The Ethics of Self-Limitation

Self-limitation is not modesty, timidity, or the caution of the person who lacks the courage to build. It is the discipline of the person who possesses every capacity to build and chooses, on moral grounds, not to exercise that capacity fully — because the consequences of full exercise are incompatible with the continuation of genuinely human life. The distinction is essential. The Luddite who smashes the loom lacks the capacity to build what the loom builds; the Luddite's refusal is born of impotence, however justified the grievance. The builder who chooses not to deploy a capability she fully possesses and fully understands — who leaves power on the table because the power's consequences are insufficiently understood or insufficiently governable — exercises a fundamentally different kind of moral agency. The first is refusal from weakness. The second is restraint from strength. Jonas believed this second kind of restraint was the most difficult moral achievement available to a technological civilization, and the one on