The present work seeks to demonstrate Hans Jonas's ethical theory as a basis for a possible
orientation for dealing with environmental problems. At first, we make a historical
background to demonstrate how the technique became an ethical problem and caused several
environmental problems, which are directly related to politics, economics and alienation of
the population. Based on Annie Leonard's Story of Stuff (2011), we will demonstrate the
intentionality of certain actions related to the use of technology and also the discourse about
“sustainability” by large corporations globally, which have had negative consequences for
the planet. It is in this context that the need for a new ethics arises, capable of discussing the
new problems that traditional ethics did not foresaw. Therefore, in a second moment, we
conceptualize Hans Jonas’s ethics of responsibility, presented in his work The principle of
responsibility: an ethics for technological civilizations, which aims to impose limits on
human actions in order to ensure the survival not only of human life on Earth, but of all
species. We will highlight Jonas's criticism of traditional utopias, who affirmed that
technology would lead human beings to progress and the current utopias, which affirms that
through technology, all world’s problems could be solved, including environmental
problems. We will demonstrate how technology assumes an ethical significance in it’s The
Imperative of Responsibility, since it now occupies a central place in the subjective ends of
human life. Finally, we evaluate whether Jonas's ethics of responsibility can sustain all the
problems highlighted in this work and if it can lead us to a possible orientation for their
solution. We conclude that it is important and necessary that these debates are held both in
the political and popular spheres, because according to our research, it is from the moment
that the population becomes aware of the seriousness of the matter that it is possible to
generate a true knowledge of their condition and reality, making it easy to understand and
accept the need to change human habits.
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