Ethical maxims cannot direct action in highly differentiated social systems.

Evidence

If it is not, then the rationality of trust and distrust must be seen anew and in a different way as a problem. To that end one must first discover where the cardinal point of the problematic, the heart of the difficulty, lies. Obviously social reality is much too highly differentiated for it to be abstracted into a simple but instructive ethical maxim for decisions regarding trust. The problem of the orientation and directing of action must be solved by very many differentiated means. The sciences of human action can no longer allow themselves the illusion of laying down to the actor, if only in terms of vague principles, how to act correctly, in some direct, immediate, fashion, of telling him what he ought to do. Scientific-analytic and practically oriented perspectives must be more rigorously separated and consciously worked out separately from each other. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Luhmann’s claim that action-orientation must be solved by ‘many differentiated means’ rather than one ethical principle connects to Giddens’s distinction between facework commitments and faceless systemic commitments.