Ricerc@Sapienza

Maurizio Bonolis e Lorenzo Sabetta
Toward a Functional Alignment of Weber's “two ethics”

In the final pages of his Politik als Beruf, Max Weber introduced his now widely known and cited distinction between two types of ethics, i.e. the seemingly dichotomous relationship between the “ethics of conviction” (gesinnungsethik) and the “ethics of responsibility” (verantwortungsethik). This proposal has provoked widespread reaction, strong endorsement and quite favorable comments as well as a significant amount of criticism. The purpose of this article, however, is exactly to avoid such hypostatized interpretations of Weber’s work, trying instead to envision a sort of functional integration of the two kinds of ethics, making the case for a blurred and nuanced reading of this famous socio-political pair of concepts. Under this light, Weber’s distinction is best understood as a differentiation between analytical models and not ontological entities – actually, the two ethics seem to be inexorably intertwined with one another, in a constant play of juxtapositions and mutual cross-references.