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Paradigm Lost: On the Ethical Reflection of Morality : Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Hegel Prize 1988
Niklas Luhmann Thesis Eleven 1991 29: 82 DOI: 10.1177/072551369102900107 The online version of this article can be found at: http://the.sagepub.com/content/29/1/82.citation

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PARADIGM LOST: ON THE ETHICAL REFLECTION OF

MORALITY
Speech on the Occasion Hegel
of the Award of the Prize 1988

Niklas Luhmann

I.

When a sociologist conscious of his discipline concerns himself with theoretical matters which are normally treated by philosophers, it is inevitable that other aspects come to the fore. Whether this can lead to a fruitful dialogue between the disciplines can hardly be determined in the abstract. The honour which you accord me with the award of the Hegel Prize offers an opportunity to pursue this question by means of an example. Currently ethics is often referred to in the most diverse contexts. In the &dquo;New Westphalian&dquo; newspaper for instance I read on 6 July 1988: &dquo;While the producers of ethical products complain about state intervention, the sales of the producers of self-medications are slowly but constantly growing&dquo;. One might first ask: is ethics no longer a self-medication? And then the suspicion arises that a printing error could be involved. All the more remarkable, Sigmund Freud would have said, the ethics wave has reached the unconscious. One should not be too surprised. The ethics wave returns in the eighties of every century with astrological regularity-at least since the spread of printing. In the eighties of the 16th century there is the impressive Justus Lipsius and what later came to be called neostoicism. Some scholars date the beginnings of a theory of morality independent of theology from around 1580.~ Perhaps that is exaggerated. At any event we find a hundred years later after long discussions of the problem of sincere devotion a new theoretical formulation. The old schema virtue/vice becomes superseded: the one side of virtue is further split

82

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into true and false virtues. True virtue is left to the theologians as an empty concept which is elucidated by reference to false virtues.3 Since the theologians
cannot

theoretically solve the problem thereby posed but devote themselves to

warnings, lament and abuse, further development stagnates.4 In its place the concept of self-love is radicalized and going with this the difference between divine providence and secular (human) order is accentuated.5 This leads to a

conception of morality in which self-love is itself socialized and consequently the moral rules are no longer understood as specifications of the will of God, as is still the case with Locke,6 but as the crystallization of natural feelings. Social analysis emancipates itself from the theologians claim to be ahle to observe God and know his criteria, and thus from the associated self-doubt. In its place the conditions of social order start being explored in their own terms. Social development, however, soon disappointed the hopes thus grounded and compelled a new form of reflection on the grounding of moral judgments in rationality. In the eighties of the 18th century Kant takes the German separate path of transcendentalism. In the West Bentham inaugurates the efforts towards a utilitarian calculus of rationality. There appears at the same time from prison the inverted philosophy of the Marquis de sade.~ These three variants establish for the first time ethics as a theoretical reflection of morality. But what is new here? In terms of the history of philosophy one is naturally impressed by the enormous expenditure of intellectual effort and by a solicitude for theoretical construction hitherto unknown in these questions-as if as it were ethics had to secure itself as theory against doubts regarding morality. The sociologist is struck rather by the abandonment of the old unity of morality and manners. That was not yet the case with Harrington, or Montesquieu or the Scottish moral philosophers-to name only a few. The old ethics and the unity of morality and manners had always depended on social stratification and then finally in the 18th century on questions of property distrihution. The new approach of ethical reflection at the end of the 18th century breaks with this. And perhaps we can explain the excessive investment in theory-or if we include Sade: the excessive investment in scandal-which is now necessary simply in the following way: given the radical restructuring of the social system the reference to the social system society had to be abandoned and could not be replaced. The next wave arrives on time. After a long period of abstinence lectures on ethics fill the lecture lists of German universities at the beginning of the eighties of the 19th century. The neo-Kantians also take up these &dquo;practical&dquo; questions,9 not without provoking violent immune reactions a la Nietzsche. Nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, socialism and similar monsters are the questions of the day. And once again ethics is looked to for help. Naturally there are hardly any theoretical innovations working mentioning-unless of course you regard the revaluation of the concept of value, the distinction

