SE Flashcards
How does Fletcher view the embryo research?
-Embryos are only a potential person – they do not possess the characteristics of personhood.
-He accepted Embryo Research, as he rejected the traditional belief that all humans were made in God’s image.
-Humans should be in control of their own reproduction.
Is fletchers SE opposed
-Fletcher’s situation ethics is not in principle opposed to any of these procedures.
-Humans are (in Fletcher’s view) makers, selectors and designers, so if adequate controls are in place then there is no reason why humans should not be redesigned to banish disease and to improve the species. In
Fletchers quote about cloning
… Control of a child’s sex by cloning, to avoid any one of 50 sex-linked genetic diseases, or to meet a family’s survival need, might be justifiable. Needs are moral stabilisers, not rights. If human rights conflict with needs, let needs prevail.”
Man machine hybrids
-Fletcher goes on to say that he would favour making and using man- machine hybrids, rather than genetically design people for dull, unrewarding, or dangerous roles, even though we cannot see clearly what the promises and dangers of such procedures are.
-He further argues:
… All this is going to destroy to some extent our traditional grounds for ethical beliefs.
Key elements of SE
-One of the key elements in Situation Ethics is love for persons.
-Fletcher is, in effect, directing the love concerned towards the persons who will benefit from embryo research, cloning and designer babies, rather than towards the embryo or the clone.
-For Fletcher, the good for actual persons’ is more important than the good for ‘potential persons. He is making agapeic calculations about the potential good this could bring.
Abortion quote fletcher
Agape love is the only absolute. Fletcher said in his book Situation Ethics,
“No unwanted child should ever be born”.
Romanian Jewish doctor
-Several years ago, congress passed a special bill giving citizenship to a Romanian Jewish doctor, a woman, who had aborted 3,000 Jewish women brought to the concentration camp.
-If pregnant, they were to be incinerated.
-Even accepting the view that the embryos were ‘human lives’ (which many of us do not), by ‘killing’ three thousand the doctor saved three thousand and prevented the murder of six thousand
-Is Fletcher right in this situation to make abortion a matter of agapeic calculation based on the number of lives saved?
Thalidomide
-A few years ago, a lady in Arizona learned that she might bear a defective baby because she had taken the drug thalidomide.
-Thalidomide was used to alleviate the symptoms of morning sickness during pregnancy.
-about 10,000 babies were born with absence or malformation of their limbs.
-many other side-effects of the drug, including blindness, deafness and heart problems.
-She asked the court to support her doctor and his hospital in terminating the pregnancy, but the law prohibited non-medically indicated abortions, so the judge refused.
-Her husband took her to Sweden, and she was aborted there. Fletcher argues that this decision was brave, loving and right. As things turned out, the lady was right in her belief that the embryo would be damaged.
1962 institution case
-In Situation Ethics Fletcher refers to a case in 1962 where an unmarried girl, ill with radical schizophrenic psychosis, was raped by another patient in a state mental hospital.
-The girl’s father demanded an abortion to be performed at once.
-The hospital authorities refused, on the grounds that the criminal law prohibited all abortion, except when the mother’s life is at stake. Fletcher asks:
‘May we rightly… terminate this pregnancy, begun in an act of force and violence by a mentally unbalanced rapist upon a frightened, mentally sick girl?’
What to think about
-in terms of Fletcher’s principles of pragmatism, relativism, positivism and personalism, do you agree that abortion is the most loving response to this situation?
-In contrast to Natural Moral Law, Fletcher’s agapeic calculus is always situational, puts people before rules and assesses the foreseeable consequences. Do these factors mean that situation ethics is always in the best position to make judgements about abortion?
PAS
-With cases of physician assisted suicide (PAS), in countries where this is legal, a doctor provides the patient with the means to commit suicide, and the drugs are usually self-administered so that the act is seen to be the patient’s own decisio
Fletcher - euthanasia
-Fletcher asks what purposes are sufficient to justify the loss of one’s life, and suggests that relief from demoralising pain where there is no further possibility of serving others, is sufficient.
-We should believe in the sacredness of personality, but not in mere existence in terms of the length of time that we live.
Fletcher euthanasia quote
To prolong life uselessly, while the personal qualities of freedom, knowledge, self-possession and control, and responsibility are sacrificed is to attack the moral status of a person.” (Fletcher: Situation Ethics)
Capital punishment
-Situation ethics has no set view on capital punishment.
-Its response to the crime carried out by Angel Diaz and his friends would, like any other situation involving the possibility of capital punishment, be assessed situationally in terms of how an average individual would interpret the demands of love.
Angel Diaz - SE
-In the case of Angel Diaz, it would be false simply to claim that somebody who follows Situation Ethics would automatically follow one particular course of action.
-Some situationists might disagree as to whether or not Jesus was a pacifist, which would then affect their view of the appropriateness of capital punishment.
