Examine the key features of situation ethics, and the main criticisms of it, and how far these lead to the rejection of the theory.

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Examine the key features of situation ethics. Then outline the main weaknesses of situation ethics. How far do these lead to a rejection of the theory?

Despite the view of Kant, and many Christian people, that it is not ethical to only act after assessing the implications of a moral action, since the 1960’s a view that situation ethics is an effective way to judge an action and its consequences has emerged in the secular community. However, it is also necessary to acknowledge the Christian ethos in order to fully make a decision on the ethical viability of something in such an ephemeral world.

        Situation ethics is a theory most commonly associated with the work of Joseph Fletcher, an American professor and one of the key pioneers in bioethics, and J.A.T. Robinson, a New Testament scholar, author and a former Anglican bishop of Woolwich. Fletcher wrote a book called Situation Ethics, which was published in 1966, a time when the ephemeral nature of the country was highly accentuated by political matters; Women were more commonly going to work, following the suffrage movement before the war and their valued contribution to the war effort during it, President John F. Kennedy of the United States had been assassinated and there was a large amount of shock and horror surrounding the brutal Vietnam war. Furthermore, Martin Luther King had left his legacy at this time, even though it would be many years before the divisive pre-civil rights attitudes and laws were truly shaken off, and the sexual revolution that occurred in the 1960’s, where the invention of ‘the pill’ came about, and sexual promiscuity was finally accepted. Also, the emergence of ‘the teenager’, a concept that had not been acknowledge before as a type of person with his or her own music, fashion and politics, the consequential growing power of the student movement and the rebellious spirit of the rock and roll culture that went hand in hand with the aforementioned new young adult’s power, when combined with the other reasons mentioned above, all meant that the scene was set for a radical shift in the social power base.

        The church, in particular, did not see this impending shift in power as an appealing prospect. The British Council of Churches in 1964 appointed a Working Party that set out to “Prepare a Statement of the Christian case for abstinence from sexual intercourse before marriage and faithfulness within marriage…and to suggest means whereby the Christian position may be effectively presented to the various sections of the community.” They wanted to convey “a sane and responsible attitude towards love and marriage in the face of the misleading suggestions conveyed by much popular literature, entertainment and advertising.” They also observed that “a widespread feeling, especially among Christian people, that recent years have witnessed a general lowering of moral standards, and that this is particularly evident in the realm of sexual behaviour. The Church put much emphasis on a report called The Sexual Behaviour of Young People by Michael Schofield, saying that they wanted to reassess where Christian moral truth lay. The report was conducted in 1965, and concluded that in the 1960’s young people were exposed to these factors; “greater independence; more money in their pockets and purses; the weakening of family bonds and religious influences; the development of earlier maturity physically, emotionally and mentally; the impact of modern books, television, periodicals”.

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        1963 saw the publication of an extremely controversial book that threw the Church into disarray and disagreement. J.A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God is a theological text in which the author challenges the traditional view that God is watching over the world as a supreme power in a three-storied universe, instead suggesting, in conjunction with Paul Tillich, a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher, that God should be understood as “the ground of our being” as opposed to a deux ex machine, a phenomenon that cannot be explained, which influences and interferes with the world while remaining detached from it. This ...

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