Description:
Max Weber's differentiation between ethics of responsibility and ethics of conscience plays a prominent role in political ethics until today, but this is no ethical differentiation. Additionally, based on a categorical mistake, this difference is false in meta-ethical respect. In normative respect, Weber's rationale of an ethics of responsibility is (even) circular. Employing two examples from (recent) theological ethics, the present essay sketches consequences of these conceptual weaknesses within the present debate on the refugee crisis.