Situation Ethics

Situation ethics is not dissimilar from utilitarianism, in that it is a way a deciding upon the correct action that is to be taken in a given situation. It does however take an individualistic approach, with the emphasis being upon each person, rather than looking after the majority, as is the case in utilitarianism. It is a Christian principle, and so would not apply to those outside of Christianity. It revolves around what the most loving thing to do is.

Joseph Fletcher, an American professor of ethics used his beliefs and concerns to come up with what he believed was a fair way of deciding what was the right action to take in a situation. He didn’t like the way in which so many ethical theories, such as utilitarianism were based upon and around a basic set of rules, a legalistic approach. He believed that it was too rigid, and did not allow for exceptions. He also firmly disapproved of any antinomian, because it “Rejects the idea that there are any authoritative laws, rules or regulations that you ought to obey in a decision-making situation.” 

Instead he used love as a general rule in decision making; not “storge”, to love a country or place; not “philia”, to love a family member or friend; and not “eros”, to make love and to lust for someone; but instead “agape”, self-giving love, as is demonstrated by Jesus dying upon the cross. To Fletcher, “agape” was fundamentally sacrificing, without any reward or pleasure, as the teachings of Jesus are told in the Bible, and he took a lot of his ideas from this. The quote in Matthew saying, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself,” epitomises what agape is all about. He believed that something could be determined as good or evil, depending on whether or not love had been fully served.

Fletcher used four different working principles before setting out his theory:

i) Pragmatism – “the proposed course of action must work, and must work towards the end, which is love” This is based around the idea of reaching a goal or the end.

ii) Relativism – in situation ethics Fletcher tries to avoid the absolute by not referring to words such as ‘never’, ‘perfect’ and ‘always’. He also added that, “all decisions must be relative to Christian love.”

iii) Positivism – faith comes before reason and anything else. People must see for themselves that love is the most important thing.

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iv) Personalism – a situationist believes you put people first, not laws, and that, “There are no “values” in the sense of inherent goods – value is what happens to something when it happens to be useful to love working for the sake of persons.”

He then worked out six fundamental principles about love and these were:

The first proposition – Only one thing is intrinsically good; namely love; nothing else

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The basic idea behind this lies in his thinking that only love can be good in all situations, and everything else is good ...

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