principles. An idea or opinion is limited by own experience, that opinion
is true to the person even though another person may not agree.
Conventionalism is an observable fact that moral values differ from
society to society, for example, in the United Kingdom we believe that
hanging is wrong, where as in China they do. The dependency thesis,
moral values are created by society, they are a product of culture. The
young experience and internalize values, they then conform to society;
stick to the values and in the end everyone is conventionalist. Situation
ethics deals with the situation. It’s the action that brings the greatest
number of love (agape) to the greatest number of people, which is good.
With situation ethics you cannot prescribe rules but must make decisions
to deal with the situations. It is a way of imitating Jesus or Gods love.
The strengths of moral relativism is that it is flexible and practical. It’s
very tolerant and avoids the issue of ethnocentricity. With
conventionalism, it avoids criticisms on other cultures. Situation ethics
main value is to give love to the greatest number of people, everybody.
However, there are weaknesses of moral relativism. Subjectivism can be
argued that it means one person cannot question another and there are no
rules. It’s impossible to run a society like that because ideas really
depend on the individual. The problems with conventionalism are that
you are unable to criticize another society, because one country’s
genocide is equal to another welfare system, they make sense in their
own setting. It doesn’t seem to allow the facts that there are common
moral values in society. In situation ethics there is always the risk that
minority’s will loose out, it seems to be compassionate, but not to the
individual. Situation ethics is meant to give the greatest amount of love
to the greatest number of people, but love is far too ‘vague’ to say is one
rule. It is based on Christian beliefs but not everyone agrees with
Christian beliefs. There are problems defining situations, it depends on
your decisions to decide what’s right or wrong.