[...] From all of this it follows that...

[...] From all of this it follows that, while today there is as little a recipe for statecraft as there ever was, the time spans of responsibility as well as of informed planning have widened unprecedentedly’.[^73] Jonas does not believe for a minute that his ethics alone can bring about complete good, but, aware of his limits, he merely seeks to protects the conditions of freedom, of happiness and the future assuming of responsibilities, in the same way as prudence, rather than squarely producing practical truth, protects and cultivates the conditions for its appearance, in the same way that Peirce recommends as the ultimate maxim of reason, as a more universal and peremptory norm of the method, to look after the conditions of free research and not to block the way of inquiry.

The ethics of responsibility is then far from any utopian idea: ‘But no less should one distrust those who pretend to know about a future destination of their own or every society, about a goal of history, for which all of the past was but a preparation and the present is only a transitional stage.

‘[^74] ‘But in believing to know the direction and the goal, Marxism is still heir to the Kantian regulative idea, which is stripped of its infinitude and wholly transposed into the finite [...] We post-Marxists (a word still sounding audacious[^75] and certainly mistaken to many) must see things differently.’[^76] In short, the rational attitude consists above all in a protection and stimulus of creative capacities which will allow future adjustment to conditions that we cannot foresee: ‘[...] the spontaneity or freedom of the life in question – the greatest of all unknowns, which yet must be included in the total responsibility.

[...] It can be so in one way only: respecting this transcendent horizon, the intent of the responsibility must be not so much to determine as to enable, that is, to prepare and keep the capacity for itself in those to come intact, never foreclosing the future exercise of responsibility by them.

The object’s self-owned futurity is the truest futural aspect of the responsibility, [...] In the light of such self-transcending width, it becomes apparent that responsibility as such is nothing else but the moral complement to the ontological constitution our temporality .’[^77] ‘We omit here what lies beyond these duties of guarding and preserving: obligations to ends which none other than he first creates as it were out of nothing.