Chapter 8: The Political Ethics and the Attribution of Moral Responsibility to Public Organizations: Its Scope and its Limits

This article emphasized the singularity of political ethics, in general, and of the ethics of public organizations, in particular, in regard to personal ethics. For the first one, the real problem was not the aim to be achieved, but the means to be used, with the available resources and taking into account the real conditions. There are two aspects that have been emphasized over time: the appeal to the ends (in the classical period) and the invocation of individual responsibility (from modernity onward). The question to be elucidated here was whether in the period in which we are living, responsibility is no longer just an individual factor but it also has to become a responsibility of the public organization as a whole.