ethic@ Florianópolis v.2 n.2 p.120-136 Dez.2003 The Contrabassist and the CEO: Moral Judgment and Collective Identity Alessandro Pinzani (Tübingen/Florence) alepinzani@hotmail.com Abstract: How much is a moral judgment on a single act influenced by circumstances which have little to do with the nature of the act itself? How much have certain moral judgments to do with the common history and shared experience of a certain group of individuals? Using two cases taken from life (a German musician and a German CEO behaving both in a morally wrong way but with very different consequences from the point of view of moral judgement and with very different reactions from the German public), the article tries to give an answer to these questions, touching issues like: guilt, moral responsibility, collective responsibility, and collective identity. Some years ago, while I was living in Germany, an incident occurred that caused a big sensation throughout German society. During a tour in Israel of the world- famous Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, one of its musicians signed a credit card bill at the bar of the hotel where they were staying, using the name “Adolf Hitler”. The 54-year-old man was not considered by anyone as having particularly rightist leanings; on the contrary: he was a registered member of the Socialist Democratic Party in Germany – and was, as confirmed by all those present, including the waiters, nicely drunk. However, these circumstances did not prevent him from being fired immediately from the orchestra for having allegedly damaged its image and – what is more interesting for us – receiving unanimous condemnation from almost all of the German public: politicians, commentators, journalists and ordinary citizens (at least the ones whose opinions were heard in interviews or in letters to the editors in the country’s main newspapers). Not one person ever mentioned the possibility that it could have been just a very stupid and distasteful act of bravado or the rash act of a drunken man. Shortly after this episode, there was another occasion in which a drunken German was the main figure. The Italian police did detain for a short time the newly designated CEO of a major German corporation, who was sitting with a colleague and a secretary on the steps of the celebrated staircase of Piazza di Spagna in Rome, drinking Chianti (probably an expensive one), completely drunk. The policewoman had asked the