situation ethics

• agape love: unconditional Christian love
• six fundamental principles:

  • love only is always good
  • love is the only norm
  • love + justice are the same
  • love is not liking
  • love justifies its mean
  • love decides there and then
• pragmatism means moral actions must work towards or achieve some realistic goal
• personalism is the idea that people come first in moral situations, not rules or ideas
• positivism means first place is given to Christian love, rooted in faith
• relativism means morality is relative to the situation + there are no fixed laws which must always be obeyed
• Joseph Fletcher composed situation ethics in 1966
• Fletcher believed a reassessment of Christian morality was necessary due to the decline in Church membership as a result of social changes:

  • perceived absence of God during the horrors of the World Wars
  • rise in science + its incompatibility with religious beliefs
  • weakening family + religious bonds; media impact
  • failures of deontological systems to provide realistic answers to new ethical problems
• Fletcher's approach is teleological and relative. it is not particularly linked with any Catholic denominations/humanism, it is instead personal + contextual
• four working principles:

  • pragmatism
  • relativism
  • positivism
  • personalism