Relativismo etico e collisione dei valori

ETHICAL RELATIVISM AND COLLISION OF VALUES. The “ethical relativism”, in the same way as relativism in general, is made object of a real “crusade” nowadays. Its defenders, against this latter, employ a series of arguments which – although they are partly shareable – risk to hide the broader importance of the problem, which this concept defines in a way for certain aspects equivocal and not appropriate. This problem lies in the fact that the long and complex process which marks the fading of the important religious conception of the “world” as a “cosmos” – i.e., as a “meaningful”, ordered totality which man’s conduct can and must be unanimously oriented to – shifts decidedly the focus of the human action on the individual consciousness and its choices, but at the same time devolves upon it – and this is the point – a whole world of collisions and antitheses. Among these, the individual consciousness is called to decide and to take a position at every moment and in different degrees. The essay looks into this issue retracing, in this perspective, the sharp werttheoretisch considerations contained in the final version of Max Weber’s Der Sinn der “Wertfreiheit” der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften (1917).