Das „Prinzip Antworten“: Eine postapokalyptische Theorie der Verantwortung für das Anthropozän

This article explores the requirements for a theory of responsibility in the Anthropocene. To this end, it begins by mapping three sociological strands of addressing responsibility in the debates on ecological crises. It shows that these approaches narrow responsibility to accountability and thereby tend to individualize and ethicize, moralize and generalize, or abstractify and depoliticize. To avoid these pitfalls, the paper discusses Hans Jonas’ ethics of responsibility and derives three challenges for a theory of responsibility from his position: The appropriate critique of anthropocentrism, the primacy of the “thing” in responsibility relations, and the question of apocalyptic underpinnings. The article examines these challenges from the perspective of a theory of alterity. It proposes an “imperative of response” that does not allow responsibility to dissolve into mere responsibilisation, but rather understands it as a process of responding to the world and with the world. Questioning one’s own identity and practices is of central importance in statements of this kind on the ethics of responsibility. Contrary to an apocalyptic assumption of responsibility out of fear, this perspective is based on ethical encounters in the post-apocalyptic situation of the Anthropocene. “Our” specific localizations in the world are at the heart of such ethical considerations.