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This study aims to review Luhmann's theory of moral communication while focusing on symmetry conditions, in light of Armin Nassehi's criticism, to clarify issues regarding this concept. Then, Luhmann's symmetry condition is reconstructed as a concept containing double meaning via a case study in Japan. Correspondingly, interesting situations and characteristics of moral communication, such as “inflation,” the “polemogene” and ubiquity of moral communication, are interpreted more consistently.

In today's society, moral communication may spiral out of control and even be fatal. By examining Niklas Luhmann's theory, in this paper, the author elaborates on why and how this mechanism occurs.

The author emphasizes that the suspicion pertaining to the asymmetry of communication is stressed in the case of anonymity. When an individual communicates using a moral code, it is impossible to discern whether the implications of self-bindingness are undermined or not through observations or consequences of communication and can only be questioned or confirmed through communication. However, criticizing the outburst of the masses and exchanging blame by isolating only one aspect of such a phenomenon will only be superficial.

This study reveals that the very condition that makes moral communication possible enables people to communicate respectfully or contemptuously with others without any special qualification. Such an analysis can serve as a theoretical underpinning for the analysis of today's phenomena.

Before starting research in the field of ethics, a few common assumptions need to be cleared up. The first is so common that it needs very little space at all: Ethics is a scientific discipline. This accurately describes its location and the problems it covers in a modern, functionally differentiated society. As a branch of philosophy and a normative science, its frame of reference is initially located in a world of possible competing reasons. The basic problem is that of trying to explain good reasons – and the horizon is the sayability of ethical sentences which, even when they reflect an ethical practice, open up a scientific horizon. Ethics is therefore a science – and like every science it can only solve scientific problems (see Luhmann, 2002, pp. 79–93). Practical problems are also the scientific problems of ethics – and that is not a deficiency, but rather a consequence of the basic structures of modern society. A modern society cut loose from political, economic, legal, scientific, artistic, educational and medical problems, on the one hand, allows these disconnected spheres to relate radically to each other, while on the other hand making them logically incompatible. A modern society could not exist any other way (see Luhmann, 1998, pp. 1–21; Nassehi, 2005a). This should first be understood before venturing into research on ethics.

The four papers in this section offer a sociology of ‘bioethics at work’, the ways that bioethics as a discipline or approach comes into medical care. One of the concerns we, as editors of this volume, bring to the issue is the appropriateness of the export of American ‘bioethics’ both in its form and its content. It is not only the creation of ‘ethics committees’, but also the rewriting of practice in accord with American principles that we find troubling. One of the nurses in Kohlen's study talks about ‘learning the language of bioethics’. Brought into committee rooms to ‘do ethics’ requires of practitioners a certain way of defining both biomedical practice and ethics, reflected in the ‘language’ one has to learn.

The present article pertains to recent advances in social systems theoretical analyses of moral communication.

An introduction to basic concepts and requirements for systems-theoretical approaches to morality and communication is provided, as is an introduction to 14 contributions to a pertinent special issue of Kybernetes.

The review of these 14 cases suggests that social systems theory enables researchers to study moral communication without necessarily performing it.

This article reappraises and challenges Niklas Luhmann's occasionally distanced attitude to morality, which has occasionally been understood as a form of moral communication itself.