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84

between being and validity, Simmels socio-psychological sensibilizing of transcendental aprioris, or Schelers opposition of a formal (Kantian) and a material ethics of value as a theoretical achievement. As was to be expected we find the same phenomenon in the same decade of the 20th century, admittedly weaker in execution and confined almost entirely to appeals and emergency brakes. Well-established themes of tradition return in the debates. Hans Jonas proclaims the principle of responsibility. And political commissions for the articulation of unrealizable interests and for the preparation of provisional regulations receive their mandate in the name of ethics. I leave it to the astrologers to explain why this comet ethics regularly appears towards the end of the century and fairly exactly in the ninth decade. My question is whether and how we can use it in the social situation at the end of the 20th century. And my answer will be: not by rewriting and reformulating the textual traditions but only through the cooperation of a sociological theory of society and ethical reflection.
BL

The first requirement is an empirically useful concept of morality. I understand by morality a special form of communication which carries with it indications of approval or disapproval. It is not a question of good or bad achievements in specific respects, e.g. as an astronaut, musician, researcher or football player, but of the whole person insofar as s/he is esteemed as a participant in communication. 10 Approval or disapproval is attributed typically according to particular conditions. Morality is the useable totality of such conditions at any time. It is not continuously applied, rather there is something slightly pathological about it. Only when things became dangerous is there occasion to refer implicitly or explicitly to the conditions according to which one approves or disapproves of others or the self. The sphere of morality is thereby empirically delimited and not defined for example as the sphere of application of certain norms or rules or values. This has the advantage of a higher exactness as compared to attempts to determine the specific nature of moral (as opposed, for instance, to legal) rules on the level of norms or values. Above all we gain the possibility of asking what happens if conditioning of whatever kind (whether legal, political, racial or of personal taste) is moralized, with the consequence, for instance, that X considers he cannot approve of Y and cannot invite him if he has a bust of Bismarck on his piano. If this may be called morality, if this concept deals only with the conditions of the market of approval, then we are free to use the concept ethics or ethical in a different way. Ethics is, we could now say, the description of morality. Up to the 18th century this description was organized as the description of a normative-rational special sphere of nature.ll Only in the last decades of the

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85

18th century does there emerge, as I previously mentioned, an ethics which seeks to make good the claim to be a theoretical reflection of morality. If this, sociologically speaking, is connected with the transformation of society from stratified to functional differentiation, then this version of the problem of the description of morality ought to be still binding for us today. We cannot go back behind it-however much one would like to be re-inspired by Aristotle. The question nevertheless remains: what exactly is to be reflected on; and in this question quite a lot can have changed since the ethics wave at the end of the 18th century.
m.
In both utilitarian and transcendental ethics it
was a

question of the rational

grounding of moral judgments. In this version ethics could understand itself as a moral undertaking, include itself in its own description of morality and, to put it simply, consider itself to be good. This presupposed a distancing from past ethical theories; further, at least implicitly, also a trust in the guarantees of peace and in the neutrality towards interests of the constitutional state. One could almost speak here of a political ethics in a new mode. Certainly there was an
element of distance towards the decisions arising from life forms and a choice of purposes was built in. Nevertheless it was still a question of the grounding of moral judgments and thus of a theory/practice relation to morality. If as a sociologist one observes the practice of moral communication doubts arise whether this is the problem with which ethics should concern itself. There are more than enough grounds and it is not difficult to put them stylistically into a consensual form. Rhetoric was already aware of this. If you abstract in the direction of really good grounds then you break off the possibility of drawing conclusions from such principles. This did not matter as long as stratification remained intact and socialization could fill the gap. But once that was no longer the case: how could one hope to replace socio-structural conditions by a theoretical construct, however sophisticated it might be? If we renounce this ambition, other possibilities of grasping moral communications in their social contexts come into view. Without striving for completeness or a systematic overview I would like to name some aspects which quickly make it apparent that a social theory of ethics leads to other problems, perhaps to other tasks: be

integrated

1. Above all it must be conceded that none of the functional systems can into the social system by means of morality. The functional

systems

owe their autonomy to their individual functions, but also to their individual binary coding, e.g. the distinction between true and untnie in the scientific system or the distinction between government and opposition in the democratic political system. In neither case can the two values of these codes

