situation ethics

• agape is universal self giving love

  fletcher gives the example of a mother buying her sexually active underage child contraception
• the four working principles are pragmatism, relativism, positivism, personalism
• the six principles

  • love is the only absolute
  • agape is self giving love
  • justice is love distributed
  • love has no favourites
  • love justifies it's means
  • situational
• fletcher is bad and naughty and says downs syndrome people are not people and that individuals shouldn't feel guilty about putting a down's syndrome baby away
• christianity and situation ethics

  luke - 'love your neighbour as yourself'

  john - 'love one another just as i have loved you'

  1 corinthians - 'faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.'
• traditional christian thinkers tend to reject situation ethics, eg pope pius XII called situation ethics an individualistic and subjective appeal to the concrete circumstances to justify decisions in opposition to the natural law or gods will

  but, jesus did set aside some rules as the person matters more, eg touching the sick
• situation ethics may condone evil acts as it teaches particular actions dont have an inherent moral value. goodness or badness depends on the eventual result