Situation Ethics

?

Introduction - Situation Ethics

  • Situation ethics was most famously championed by Joseph Fletcher. 
  • He argued we should follow rules but break them in the name of love. 
  • His theory is based on that of agape (unconditional Christian love - summarised in the first letter to the Corinthians, and says we should do the most loving thing in any situation. 
  • Agape is Christian love - putting others before yourself and holding them in high regards. 
  • Situation ethics is centered around personalism. God is a personal God (i.e you can pray to him), so he fits in very well here. 
  • Jesus said ''love God first'' and also ''love your neighbour'' (the Ten Commandments). Additionally, he taught the golden rule - ''treat others as you yourself would like to be treated''. 
  • Parable of the Good Samaritan - a good example of situation ethics. 
  • Fletcher rejected legalism (only following the rules) and antinomianism (not following any rules) and sought a middle way between them. 
1 of 7

The Four Working Principles

1) Positivism - must put faith before reasoning - God comes first. In a situation you must ask ''I am Christian so what should I do?"

2) Personalism - people come first, not rules or ideas. Situation ethics is human centric and it also takes into account the relevance of a personal God. 

3) Pragmatism - the action must be pragmatic (practical), you must do what is most practical for the situation. 

4) Relativism - the theory must be relative, there are no rules. You decide what is best in the situation. 

2 of 7

Fletcher and Conscience

  • Unlike Aquinas or Freud, Fletcher didn't take conscience as a noun, but as a verb. 
  • For Fletcher, conscience was a verb - it involved doing the right thing in a situation. 
  • Conscience plays a role in working out what to do - just must be in a situation to be able to decide what best to do. Conscience is not a pre-manufactured thing within us that decides how we should act morally, because if it worked like that, then it would be a priori and we wouldn't learn from our mistakes. 
  • We need to be in the situation, doing the experiencing. So for example, I were to see some bullies send a horrible text to my friend, I would decide in the situation whether it was most loving for me to delete them before he saw them or for me to do something else. 
  • Maybe we will conclude that we will go into our friend's phone, maybe we will not. Whatever the case - the outcome cannot have been known beforehand. 
  • What our conscience would have us do is revealed during the experiencing. 
3 of 7

The Six Fundamental Principles

1) Love is the only thing which is intrinsically good - love is the best thing we can think of and that's why it's the basis of our rule making.

2) Love is the only ruling norm - love replaces the law since it is universal. 

3) Justice is love in disguise - justice and love are equal, without love we cannot have justice. Perhaps this would solve starving children in Africa. If love was shared out equally there would be no suffering. 

4) Love is not sentimental - agape/loving is not the same as liking. We make decisions out of love not because we want to do it or because we like doing it. 

5) Only the ends justifies the means - do not treat people as means to an end. 

6) Love decides there and then, regardless of the rules. 

4 of 7

Evaluation of Situationism

  • Situation ethics allows us to put others first in the name of love. We would be able to justify stealing a loaf of bread as OK if it were to feed our children who are starving. 
  • We can follow rules like Fletcher suggested, but we can also break them in the name of love. 
  • Situationism takes into account human emotions and compassions - we can be clouded by emotions, but in situationism that's ok. 
  • In line with the teachings of the Bible, Jesus put people before rules. 
  • However... Situationism allows for us to do bad or evil things and then justify them as loving. For example, in the context of euthanasia, we have the case studies of the suffocated woman and the trapped lorry driver. A man who smothered his wife with a pillow because she complained often about her cancer can be justified if the man claims he did it as loving, even if the woman didn't want to die. As for the trapped lorry driver - a burning lorry, with a driver trapped inside is shot by his friend who escaped. The friend can justify this as loving but what if the lorry driver could've lived? 
  • Morally subjective, we don't know whether it's right or wrong, we only know that love is important. 
  • Love is relative to each and every one of us, how do we know what a murderer thinks of love in comparisson to our mother? This is where the lines become blurred. If we all had the same idea of love, we'd all have the same moral outcome but we don't. 
  • Since there is a complete lack of moral rules - situationism becomes individualistic - it's only relevant to the individual and so will produce an unreliable outcome. 
  • Barth says, as fallen creatures we are better off following Jesus' teachings rather than other principles.
5 of 7

Bishop Robinson and Tillich

  • John Robinson (Bishop of Woolwich) considered a major force in shaping liberal Christian theology. Robinson argued that situationism was for ''man come of age''. It was for moving people away from what being told what to do by God but still retaining major aspects of Christian teaching. It was a good compromise between legalism and antinomianism. 
  • While Robinson and Tillich argued that God was a supreme and ultimate being - He's not this ''deus-machina''. He is not a supernatural being who intervenes in the world because he is transcendent and outside of space and time. God is personal, and while he remains at an epistemic distance his is not this being who barks commands at us to follow. 
6 of 7

Proportionalism

  • Paul Tillich supported the preservation of Christian love but argued that situationism would be possible to maintain realistically. By using a sort of agapeic calculus in every single situation would not only be difficult, but we would have to re-evaluate our moral compass each time we made a decision. He argued that this was unrealistic and so proposed propotionalism 
  • Propotionalism takes into account both rules and the pull of desires/issues in a certain situation. It argues that we should take the main aspects of Natural Law (an absolutist, legalistic theory) and use them as a moral guideline, only abandoning it when a proportional reason made it acceptable for us to ignore it. 
  • There are absolute moral rules which should never be broken unless there is a sufficiently proportionate reason for doing so. This means that there are no ''blurred lines''. We are only able to break the rules when its absolutely necessary. 
  • Proportionalism is a hybrid of deontological and teleological ideas. It's deontological becase we perform our actions based on natural laws, but teleological because we ask ourselves whether its ok to break a deontological rule for the sake of a proportional other. 
  • Also supported by Bernard Hoose.
  • Unlike situation ethics, proportionalism considers a wide range of factors and not just love. Your reason for deviating away from the rules must be proportional i.e you can't justify killing in the name of love.
7 of 7

Comments

No comments have yet been made

Similar Religious Studies resources:

See all Religious Studies resources »See all Ethics resources »