1B: The Principles as a Means of Assessing Morality Flashcards
What are the four working principles?
pragmatism, relativism, positivism, personalism
What is pragmatism (and a quote from Fletcher to support it)?
- practical
- SE needs to work in practice (eg breaking a religious rule can only be justified if the living consequences are realistically going to occur)
- quote from Fletcher: pragmatism is a “practical or success” posture
What is relativism (and a quote from Fletcher to support it)?
- no absolute rules except for love
- any other laws can be flexible depending on the situation
- quote from Fletcher: “it relativises the absolute, it does not absolute the relative”
What is positivism (and a quote from Fletcher to support it)?
- the idea that we have faith first
- put faith in love and assume it is the answer
- quote from Fletcher: “the christian does not understand god in terms of love; he understands love in terms of god as seen in Christ”
What is personalism (and a quote from Fletcher to support it)?
- the person comes first
- law must serve the people
- quote from Fletcher: “Situation Ethics puts people at the center of concern, not things”
- people are more important than religious laws
What are the six fundamental principles?
- only agape is intrinsically good
- love is the ruling norm for Christians
- love and justice are the same
- love wills the good of others
- only the loving ends justify the means
- loves decisions are made situationally
What does ‘only agape is intrinsically good’ mean?
- it is an action
- Fletcher prefers to see love as an active principle, a “doing thing”
- only love is good in itself
- nothing else is just good
- other things are only good if they achieve long
What does ‘love is the ruling norm for Christians’ mean?
- the purpose of religious and moral laws have been misunderstood and become dictator to the person
- Jesus recognised the laws were there to serve the person
- Fletcher argued that love is the new covenant; it replaces old laws
- all Christians should use the rule of love
- love overrules religious morals rules
What does ‘love and justice are the same’ mean?
- justice is the same as fairness/equality. love is the same as justice
- “justice is Christian love using its head”
What does ‘love wills the good of others’ mean?
- Jesus urged everyone to “love your enemies”
- love is not the same as like
- “love your neighbour as yourself”: golden rule
- you can wish someone well even if you don’t like them/what they stand for
What does ‘only loving ends justify the means’ mean?
- Fletcher rejects the use that the end should not be used to justify the means as an ‘absurd abstraction’
- saw that any system which proposes that means are good and absolute as flawed
- any act can be morally good if it’s caring
- you can do any act if it has a loving outcome
- loving consequences can justify breaking a traditional religious rule, as long as the goal is not accidental)
What does ‘loves decisions are made situationally’ mean?
- Fletcher sees it as part of our heritage that we have sought for laws to become slaves to
- however this only leads to failure as the principles fail to unfold in practice
- how to be loving will change according to the situtation
- you cannot make rules about how to love
- you make the decision at the time, not in advance
Easy way to remember six fundamental principles
- only
- ruling
- ends
- others
- situation
- justice
(OREOS (J))
What is an example used by Fletcher to illustrate situation ethics in action?
Christian cloak and dagger
- a Christian man is approached by a young woman asking to help her solve a problem
- her government asked her to seduce and sleep with an enemy spy to blackmail him
- this went against her morals but if the plan was successful it could bring the war to an end
- were the thousands of lives that would be saved worth breaking her moral standards for?
