[German Version]

The term ethics of conviction refers to a form of ethos or an ethical theory and occurs as such in M. Weber's theory of the evolution of ethical positions that leads from the legal ethics of scholastic natural law to the Reformation's ethics of conviction and thence to the Enlightenment's ethics of responsibility. In a certain tension with this usage, the term serves – also since Weber – to characterize the approach and fundamental problem of the moral philosophy of I. Kant, according to which the moral disposition (namely, acting purely out of duty) attends s…