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86

be made congruent with the two values of the code of morality.&dquo; We do not want tlie government to be declared structurally good and the opposition structurally bad or worse evil. That would be the death sentence for democracy. The same result can be checked in the case of true/untrue, of good or bad marks, of financial payments or their omission, of love decisions for this and for no other partner. The functional codes must operate on a level of a higher amorality because they must make their two values available for all operations of the system. Moreover, the functional systems have had a consciousness of this uncoupling from morality since the beginning of their differentiation. This is evident from the literature on raison d6tat and on economic striving for profit as the condition for growth or in the semantics of passionate love and in the ideas about the function of law for freedom. Even the Last Judgment could not be conceived as a purely moral final reckoning; that would amount to a victory of the Devil over I~Iaria.l~ It is only consequent that hell could be described as the realm of perfect moral theatre in the 18th century.14 A society differentiated into functional systems must accordingly renounce moral integration. At the same time, however, it retains the communicative practice of speaking to human beings as whole persons through the conditioning of approval and disapproval. Thus moral inclusion as before but without the moral integration of the social system. What does ethics have to say to this? 2. Seen empirically moral communication is close to conflict and thus located close to violence. The expression of approval and disapproval leads to an over-engagement of the participants. Whoever communicates morally by making known the conditions under which he disapproves of others and of himself, invests and places at risk his self-approval. He can easily get into situations in which he must choose stronger means in order to meet challenges. The institution of the duel was meant to privatize this problem and it took centuries before the law could assert itself against this last gasp of the old upper class, as the Marquis Mirabeau called 1t15-a case of the victory of law over morality which is seldom acknowledged today. Taking this polymogenous origin and the corresponding effects of moralinto account: may we then advise ethics to consider morality morally good ity without question? Or are we not then confusing two concepts-that of the moral code of good and bad which symbolizes approval or disapproval, and that of the positive value &dquo;good&dquo; as an element of this code which cannot stand on its own? 3. This leads to a third problem of which tradition was well aware but which is hardly ever adequately taken into account today. Every binary code including that of morality leads to paradoxes when it is applied to itself. We cannot decide whether the distinction between good and bad is itself good or not rather bad. As everyone knows this problem cost mankind paradise and even before that the best of angels his damnation.16 There are thus theological

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87

this paradox. Equally rhetoric has always known that all virtues be presented as vices and all vices as virtues. As soon as consequences were taken into consideration and an ethics of responsibility began to emerge this paradox cast its shadow over motivation. If reprehensible action can have good consequences, as the 17th and 18th century economists assure us, and if inversely the best intentions can lead to bad results, as we can see from politics, then moral motivation blocks itself. Should ethics then counsel good or bad action? As we know ethics has abandoned this problem to economic or political theory, that is, to the market or to constitutional law, and spared itself a standpoint of its own. 4. My last example refers to the form in which the future is made visible and rationalized through decisions. This is dealt with today under the concept of risk. On the one hand an immense research effort is invested in the rationalizing of risks. But however great the effort of calculation final security is not to be attained; further reflection suggests that even undertaking this attempt is too risky.&dquo; On the other hand this calculus as well as the whole concept of risk applies only to the decision taker who thinks of the consequences of his own decision. His risk, however, involves dangers for others. Empirical investigations show that the individual can be more or less prepared for risk in relation to his own behaviour, but that he reacts extremely sensitively to dangers which result from the behaviour of others. Test this while driving. First investigations of AIDS show a corresponding pattern. And, of course, this applies to all the agitation which accumulates in the vicinity of nuclear power industries, chemical industries or gene tech-

