**3.2 "Responsibility" as an alternative**

An appropriate way to move from a third-person ethics to a first-person ethics is a new reading of Hans Jonas' "ethics of responsibility" [15]. Jonas presents the personal responsibility and duty towards the children we have begotten, and who would perish without the care they need, as the clearest example we find in everyday morality of a non-reciprocal elementary responsibility and duty, which are spontaneously

recognized and practiced. Jonas locates the origin of the idea of responsibility not in the relationship between autonomous adults, but in this relationship with offspring in need of protection. For Jonas, parental care for children is the archetype of responsible action. This archetype does not need to be deduced from principles, but is implanted in all of us by nature.

Along with parental responsibility, Jonas posits politics as another fundamental form of responsibility. Political responsibility and parental responsibility, although different, have the most in common. Jonas posits five elements in which these responsibilities coincide: *totality, object, sentiment, continuity*, and *future*. This last common element, the future, shows that in both parental and political responsibility, tomorrow is included in today's concerns. In the context of total responsibility, every individual act that is concerned with the immediate also includes, as its object, the future existence of that child or that community. In this sense, personal responsibility cannot be determining but *enabling*; it must prepare the ground for the future and keep the greatest number of options open. It is a matter of keeping open the future of the subject for whom one is responsible, be it the future of the child, or of the individual who is part of the social community.
