Without further explanation, I (Luhmann) will assume that academic ethics has failed. This conclusion seems obvious to me, and if an argument were needed, it would suffice to point out the frightening precision with which philosophers, especially of the analytic school, treat questions of Ethics. In any case, it can be assumed that the old (Aristotelian) ethics, namely the intellectual endeavor of the same name, had to be abandoned in the 17th or 18th century at the latest. This ethic assumed that the Good was self-motivating, i.e., that it was a necessary causal component of action. Errors in knowledge could, at best, corrupt action. And this is where this ethic saw its Problem.
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Luhmann N (2008): Die Moral der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, p. 175.