analyses of
can

nology. Sociological research has hardly begun here. If it is the case, however, that perspectives on the future apply completely different criteria according to whether the problem is approached from the perspective of risk or of dangerwhether, that is to say, it is a question of the consequence of ones own decisions or of the decisions of others-then this new kind of difference, typical for modern society, blows traditional consensual expectations apart-whether they are formulated from the standpoint of reason or from the standpoint of ethical principles. On the one side morality is concentrated in the standpoint of those affected and it is socially generalized under the pressure of expectation as the need to show concern through the concerns of others: &dquo;How do you deal with it?&dquo; one individual asks another. This perspective can provide no criteria, however, for decisions involving risk. Those affected involve themselves blindly in the risk of avoiding risk. The difference between risk and danger thus indicates a problem of social communication which is already on the way to pushing the old problems of welfare distribution from the first place in political relevance. And again we observe in the middle of the ethics wave at the end of this

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88

century that there is not even an adequate thematization of this problem, let alone standpoints which are capable of convincing either as a solution or at
least of tension between the temporal and the social dimension for which no ethical regulation has as yet been found. If we want to take full advantage of the chances of rationality, dealing with our own future must be left open in a way which can lead to social burdens. The same problem appears equally in the sphere of scarcity, that is, in the economy. The more one person reinforces his provision for the future and thereby freezes means, the scarcer become goods for the others who want to or need to use them now. It is true that traditional societies were able to develop a morality in this respect, above all the morality of male self-assertion against rivals; 18 the transference, however, of this morality to social orders in cash-based economies never succeeded Scarcity and risk are exactly complementary time perspectives. In the one case the aim despite scarcity is as much future security as is possible in the present-at the expense of others. In the other case the aim is to make full use of the chances of rationality which lie in the acceptance of insecurity-and here too at the expense of others. In both cases calculations of rationality have been developed which are based on indifference to the social consequences. In both cases we have no ethics which could balance the tension between the temporal and social dimensions. This is the reason why problems of distribution have become political problems for our society; and it looks as though the same will happen with the problems of risk. There are thus many reasons for assuming that ethical reflection in the forms it found at the end of the 18th century can no longer function. Paradigm lost. And paradigm regained? A new interest is already apparent at the end of the 18th century; it takes the form, however, of an interest in language: Herder, then Humboldt. Today this current flows into a wide, branching delta and has even taken up aspects of the old rationality discussion, but only in terms of speech actions. It is not clear how a social theory, capable of adequately describing modern society, could be developed from this. It would require a reorientation from speech actions to communication and from language to social system in the theoretical design. All the same, the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy has led to important innovations. In our context one is above all relevant: that linguistic research must use language and thus reappears in its own subject matter. 20 This poses the question whether the same applies to morality. The researcher on ethics does not have to write an ethics which submits itself to a moral judgment. Research on ethics, however, cannot avoid being social communication. Io that extent at least the researcher reappears in his subject matter. The selfreferential circle can be extended this way, but it cannot be avoided. It is an indication that every grounding of statements on ethics and morality must take a self-referential form; but it still leaves the choice between the narrow circle of
as a regulation of the problem. Clearly we have here a relation

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89

its own moral quality, and the wide circle of a social which presupposes that all research operates as social communication theory, and that research on morality can take place only in society as the place where inter alia moral distinctions also occur.
an

ethics, which grounds

IV.

