Situation Ethics Flashcards
Joseph Fletcher
argued that love was what morality should serve. He thought that when making a moral decision, you should be prepared to set aside rules if it seemed that love would be better served by doing so.
The concept of agape
The ‘love’ Fletcher is referring to is agape - the unconditional love that all Christians should have for one another.
He argued that in the New Testament, Jesus taught his message of love not only through his teachings to his disciples but also through his actions.
’ The situationist follows a moral law or violates it according to love’s need’
6 propositions
Fletcher gives six propositions to his theory
1st proposition
Love is the only thing that is intrinsically good. Because of this, actions are good/evil depending on how far they promote the most loving outcome.
2nd proposition
Love is the ruling norm in ethical decision making and replaces all laws.
3rd proposition
Love and justice are the same things - justice is love that is distributed.
In Fletcher’s view, most moral problems are just tension between “justice” and “love”. To Fletcher, acting justly is acting in the name of love.
4th proposition
Love wills the neighbour’s good regardless of whether the neighbour is liked or not.
5th proposition
Love is the goal or end of the act and that justifies any means to achieve that goal.
The end goal must be the most loving outcome. So anything done to try and achieve that end goal is justified.
6th proposition
Love decides on each situation as it arises without a set of laws to guide it.
There are no governing rules. In each context, the right action will be the one that brings the most loving outcome.
Fletcher proposed four working principles of his situationism.
Pragmatism
It is based on experience rather than on theory.
Relativism
it is based on making the absolute laws of Christian ethics relative.
Positivism
It begins with belief in the reality and importance of love.
Personalism
Persons are at the centre of situation ethics - not laws or anything else.
Conscience
Conscience is a verb rather than a noun. It is something you do when you make decisions, as Fletcher puts it, ‘creatively.’
Situation ethics is useful
is flexible because it allows people to use their free will to decide what the most loving action is. There is no objective right or wrong answer in any situation.
It is not rigid and devoid of any emotion (which distinguishes humans from other mammals) allowing people to show more empathy when appropriate.
It is based on one simple rule: namely love. For this reason, it is relative, which means that we are not restricted by moral absolutes such as ‘do not kill’.
Sacrificial Adultery (Mrs Bergmeir).
During the second world war, a married German woman with three children was captured by a soviet patrol and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Ukraine she learned after the war that her family were trying to stay together and find her. According to the rules, she’s only be released if she was pregnant. After considering her options, she asks a Volga German camp guard to impregnate her. She then later on became reunited with her family.
response to the example of the Sacrificial Adultery be if applied to situation ethics?
It was the right thing to do.
Selfless love Personalism: people are more important that some circumstances that require sin, therefore, a good consequence justifies the bad action.
Situation ethics is not useful
William Barclay believed humans can’t be trusted to do the right thing and it would only work ‘if all men were angels’.
This is supported by Augustine’s interpretation of humanity - which is fallen.
Augustine believed that humans are inclined to sin and are selfish. For this reason, we cannot be trusted to make the correct ethical choices.
In 1952 Pope Pius XII called Situationism, ‘an individualistic and subjective’ theory which will ‘justify decisions in opposition to the natural law’.
Subjective & individualistic
There are no boundaries in situation ethics because it does not abide by any form of legal system.
Christian love can become individualistic (and potentially selfish). The individual has too much control or influence and people tend to be selfish.
Augustine and Thomas Hobbes (pictured) both believed that it is in our human nature to be instinctively selfish.
Subjectivity can never be the standard for human conduct: “all the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes” (Proverbs 16:2).
Not subjective & individualistic
Situation ethics is based on the rule of love. So in some sense, is not individualistic because one must always do the most loving thing, even if they would prefer not to or it would endanger them or their families.
Jesus applied situation ethics and risked death by healing someone on the Sabbath. He did this on the basis of love.
There are many things the vast majority of society would agree on when it comes to love.
