Situation Ethics
- Created by: ebcrankomills
- Created on: 06-06-19 14:37
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- Situation Ethics
- Three approaches to moral thinking
- Legalistic
- A set of predefined rules and regulations
- Judaism at the time of Jesus was legalistic in its approaches
- A legalist must continue to add to the rule book to encompass different new scenarios.
- To be moral means to follow the appropriate moral law or applying a previously determined law.
- Fletcher believed that this is found in Christianity and Catholicism based on the thinking of Natural Law
- Fletcher rejected this approach
- Antinomian
- Reverse of legalistic ethics
- There are no rules or regulations in regards to ethical rule making
- Every attempt at moral decision making is completely unique.
- Fletcher was highly critical of antinomian ethics
- 'It is literally unprincipled, purely ad-hoc and casual. They follow no foreseeable course from one situation to another. They are exactly anarchic.'
- Situational
- The morality of an action depends on the situation
- A situationist will enter into a moral dilemma with ethics and rules based on community or tradition
- More concerned with loving people than loving rules
- Reason is the instrument of moral judgements
- For situationist's all moral decisions are hypothetical
- Situation ethics dsagrees with the idea that good is to be discerned fromn the nature of things or the love of of things.
- 'the situationist follows a moral law or violates it according to lover's need.'
- Situationism presents itself as a principled attached to ethics that is based on circumstances and love rather than actions and precepts.
- Influenced by christian theologians, the christian response should be a flexible message of forgiving grace
- Legalistic
- Agape Love
- A form of unconditional love
- Similar to the love of 'love thy neighbour.'
- It is a love that many Christians hold within them and place at the heart of their moral conduct.
- Bishop John Robinson
- 'there is no one ethical system that can claim to be christian.'
- Rudolf Bultmann
- Jesus had no ethics apart from 'love thy neighbour as thyself.'
- Agape love is the highest end.
- Six propositions
- First
- 'only one thing is intrinsically good, namely love; nothing else at all.'
- Actions aren't intrinsically good or evil they always form part of a chain of cause and effect.
- Love is the only universal, the only thing to oblige us in conscience.
- Particular acts do not have love in them, they are right or wrong depending n the situation.
- Second
- 'the ruling norm of christian decision is love; nothing else.'
- Commandments are not absolute as Jesus broke them when love demanded it.
- Love replaces law
- Third
- 'love and justice are the same thing; for love is justice distributed,'
- 'Justice is christian love using its head, calculating its duties, obligations, opportunities, resources.'
- Justice is love at work in the whole community.
- Fourth
- 'Love wills the neighbours good.'
- This love is not a matter of feeling but of attitude.
- Your neighbour is anybody and agape love goes out to everyone regardless
- Agape love is unconditional, nothing is required in return.
- Fifth
- 'Only the end justifies the means, nothing else.'
- Considering moral actions without reference is a haphazard approach
- Actions acquire moral status as a means to an end.
- When weighing up a situation, one must consider the desired end, the means available, the motive for acting and the foreseeable consequences.
- Sixth
- 'Love's decisions are made situationally not prescriptively.'
- Whether something is right or wrong depends on the situation
- Morality based on set codes can be repressive.
- 'whether any form of sex is good or evil depends on whether love is fully served.'
- It is possible for euthanasia to be the most loving thing in the situation.
- First
- Four working presuppositions
- Pragmatism
- Based on experience rather than theory
- Fletcher quoted William James; 'A pragmatist... turns towards concreteness and adequate, towards facts, towards action and towards power.
- e.g. Catholic church allowed artificial contraception in 1993 after many civilian women were ***** as a means of conflict in Bosnia.
- Relativism
- Based on making the absolute laws of Christian ethics relative.
- Situation ethics, 'relativizes the absolute it does not absolutize the relative.'
- e.g. Jesus' followers picked corn on the sabbath, the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.'
- Personalism
- The legalist puts law first, the situationist puts people first.
- 'Ethics deals with human relations, situation ethics puts people at the centre of concern not things. Obligation is to persons, not to things; to subjects not objects.'
- There are no values in the sense of inherent goods
- Nothing individualistic about personalism
- e.g. buying cheap clothes made in sweatshops uses the poorly treated workers.
- Positivism
- Natural Positivsm
- Reason deduces faith from human experience or natural phenomena
- Nature provides the evidence and reason grasps it
- e.g. Natural Law
- Theological Positivism
- Faith statements are made and people act in a way that is reasonable in light of these statements
- reason is not the basis for faith but it works within faith
- Situation ethics depends on Christians freely choosing faith that God is love, so giving first place to christian love.
- When the situationist approaches a moral dilemma her thinking begins with faith of love not obedience to rules or trust in human reasoning.
- e.g. a soldier shooting his friend in the battlefield to save the agony of an untreatable injury is acting out of faith in love.
- Natural Positivsm
- Pragmatism
- Conscience
- Conscience in situation ethics is not a bag or reliable rules and principles to tell you what to do, it in no way guides human action.
- The error is thinking about conscience as a noun instead of a verb, there is no consequence per se.
- It is a word which describes our attempts to make proper decisions
- Fletcher adopts Aquinas' idea that 'conscience is reason making moral judgements.' he rejects Aquinas' other moral thoughts.
- It doesn't simply review our actions but is the process of making the decision.
- Joseph Fletcher (1905-1991)
- Teleological Ethical theory
- Rudolf Bultmann
- Against the concept that Jesus sought to establish some new ethical ideology, some set of abstract unwritten immutable legalism or idealism, a law of heaven.
- Karl Barth
- 'God's commanding,' can only be this individual, concrete and specific example of commanding not only a rule.
- Barth wasn't opposed to the concept of morally wrong actions, there is an outside chance that it could be right to break a moral law.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Situationist
- Determining the will of God in any concrete situation is based on the need of one's neighbour and the model of Jesus.
- 'These are the only two rules.'
- All we can do is act according to these two things and offer our conduct to God's judgement, mercy and grace.
- Three approaches to moral thinking
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