Situation Ethics

• Justice: ordinarily refers to notions of fair distribution of benefits for all. Fletcher specifically sees justice as a king of tough love, love applied to the world
• Pragmatism: acting, in moral situations, in a way that is practical, rather than purely ideologically
• Relativism: rejection of absolute moral standards, such as laws or rights, good and bad are relative to an individual or a community or in Fletchers case to love
• Positivism: proposes something as true or good without demonstrating it, Fletcher posits love as good
• Personalism: ethics centred on people rather than laws and objects
• Conscience: faculty within us, process of moral reasoning, insights from God or it may be understood in psychological terms. Fletcher described it as function rather than a faculty
• Teleological: moral goodness is determined by the end or result
• Legalistic ethics: law based moral decision making
• Antinomian ethics: do not recognise the role of law in morality
• Situational Ethics: another term for situation ethics, ethics focused on the situation rather than fixed rules
• Agape Love: unconditional love, the only ethical norm
• Extrinsically Good: good defined with reference to the end rather than good in and of itself. Fletcher said that only love was intrinsically good
• Teleological Christian Ethics:

  • Has roots within the New Testament with references to Jesus
  • Setting aside the law or breaking established rules
  • The Catholic Church was against this
  • Many Protestant Churches were against this too
• Joseph Fletcher and Situation Ethics:

  • written in his book -> Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966)
  • arose from his objection of moral absolutism
  • 1960s => defined by radical social movements which were aimed at changing traditional ways of life
  • Fletcher is a classic example of adaptation
  • Fletcher based situation ethics on the general Christian norm of brotherly love, which is expressed in different ways in different situations
  • Fletcher believed that an absolute position pays no attention to the complexity of each situation, resulting in inhumane ways of dealing with the problem
• Legalistic Ethics and Fletcher:

  • set of predefined laws
  • people are required to follow these laws
  • Pharisaic Judaism had a law based approach to life
  • Christianity also shows this -> based on Church commandments and Aquinas believed this
  • Fletcher though this led to a legalistic mindset -> must be continually added to
  • Fletcher rejected these legalistic approaches
• Antinomian Ethics and Fletcher:

  • no rules or laws to follow at all
  • moral decision making follows no pattern or set belief
  • Fletcher said => it is literally unprincipled, purely ad hoc and casual. They follow no forecastable course from on situation to another. They are exactly anarchic
• Situational Ethics and Fletcher:

  • prepared to set aside rules in the situation if love seems better served by doing so
  • it is according to love
  • takes the situation into account, give people clear guidance and avoids moral chaos
  • it does this by claiming that love is the one single absolute principle which should be applied to all situations.
• Agape Love:

  • unconditional and Godly love
  • appears in the New Testament 106 times
  • love is self sacrificing not self satisfying
  • ultimate duty
  • Fletcher interprets that as suggesting all other religious rules, principles and commandments such as the 10 commandments
• The Teaching of Jesus and Agape Love:

  • "the clear teaching of our Lord" -> taken to mean that Jesus laid down certain precepts which were universally binding
  • not intended to be understood legalistically
  • "Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love eachother"
  • "Love the Lord your God and with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength"
  • love utterly unconditional love admits of no accommodations -> define in advance situations
• St Paul:

  • "We love because he first loved us"
  • "Owe no one anything, except to love one another" -> Romans
  • "Faith working through love" -> Galatians
  • "Speaking the truth in love" -> Ephesians
• Woman Caught in Adultery:

  • a woman was caught cheating and her accusers asked Jesus what they should do, to which he responded -> "Those without sin cast the first stone"
  • no one casted the first stone, Jesus told her not to sin again
  • shows that everyone makes mistakes, and the most loving thing to do is to forgive
• Jesus heals on the Sabbath Day:

  • walks into a temple and sees a man with a deformed hand, eventhough his critics are watching he still heals the man
  • he did the most loving thing even if it went against Biblical teachings
• Disciples pick Grain on Sabbath:

  • the disciples pick grain due to hunger, to which the Pharisees aren't happy
  • Jesus reminds them of David and says that the Sabbath day is to help people and to give them a rest
• Letter of the Law: exact recquirements
• Spirit of the Law: true meaning, basis of law
• The Six Propositions should be kept in mind when seeking a decision
• First Proposition:

  • Only love is intrinsically Good
  • Actions aren't good or evil
  • Chain of cause and effect -> love is the only universal thing to oblige us
  • Agape is not something we have or are but something we do -> Agape is active ==> a verb
  • Everything else has a conditional value
  • "Only one thing is intrinsically food; namely love: nothing else at all"
• Love is a verb:

  • it is not an innate sense of right and wrong
  • is it the weighing up of what we should do not our 'gut instinct'
  • based on reason not a priori reason but reason a posteriori
  • it is practical and not linked to emotion
• Second Proposition:

  • Love is the only law
  • Jesus replaced the Torah with the principle of love
  • Fletcher argues that the Commandments are not absolute
  • Situationists hold it as a duty to break these in some circumstances
  • Love gives people freedom and love unlike law sets hno limits on obligation
  • "The ruling norm of Christian decision is love: nothing else"
• Third Proposition:

  • Love and Justice can't be separated => they are compatible
  • Fletcher argues that agape means standing up for justice and representing those who are oppressed
  • challenging injustice
  • maximising agape is the only ethical goal
  • Justice is love at work in the whole community
  • "Love and justice are the same, for justice is love distributed, nothing else"
• Forth Proposition:

  • love is an attitude
  • love wills the good of the neighbour -> as agape is a selfless love; no personal interest
  • desire for the good of the other person
  • agape love is unconditional -> nothing is required in return
  • don't have to like someone to show agape love to them
  • Jesus -> "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"
  • "love wills the neighbours' good, whether we like him or not"
• Fifth Proposition:

  • the end justifies the means
  • the end must be the most loving result
  • 'right' does and can mean nothing but 'cause of a good result'
  • G.E. Moore -> "No action which is not justified by its results can ever be right"
  • Moore said that good cannot be measured we just know it when we see it
  • whether something is lawful or not is irrelevant
  • e.g. resistance during WW2
  • "Only the end justifies the means; nothing else"
• Sixth Proposition:

  • love's decisions are made situationally
  • this means that love decides on each situation as it arises without a set of laws to guide it
  • Fletcher suggested Jesus distanced himself from Jewish groups that lived on rule based moral systems
  • whether something is right or wrong depends on the situation
  • morality based on following set codes will be no help here
  • "Love's decisions are made situationally, not prescriptively"
• The Four Working Principles of Situation Ethics:

  • personalism
  • pragmatism
  • positivism
  • relativism
• Personalism: person first not the laws

  • put people first
  • people centred
  • what to do to help humans
  • others over ourselves -> this can be hard as we can be selfish
  • "Love God, love your neighbour" -> Mark
  • "How can you love God who cannot see if you do not love your neighbour who you can see" -> John
  • "It is 'immoral' when people are used and things are loved" -> Fletcher
  • examples might be how the 'love' of pornography turns humans into the objects of pleasure for others
• Pragmatism: realistic

  • the practical approach
  • based on experience rather than theory
  • Fletcher doubts strict philosophical systems
  • not about 'a priori' reasons or principles
  • "He turns towards concreteness and adequacy; towards facts, towards action and towards power" -> William James
  • e.g. Catholic Church traditionally opposed to artificial contraception, allowed them in Bosnia from 1993 due to the Bosnian war
• Positivism: faith in love, choosing to put God's love first

  • natural positivism deduces faith from human experience, nature provides the evidence
  • reason is not the basis of faith, it works within faith
  • ethics had to begin with faith in love because Fletcher thought no rational answer can be given for why someone should love
  • acting out of faith in love, Christians choosing to adopt agape as an ultimate guide
  • "God is love" -> John
  • "We love because he first loved us" -> John
  • "Faith working through love" -> St. Paul
  • "Love is an ontological dimension of the universe" -> Paul Tillich
• Relativism: consider the circumstances

  • there are no fixed rules that have to be obeyed
  • different degrees of relativism from absolute relativism
  • the situationist approach in which all decisions must be relative to Christian love
  • based on making the absolute laws of Christian ethics relative to a situation
  • e.g. Jesus healing on the Sabbath day
  • "Love relativises the absolute it does not absolutise the realtive" -> Joseph Fletcher
• Conscience:

  • not a bag of reliable rules and principles to tell you what to do
  • no way guides human action
  • not an innate radar
  • not an internalised value system of the culture and society
  • describes our attempts to make proper decisions
  • Aquinas' belief
  • process of making the decision
• Sacrificial Suicide: Fletchers book

  • doctor's could give a man pills which cost $40 every three days
  • it would keep him alive for the next three years, he would die within 3 months
  • insurance runs out in October > can't get it again
  • thinks about not taking the pills so his family has some security