The concentration on questions of the moral grounding of moral judghas cost ethics its reference to social reality. Perhaps that is the reason it is in demand as a disinterested instance. But how can ethics judge the why affairs of a society which it does not know? Neither the transcendental nor the utilitarian paradigm, however renovated, can help us further here.2I Nevertheless it would be a mistake to overreact and declare the whole undertaking of ethics to be out of date or to attribute it, in Diderots formulation, to the tic of moralizing.22 Morally conditioned communication exists; ethics thus has the task of taking a position towards it. Another way out also appears unavailable: we cannot put a sociological theory of society in the place which only ethics can fill. That would not even have been acceptable for sociology. If ethics is to be and remain a theoretical reflection of morality (and it would make little sense to use the historically fixed expression differently), then it must bind itself to the code of morality, that is, submit itself to the binary schematism of good and bad; it must itself desire the good and not the bad, whereas for sociology it is a question of the truth or untruth of its statements. That sociologists can also be morally evaluated, like all human behaviour, does not alter this difference. The research programmes of sociology follow in their scientific practice not the moral code but the truth code. Only thus is a sociology of ethics, a historical-sociological analysis of ethical semantics possible. Only thus is it possible to arrive at a sociological critique of the social adequacy of ethical theories and to register that ethics has allowed itself to be determined by its own textual traditions longer than can be justified. Such an analysis is able in its own right to clarify structures of modern society and indicate the problems which arise in the course of the reproduction of this type of society. We can observe and describe the consequences of this social formation to a greater extent than in the time of Kant and the French Revolution; and this is the task which sociology must face up to at the end of this century. This leads, however, neither directly nor indirectly to a moral evaluation. Besides, society is not a possible object of moral evaluation; it would be absurd to regard those who hold modern society to be good as bad on that account or to approve those who critically reject society on that account. These are basically errors of thought which are easy to avoid since society as the comprehensive system of
ments

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90

all communications is neither good nor bad but the condition that something can be so characterized. Having stated this and having registered the corresponding reservations, we can still recognize that social theory can set limits to ethics. A morality can ignore, of course, such limits by proposing other conditions for approval and disapproval. It can, for instance, divide its world into destroyers and protectors of the environment or it can proceed from the principle that an alternative in question is better than what has previously been tried and recommended. There are many possibilities of moral communication and there is no lack of values and good grounds to which one can appeal. We are entitled to demand from an ethics, however, that it includes the structures of the social system in its reflections whenever it awards a seal of approval or even simply a certificate of clearance. If the assumption is correct that modern society can no longer be integrated means of morality and that it is no longer able to allot people their place by by means of morality, then ethics has to be in the position to limit the sphere of application of morality: do we have to put up day after day with politicians of the governing and opposition parties morally accusing each other, even though democracy, properly understood, does not demand that we choose between them according to moral standpoints? Do movements for regional autonomy have to be launched under a moral flag? Does a precautionary legal limitation of risky research or of technologies of production have to be proclaimed as a moral or even ethical commandment, when a year later with better information we shall prefer a stricter or less strict regulation? And above all: how are sanctions of approval or disapproval to be applied to the assumption of risks if there is no such thing as risk-free behaviour, and ethics, at least up to now, has been unable to develop consensual criteria? Given this situation, perhaps the most pressing task of ethics is to warn against morality. This is not an absolutely new desideratum. The 18th century invented humour for this purpose, a breakwater as it were for unexpected moral storrns. That, presupposes, however, too much discipline and too great a strata-specific socialization. Warning is equally a paradoxical activity with its goal of producing its own superfluity. Perhaps we could expect on these grounds that ethics, now that it has become a theoretical reflection of morality, make higher demands on itself. Whether an ethics, which takes account of the conditions of modern society and at the same time proclaims itself good, is at all possible, is not a question which the sociologist can finally judge. Doubt is called for here. Certainly the political need is not alone sufficient any more than the good will of all concerned. If, however, such endeavours are undertaken, they should at least meet certain minimal theoretical claims. At the very least we ought to be able to expect that ethics does not simply declare its solidarity with the good side of morality and forget the bad side, but that it thematizes morality

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d,,,5tinction, i.e. the distinction between good and bad or good and evil. For then the question is immediately raised, when is it good to apply this distinction and when not. Here the first requirernent is to be able to distinguish the distinction and the question is: from what? In the language of Gotthard
as a

