Abstract

A systematic foundation of an autonomous ethical sphere is not available in Max Weber, but in The Meaning of ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics, in The Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions and in Politics as a Vocation, we may find a reliable discussion on this topic, in spite of his theory of polytheism and conflictual relations among value spheres. This essay wants to demonstrate that Christian brotherhood ethic of Sermon on the Mount and Kantian imperative of practical reason are the basic principles for the Weberian ethic of conviction as a goal-oriented ethic, and also for Weber’s idea of ethics. On the contrary, there is ambivalence in Weberian ethic of responsibility, whose approach to means-ends relations is for him typical of politics, but not of ethics