In the middle of “Politics as a Vocation” Max Weber turns his attention to the question of how ethics can inflect politics without becoming moralizing. He begins by noting how “Ethics can sometimes make its appearance in what is morally (sittlich) a highly unfortunate role.” By way of illustration he presents “the case of a man whose affections have turned away from one woman to another”:

This unchivalrous man, whom we perhaps all too easily recognize, desires to balance the moral books. He takes a bookkeeping approach to his responsibility and wants to make sure that vis-à-vis his ex-love he is not in a situation of owing or indebtedness. Her suffering must be justified by her own guilt. The books must be balanced and he must be debt-free before he begins a new joint venture. Here I elaborate beyond Weber's explicit text, but I stay true to what he is describing. I am drawing out the approach to responsibility that underlies the fickle lover's justifications and which, as I will show later, Weber critiques over the course of “Politics as a Vocation.” From this intimate scenario, Weber moves on to more overtly political examples. With regard to parties to a past war, he argues that insofar as they immerse themselves in the allocation of “past guilt (Schuld)” for the start of the war, they distract themselves from their “responsibility for the future” and also efface the blunt reality of the “objective (sachlichen) interests that were at stake” in the war. Writing in the aftermath of Germany's defeat in World War I, he decries victors who, after a war, claim that they won because they were “in the right.”