Giinther, we would have to be able to agree about acceptance and reflection values in relation to distinctions.23 Or in the language of constructivist epistemology in systems theory: one must be able to observe with the help of which distinctions observers observe and what they can and cannot see with them. 24 If such an ethics were successful, it would be able to comprehend that a very specific distinction, i.e. between good and bad, can be applied universally, i.e. to all behaviour. And according to the sociologist Talcott Parsons precisely this combination of the pattern variables specific/universal is a feature of modern world orientation.2 With a theoretical approach based on difference the old problem of the relation between morality and freedom dissolves of itself. Tradition saw freedom as the precondition of moral judgment and only concerned itself with the nature of this precondition, reacting to the problem by a development from natural to transcendent-religious to transcendental references. That left only the possibility of grasping freedom as a quality of human beings. But how? Against this a sociological theory could assume that freedom is as it were a by-product of communication. For whenever something determinate is communicated one can say yes or no to it (and if not, not). Moral communication offers no exception here. Its commandments can also be rejected. Whereas in the normal course of communication there are routines for dealing with rejection and contradiction, morality tries to bind freedom-which after all it presupposes and itself reproduces-to the good side, that is, to cancel it. This is the reason why freedom has become a theme, especially as a problem for ethics. And here ethics is obliged to presuppose something of which it cannot approve and consequently it is obliged to enter into the most difficult constructions in order to dissolve this paradox. No progress without paradox, we could add. But perhaps this specific form is quite unnecessary. If freedom is introduced not as a precondition of morality but as a by-product of communication, then it is compatible with the structural determination of all self-referential systems. The old dispute between determinism and indeterminism disappears. Instead we are faced by the question, what is the meaning of accepting or rejecting the freedom which is anyway given in all communication, of morally recoding it, even if it only amounts to a distinction, whose values good/bad likewise produce in communication the freedom of acceptance or rejection-and now with very problematic, resulting burdens. All the same, all these initial steps towards theories which are able to distinguish distinctions have their grand model in Hegels logic. This logic

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92

offers the never what is identical

to process distinctions with reference to different in them. Nobody has succeeded in organizing it differently. In second-order cybernetics, in Gotthard Gianthers concept of polycontextuality and in the operative logic of George Spencer Browns Laws of Form we see the search for quite different approaches to a similar problem. In all these cases it is no longer a question of determining objects but of distinguishing distinctions. For a sociologist, however, the air is too rarified. His interest in a theory of modern society leads him to wish: if only it could be done.

surpassed attempt
or

Translated

by

David Roberts

Notes
1. The term "ethical 2.

products" is borrowed from English and is not familiar in Germany

(translators note).

Joseph Dedieu, "Les origines de la morale indépendente", Revue pratique dapologétique 8 (1909), pp. 401-423, 579-598. 3. For the theological version see for instance De la Volpilière, Le Caractère de la véritable et la fausse piété (Paris, 1685). The problem confronting theology, which it is incapable of solving, is evident purely quantitatively: four pages on véritable piété and, with an eye on the world, 466 pages on fausse piété. For a secular ethics with a similar division see the better known work of Jacques Esprit, La fausseté des
vertus humaines, 2 vols (Paris, 1677/1678). 4. In retrospect one can adduce an additional cause: the lack of a sufficiently abstract theory of binary coding. 5. It is sufficient to name here: Blaise Pascal, François de La Rochefoucauld, Pierre Nicole, Jacques Esprit, Balthasar Gracián and 1670-1690 as the period. 6. In particular here a polemic against Locke leading on to Scottish moral philosphy: John Dunn, "From Applied Theology to Social Analysis: The Break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment" in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment

(Cambridge, 1983), pp. 119-135. Probably first in the book directed against Hobbes by Richard Cumberland, De legibus natural disquisitio philosophica (London, 1672). Translated into English in 1727—a delay which indicates the need to wait for Shaftesbury. 8. The comparison with Kant was first proposed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, but on the questionable basis of a theory of the "bourgeois" movement. See the "Second Excursus Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" in Dialectic of Enlightenment. 9. On this point Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt, 1986), esp. pp. 426 ff. Further investigatins are underway in the Simmel Project of the Sociology Faculty, Bielefeld University. For a sociological cri7.

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93

10. 11.

12.

