From precaution to urgency

The German philosopher and historian Hans Jonas (1903 – 1993) lived most of his life as an academic recluse. His early specialty was Gnosticism, a religious movement within Judaism and early Christianity. Not exactly the stuff of blockbuster books. However, in 1979, at the ripe old age of 76, Jonas’ life took a dramatic turn as he was thrust into the limelight becoming an overnight celebrity. That’s the year he published The Imperative of Responsibility – in search of an ethics for the technological age. In the years to follow the book found its way to the bedside table of world leaders and was widely read and discussed in cultural circles.

Jonas makes the point that the nature of human action changed radically during the twentieth century. Through the development and deployment of modern technologies, the range and effects of our actions took a quantum leap. The difficulties in dealing with these technologies from an ethical point of view is that humanity has entered a totally different moral arena; an uncharted territory where classical moral theories do not provide any viable maps. These theories, he argues, rest on four untenable assumptions:

·      our interaction with nature and the environment is not ethically relevant
·      human well-being is the principal aim of ethics
·      human nature is stable and cannot be changed
·      the range of human actions is limited in time and space.

Modern technology challenges those assumptions as it has given us the power to radically alter human nature, destroy the environment and ultimately obliterate our own species.  The range of our actions have also become limitless and ultimately unforeseeable, no longer confined to the here and now. Consider only the possibilities and consequences of an even wider deployment of human enhacement techniques (HET), gene technology and nuclear energy which Jonas refers to, or more recently, of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI).

In this light, Jonas argues, we must expand the scope of ethics and include the prerogatives of future generations which will be directly or indirectly affected by what we do. The imperative of responsibility which Jonas formulates reads as follows:

«Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life»

Jonas’ axiom has become the cornerstone of the “principle of precaution”, an ethical principle often referred to in national and international policy papers and soft law.  More concretely this principle stipulates that the threats posed to the environment and the livelihood of future generations should weigh more heavily than the foreseen eventual benefits of novel technologies. It is this rule which should determine if such technologies are permitted and, if so, how they should be phased in.

The principle of precaution has become an invaluable ethics tool. However, the pace of events during the past forty years has also revealed its shortcomings and relevance in safeguarding the interests of future generations. These events, and especially the climate crisis, challenges Jonas’ own assumptions in this theory, especially that:

·      Cutting-edge technologies pose the biggest threat to humanity
·      Long-term threats pose a greater risk than short-term threats
·      Humanity has a long-term future that we must protect

It would be the fair to say that the greatest threat to humanity today does not come from cutting-edge technologies. It comes instead from something much more banal and seemingly innocuous; the low-intensity emission of greenhouse gases that fuel our economy and underlie our lifestyle. It is these accumulated emissions that are the principal driving force of global warming, a phenomenon that is pushing us to the brink of the sixth mass extinction. We can no longer assume that humanity has a long-term future that we must protect. A tipping point could be around the corner. These dire prospects are not fiction. The recent FN report Making peace with nature spells it out this way:

“The well-being of today‘s youth and future generations depends on an urgent and clear break with current trends of environmental decline. The coming decade is crucial. Society needs to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared to 2010 levels and reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to limit warning to 1.5 °C as aspired to in the Paris Agreement, while at the same time conserving and restoring biodiversity and minimizing pollution and waste.”

Studies show that the majority of people in developed countries do consider global warming as a serious threat and do want to live more sustainably. At the same time there is a huge gap between this intention and the continued rise of household consumption and the consequent increase of emission levels. This gap is known by the acronym BIG (behavior impact gap). In order to quell our addiction to fossil fuels and hyper-consumption, major systemic changes will have to be implemented without delay across all sectors of society. A new ethic is also needed to meet these challenges; one which starts from the assumption that humanity, along with most species in our planet, are under the direct threat of extinction. The cornerstone of such an ethic would be a principle of urgency which preliminarily could read:

«Act without delay so that the effects of your actions secure the survival of the human species and the stability of the ecosystem»

The implementation of orderly and radical change is nothing new to organizational management and leadership. In fact, it lies at the heart of it. It’s time to see how change strategies from the organizational context can contribute to the huge systemic change that awaits us as a global community. In his book Leading change, John P Kotter from Harvard formulates a roadmap for change where the first step is to “Create a sense of urgency.” In order to achieve such urgency, he writes, you must:

·      eliminate the signs of excess
·      set higher standards of change performance
·      change internal measurement systems that focus on the wrong indexes
·      vastly increase the amount of external performance feedback
·      reward honest talk and people who are willing to confront problems
·       stop baseless happy talk from the top.

These checkpoints are an excellent start and can be applied to climate change transformation.

A metaphor which is often used in change management is “the burning platform”. It is used in organisational communication in situations where management wants to convey a sense of urgency and the need for radical change. The metaphor originated from a real, literal burning platform; the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea which exploded in 1988 causing a massive fire that claimed 167 lives. Trapped by the fire, workers faced a dire dilemma: 1) stay on the rig and hope for the best or 2) jump into the frigid ocean and risk death by hypothermia. The workers who stayed were killed while those who jumped were eventually rescued. Our warming planet is now also literally becoming a burning platform and we cannot stay put and hope for the best. But the huge difference between reality and this metaphor is that we cannot abandon the platform. There is no plan B. We must put out the fire at all costs and there is no time to waste.