Abstract
The essay focuses on the meaning and scope of the concept of responsibility that has taken shape within a certain kind of ethical reflection, which the essay itself calls “responsive”. A “responsive ethics” is one that emerges as a response to changes in factual or contingent (economic, political, social) circumstances , which change the scope – including the potential damage – of human action, thus causing traditional ethical approaches to become obsolete or at least insufficient . For a responsive ethics, not the motivation of an action and the perfection of things are decisive, but exclusively the outcome of that action in terms of collectively desired effects. The essay argues that the notion of responsibility that characterizes a responsive ethics, while generating imperatives that can possibly secure the continuance of universal existence, and of a responsible humanity within it, does however not address, but rather covers, a different menace that is, in a sense, even more far-reaching than that of the extinction of all life on earth, as well as the promise of a new perfection that this different menace implies.