13.

see above all Georg Simmel, Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft: Kritik der ethischeu Grundbegriffe, vols (Berlin, 1892/1893). 2 See the corresponding distinction between esteem and approval in Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill., 1951), pp. 109, 130 ff. and passim. I must omit the detials here—i.e. the question whether it is meaningful to speak of a biblical "ethos"; further the switch from a description of habitus to a description, which presupposes in ethics approval of ones own behaviour and thus the possibility of guilt; and finally the reduction of ethics to rules of control over ones behaviour as distinct from control of the household (economics) and control of political society (politics)—a division to be found in the philosophia moralis of the schools. cf. here Charles E. Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge, 1987). See on this scene typical for the high and late Middle Ages Gérard Gros, "Le diable et son adversaire dans lAdvocacie Nostre Dame (poème des XIVe siecle)" in Le diable

tique

) moyen âge (Doctrines, problèmes moraux, représentations (Aix-en-Province, 1979), pp. 237-258. 14. Thus Jean-Frédéric Bernard, Eloge dEnfer: Ouvrage critique, historique et moral, 2
au

15.

16.

17. 18.

vols (The Hague, 1759). "The wars of the nobility of which duels are the last gasp" in Mirabeau, Lami des Hommes, ou Traité de la population (1756; quoted in the edition Paris, 1883, p. 19). Sufi mysticism derives this directly from a paradoxical (or so perceived) direction from God—a case of double bind! See Peter J. Awn, Satans Tragedy and Redemption : Iblis in Sufi Psychology (Leiden, 1983). Thus Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick, 1988). cf. George M. Foster, "Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good", American

Anthropologist 67 (1965),
causes

19. For the

Moral

see E.P. Thompson, "The corresponding of the English Crowd in the 18th Century", Past and Present 50 Economy (1971), pp. 76-136; James S. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasctnt: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976). Both works, however, schematize the contrast in a form which does not do full justice to ethical reflection (for instance

pp. 293-315. of peasant revoles etc.

20. Lars

of Adam Smith). Löfgren calls this the "autological predicament", "Toward System: From Computation to the Phenomenon of Language" in Marc E. Carvallo (ed.), Nature, Cognition and System I: Current Systems-Scientific Research on Natural and Cognitive

Systems (Dordrecht, 1988),

21. One could think here
ture
as a

of

Social Action

early work of Talcott Parsons, The Struc(New York, 1937), currently the subject of much discussion. It

pp. 129-155. sociologist of the

sociology who translate either the individual-utilitarian the transcendental-theoretical position into sociology, and it sets out to show that both attempts end up with one and the same sociological theory. This is still a matter of serious discussion fifty years later. cf. the instructive contribution of Hans Jonas, "The Antinomien des Neofunktionalismus—eine Auseinandersetzung
is oriented to the classics of
or

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94

mit Jeffrey Alexander", Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17 (1988), pp. 272-285. 22. Thus in Satire I: Sur les caractères et les mots de caractère quoted from Ouevres

Diderot,

(Paris, 1951), pp. 1217-1229.

23. cf. esp. "Das metaphysische Problem einer Formalisierung der transzendentaldialektischen Logik: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Logik Hegels", and "Cybernetic Ontology and Transfunctional Operations" in Gotthard Günther, Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1976), pp. 189-247 and 249-328. 24. See Heinz von Foerster, Observing Systems (Seaside, Cal., 1981). 25. For the frequently varied presentations cf. Talcott Parsons, Robert Bales and Edward Shils, Working Papers in the Theory of Action (Glencoe, Ill., 1953), esp. 63 ff. and Parsons, "Pattern Variables Revisited", American Sociological Review 25 (1960), pp. 467-483. One of the seldom attempts at a sociological theory of morality has its basis here, i.e. Jan J. Loubser, "The Contribution of Schools to Moral Development : A Working Paper in the Theory of Action", Interchange 1 (1970), pp. 99-177. Loubser seeks a way to morality via a modern/traditional combination of pattern variables, i.e. affective neutrality/quality and universalism/diffuseness. I try to avoid this in the text by distinguishing between the rather traditional structure of morality and the specifically modern demands on ethics.

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