Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Max Weber; Beispiel: Gerechtigkeit; '''Verantwortungsethik - Gesinnungsethik

Kurzinhalt: ... what justice in society requires cannot be decided, according to Weber, by any ethics ... insoluble conflict between what he calls the "ethics of responsibility" and the "ethics of intention."

Textausschnitt: 67a But we can no longer delay turning to Weber's attempts to prove his contention that the ultimate values are simply in conflict with one another. We shall have to limit ourselves to a discussion of two or three specimens of his proofs.1 The first one is the example that he used in order to illustrate the character of most issues of social policy. Social policy is concerned with justice; but what justice in society requires cannot be decided, according to Weber, by any ethics. Two opposed views are equally legitimate or defensible. According to the first view, one owes much to him who achieves or contributes much; according to the second view, one should demand much from him who can achieve or contribute much. If one adopts the first view, one would have to grant great opportunities to great talent. If one adopts the second view, one would have to prevent the talented individual from exploiting his superior opportunities. We shall not complain about the loose way in which Weber stated what he considered, rather strangely, an insuperable difficulty. We merely note that he did not think it necessary to indicate any reason by which the first view can be supported. The second view, however, seemed to require an explicit argument. According to Weber, one may argue, as Babeuf did, in the following way: the injustice of the unequal distribution of mental gifts and the gratifying feeling of prestige which attends the mere possession of superior gifts have to be compensated by social measures destined to prevent the talented individual from exploiting his great opportunities. Before one could say that this view is tenable, one would have to know whether it makes sense to say that nature committed an injustice by distributing her gifts unequally, whether it is a duty of society to remedy that injustice, and whether envy has a right to be heard. But even if one would grant that Babeuf's view, as stated by Weber, is as defensible as the first view, what would follow? That we have to make a blind choice? That we have to incite the adherents of the two opposed views to insist on their opinions with all the obstinacy that they can muster? If, as Weber contends, no solution is morally superior to the other, the reasonable consequence would be that the decision has to be transferred from the tribunal of ethics to that of convenience or expediency. Weber emphatically excluded considerations of expediency from the discussion of this issue. If demands are made in the name of justice, he declared, consideration of which solution would supply the best "incentives" is out of place. But is there no connection between justice and the good of society, and between the good of society and incentives to socially valuable activity? Precisely if Weber were right in asserting that the two opposite views are equally defensible, would social science as an objective science have to stigmatize as a crackpot any man who insisted that only one of the views is in accordance with justice.2 (Fs)

69a Our second example is Weber's alleged proof that there is an insoluble conflict between what he calls the "ethics of responsibility" and the "ethics of intention." According to the former, man's responsibility extends to the foreseeable consequences of his actions, whereas, according to the latter, man's responsibility is limited to the intrinsic rightness of his actions. Weber illustrated the ethics of intention by the example of syndicalism: the syndicalist is concerned not with the consequences or the success of his revolutionary activity but with his own integrity, with preserving in himself and awakening in others a certain moral attitude and nothing else. Even a conclusive proof that in a given situation his revolutionary activity would be destructive, for all the foreseeable future, of the very existence of revolutionary workers would not be a valid argument against a convinced syndicalist. Weber's convinced syndicalist is an ad hoc construction, as is shown by his remark that if the syndicalist is consistent, his kingdom is not of this world. In other words, if he were consistent, he would cease to be a syndicalist, i.e., a man who is concerned with the liberation of the working class in this world, and by means belonging to this world. The ethics of intention, which Weber imputed to syndicalism, is, in reality, an ethics alien to all this-worldly social or political movements. As he stated on another occasion, within the dimension of social action proper "the ethics of intention and the ethics of responsibility are not absolute opposites, but supplement each other: both united constitute the genuine human being." That ethics of intention that is incompatible with what Weber once called the ethics of a genuine human being is a certain interpretation of Christian ethics or, more generally expressed, a strictly otherworldly ethics. What Weber really meant when speaking of the insoluble conflict between the ethics of intention and the ethics of responsibility was, then, that the conflict between this-worldly ethics and otherworldly ethics is insoluble by human reason.1 (Fs)