The aim of the conference is to present and discuss contributions addressing the meaning and importance of the concept of "responsibility" in the context of economic theories and economic practices. Two main lines of interrogation will be followed.

The first line of interrogation concerns the implications of the concept of "responsibility" in terms of how it makes economic decisions ethically relevant. Arguably, it is only in the last 50 to 70 years that this concept has become a key-concept of applied business ethics. In these same years, “responsibility” rose to become a prominent concept in both public and academic debates, as a result of profound transformative processes in the social, ecological, and economic sphere. To the extent to which these processes put the future of humanity at stake, decisions needed to be taken in the perspective of expected scenarios, dangers to be avoided, and desired developments. In this context, the concept of "responsibility" gained increasing normative significance, and eventually became part of the orientational knowledge of our age, informing economic theories as well as economic practices.

The second line of interrogation concerns "responsibility" as a fundamental trait of the being of man, and how in that capacity it is constitutive for the economic sphere as such. In fact, neither economic theory nor economic practice is conceivable without a reference to the human being. In fact, the latter is characterized by the fact that he/she has as a first and unavoidable responsibility the task of grounding his/her own being. Hence, seeing that economic needs and conditions are such of the human being, economic responsibility, and thus the economic in general, must be located and defined in the element of that original responsibility. However, this element is nothing other than what the Greeks called "ethos"; the knowledge associated with it is ethics. Consequently, economic responsibility thus has its roots in ethics.

Introducing the ethical dimension into the question of the meaning and import of the concept of "responsibility" in the context of economics thus provides an opportunity to define this context in a more fundamental way; at the same time, it emphasizes the unavoidable ethical nature of economic responsibility itself. The aim of the conference is therefore to reframe the dialogue between ethics and economics by focusing on the significance and weight of responsibility as a key concept of both domains.