Four Presumptions

Question 0

What is Relativism?

Answer 0

Situation ethics is relativistic: ‘The Situationist avoids words like “never” and “perfect” and “always” and “complete” as he avoids the plague, as he avoids “absolutely”’ (Fletcher, 1963, p44).
There are no fixed rules that must always be obeyed. However, nor is it a free for all! Fletcher maintains that all decisions must be relative to Christian love. Situation ethics ‘relativizes the absolute, it does not absolutize the relative’ (Fletcher, 1963, p45)

Question 1

What is Pragmatism?

Answer 1

• A practical or success posture. The proposed course of action must work, and must work towards the end, which is love.
• Any theory of ethics must be practical and work towards the end that is love.

Question 2

What is Positivism?

Answer 2

Religious knowledge or belief can only be approached by one of two ways:
- With natural positivism reason deduces faith from human experience or natural phenomena. Nature provides the evidence and reason grasps hold of it. With theological positivism faith statements are made and people act in a way that is reasonable in light of these statements. Reason isn’t the basis for faith, but it works within faith. Situation ethics depends on Christians freely choosing the faith that God is love, so giving first place to Christian love.

Question 3

What is Personalism?

Answer 3

• The ethic that demands that human beings come first and are not treated as ‘means’.
  The legalist puts the law first. The situationist puts people first. He asks what to do to help humans best: ‘There are no “values” in the sense of inherent goods - value is what happens to something when it happens to be useful to love working for the sake of persons’ (Fletcher, 1963, p50). Whereas some ethical theories place a lot of weight on rules, situationists are much more interested in people. In a sense, people are more sacred than rules.

Question 4

Conscience:

Answer 4

Fletcher rejects:

1) Intuition
2) A channel for divine guidance
3) The internalised values of the individuals culture
4) The part of reason that makes value judgements, because all of these treat conscience as a thing, which Fletcher believes is a mistake. Rather, for him conscience is a verb rather than a noun