Modern Technology, Preventive Ethics, and the Human Condition:

INTRODUCTION AND THE METAPHOR OF TITHONES

New machines are forcing us to change our concepts. The ventilator for example, by pumping air to the lungs, can prolong life of the comatos people and delay death regardless of consciousness, but the question here is not about “life” indeed it is about the “quality” of life. Our state with technology is not that far from the story of Tithonus in Greek mythology:

Tithonus a human, was considered very attractive to the point that the daughter of Zeus, a goddess, fell in love with him. Tithonus lived on earth, but she lived in the heavens with the rest of the goddesses. He loved to always be near her, in order to keep him closer she asked her father if he could give him some of the god’s attributes such as eternity so he can live with them in the heavens. Then Zeus granted Tithonus eternity and the daughter was able to raise him to heaven and they both happily lived there. However, the daughter started to notice that Tithonus started aging. She realized that she had made a mistake and had forgotten to ask her father to not only give him eternity but to also give him youth. He grew old, continuously without dying and unable to do much and was left alone. He started to shout, make noise to get attention, he became noisy and intolerable, and finally the daughter asked her father to lock him in a cage, and Zeus did. After that Tithonus was transformed into a grasshopper.

Ethics deals with the question: “how we ought to live?” it deals with the actions of human beings. We traditionally have standards and codes for the moral actions of people; these are usually found in monotheistic religions also in philosophy. Since the nature of human actions has changed, due to modern technology, therefore we should call for a change in the traditional ethics as Hans Jonas rightly observed.1 The human actions has been empowered by technology and changed due to the new inventions to the point that machines became models for understanding human beings. Worse than that “man has been added to the objects of technology.”2