations, scientific institutions, professional bodies, and the infrastructures through which daily life is organised. They also keep the distribution revisable. New knowledge changes what can now be foreseen and may reveal what was already knowable. New institutions change what can now be done. Forms of control that were once invisible become legible. Responsibility must be assigned firmly enough to guide action and openly enough to be revised when the assignment turns out to be wrong.
This is Jonas's power–responsibility principle with the guardian removed. The question of who must answer does not reduce to who holds the most prominent office or who has declared themselves the future's protector. It follows the actual structure of power over the conditions that determine what later people will inherit. That structure is distributed, shifting, and always partly obscured. Mapping it is not a task that admits a final answer. It is the work of institutions capable of acting, revising, and holding each other to account—without appointing anyone to be its last word.
Conclusion
Jonas sees the problem that will not go away. Human power now reaches into a future that can be damaged, has no settled form, and cannot be fully known by the people acting on it. He sees that inherited moral frameworks were built for a different scale of action and have not caught up. He sees that uncertainty cannot excuse inaction, that credible projections of serious and irreversible harm must carry greater weight, and that responsibility must expand as power does. None of this is diminished by the failure of his metaphysical argument.
That argument fails because it asks nature to do something nature cannot do: certify the circle, supply the ought, appoint the guardian. Each transition—from self-maintenance to purpose, from individual purpose to the good of life, from value to obligation—requires a principle Jonas does not provide. By the time the argument reaches its conclusion, the weight has shifted silently onto human moral subjectivity, which is exactly where the argument was supposed not to rest.
I accept that it rests there. The circle has no cosmic signature. It is drawn through the practices in which human beings make claims on one another, give reasons, take responsibility, and hold power answerable. Those practices carry their own standards of success and failure, fidelity and betrayal, justification and evasion. And they tell us something specific about future responsibility: that power exercised over those who cannot answer back calls for justification, that later people will enter a world shaped by decisions made before they existed, and that a chain broken now cannot be repaired from the future end.
Those practices grant no present person or institution the final word on what these requirements mean. Jonas's guardian fails because anyone authorised to interpret the future's silence becomes unaccountable to the future they claim to protect. Provisional closure, distributed authority, and the continuing revisability of decisions give responsibility its political form when no one can claim to have read the future correctly in advance.
The demand to draw the circle without a cosmic signature is harder than Jonas's alternative. It means owning the boundary, answering for who is inside it, acknowledging who has been left out, and leaving enough room for those who come later to draw it again. Jonas wanted nature to carry that weight. If the weight stays with us, how will we carry it?