Hans Jonas's biologization of the moral being

Responsibility, as an ethical principle, proposed by Hans Jonas, represents one of the moral considerations which are essential for a technological civilization. As Jonas expands the moral universe in order to encompass extra-human nature and resorts to biology as a basis for the principle of responsibility, it has been quite easy to associate him to naturalistic morality. The thesis presented in this paper is that the aforementioned author, despite resorting to biology, does not defend a naturalistic morality, distancing himself from what has become known as the naturalistic fallacy. The "novelty" of Jonas's philosophy lies in the idea that duty is based on an ontological way, and that is why responsibility becomes an ontological duty and not a moral one: man has to be responsible because he is ontologically responsible. It is not a matter of extracting ethics from ontology, since ethics is contained in the paramount fact of life, considering that "the duty to be" is part of Being itself; thus, Jonas uses the ontology present in nature as a basis for ethics. As it is ontological and not rational, freedom is not a human privilege. Reinserted in nature, man reaffirms himself in a kind of ontobiology and Jonas's proposal is classified as a biologization of the moral being.