This paper tries to show that, in our criticism of society today, it is not enough to presuppose an idea of utopia but also to integrate an idea of dystopia into our reflections. The first two parts consider two documents that analyze the socio- environmental crisis of our world today: (1) the fifth assessment report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2014, and (2) the Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis on Care of Our Common Home, which argues that there are not two different crises but one single socio-environmental crisis that threatens all life on our planet, and calls for a new ethics. The next two parts confront two philosophers, Ernst Bloch and Hans Jonas. Bloch has provided a strong defense of the utopian thinking but in a Marxist context, whereas Jonas has rejected all utopian thinking and replaced it with the idea of responsibility for the present world. Both thinkers need a more fundamental idea of hope.

The 21st International Climate Conference (COP21) demonstrated that a global consensus is possible among 195 countries. For this reason, we could say that climate change is a chance (perhaps the last) for humanity.It is indeed the only area where worldly governance now seems possible, although it also is needed to fight, for example, against global terrorism or to regulate international migration. - Through the ongoing experience concerning climate policy, a triple dynamic, which would establish a genuine global governance, can be drawn: recognizing interdependencies, regulating contradictions, making actors aware of their responsibilities. It is therefore urgent we learn the lessons of the COP 21.

This paper demonstrates the importance of the concept of responsibility as the foundation of an ethics of the environment, in particular in the fields of politics and economics in the modem civilization marked by globalization and technological progress. We can indeed observe a moralization of responsibility going beyond a strict legal definition in the development of an ethics of the environment. Accordingly, the concept of responsibility for the environment and for sustainability is the key notion of international development in order to understand the ethical duty of a modem technological civilization.

Environmental ethic depends on technological ethics. We must therefore think of the technique with all its virtualities and not merely as an instrument. Heidegger’s approach to technique avoids this reduction. Brought closer to the language it questions its essence. With modem technology that essence does not advance production but provocation, by which nature is ordered to deliver an energy that can be extracted for maximum utilization and lower costs. The way of producing poetry remains open yet. This article reads again this difficult text, indicates some limitations, and tries to take the better of its wealth for contemporary debate crossing environmental and technological ethics.

This paper deals with the relationships between ethics and the environment in Rousseau’s thought. The concept of environment is understood in its various dimensions. What is at stake is the natural, as well as the social and political, environment of human beings. The notion of ethics is also understood in a broad sense. We do not set ethics, understood as the search for happiness (or for the good life) against morality, understood as the fulfillment of duty. However, we take up two main questions. The first question concerns the influence of the environment, both natural and social, upon the ethical development of human beings. The second question concerns the responsibility of human beings towards nature. We examine what Rousseau teaches us regarding these two questions. Finally, we envisage liberty from the point of view of the relationships between nature and the political order. Human liberty is a matter of rights. It depends upon the republican nature of the state. However, liberty is also a sentiment that is intimately related to the living experience of nature. In order to understand what Rousseau means by liberty, we must grasp this intimate relationship between nature and politics.

The aim of this paper is to show the anthropological resources of Ricceur’s philosophy of the act, in order to elaborate a living articulation of ethics and politics that avoids the deadlock which represents the idea of a complete divorce between moral idealism and political realism. In this second part, it defends the thesis that the reconquest of an “ethical-political teleology” is only possible to the extent that, in Ricceur, the reappropriation of the “ethical originary affirmation” takes a radically critical form. Then it tries to show how this critical approach is likely to lead to a release of the mediating power of social imaginary, which always complements and precedes our acts.