ABSTRACT
"Modern technology," writes Hans Jonas (1984: 7-8), "has introduced actions of such novel scale, objects, and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them." Living in a globalizing hi-tech world means living in a world where daily, routine, local actions may potentially affect thousands or even millions of individuals throughout the world, and not just in the here and now. Actions contributing to, say, global warming or the proliferation of nuclear weapons may have the most lethal repercussions for future generations—for our children's children. For Jonas, this is where the moral problem of our globalizing world lies—in that ever-widening gap between individual imagination and moral capacity, on the one hand, and the conditions of rampant technology and globalization, on the other. Indeed, it would seem that our individual imaginations are increasingly blunted in terms of ethical choices and moral responsibilities by the far-away consequences of our actions—thanks to the forces of capitalist commodification, the development of technologies, and globalization.
