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Situation ethics - Coggle Diagram
Situation ethics
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Agape
- The key idea of Fletcher's situation ethics is the Christian idea of agape, which is understood as the unconditional love Jesus demonstrated
- Christianity is based on love in terms of God's love for his creation and the command that people love their neighbours
Ethical judgements should be based on agape
- For a religious thinker, agape is an excellent principle and, according to Jesus, sums up the most important commandments
- The principle of agape is useful in helping us know when to accept the general rules (sophia) and when to break them - it is flexible to different situations
- Agape is a relativist principle but, unlike the pleasure principle of utilitarianism, it does not seem as easy to manipulate - eg it is harder to argue that murder or racism can be a loving act even though in extreme circumstances this may bring pleasure to an evil majority
Ethical judgements should not be based on agape
- The concept of agape can be interpreted in various ways - it may for some conjure up charity and compassion, but for others represent a dispassionate wanting of good for others - both the concept and the application to individual situations can produce different results
- Agape and situation ethics in general seems set up to deal with exceptional or difficult cases - agape may be the right approach times, but most cases require us to follow the conventional rules
- A religious believer may argue that God directly reveals commands and that a stress on agape may lead a believer away from the revelation
Conscience
- Fletcher disagreed that conscience is something we possess, instead he argued that conscience is an active process - it is a verb not a noun
- When we are making moral decisions, we are using the function conscience
- Conscience is not something we carry with us or a voice from within, it is only conscience when we are moral decision making
- Fletcher - "The traditional error lies in thinking about conscience as a noun instead of a verb"
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The six propositions
- Only one thing is intrinsically good, namely love - only love is intrinsically good, all other things are extrinsically good because they serve an end
- The ruling norm of Christian decision is love - in the New Testament, Jesus consistently replaces the Old Testament laws with the principe of love - where law and love conflict, we must follow love
- Love and justice are the same, for justice is love distributed - justice is Christian love being applied rationally and in a calculated manner
- Love wills the neighbour good whether we like him or not - agape love is selfless and not necessarily reciprocal - Fletcher notes that Jesus' command to love extends to loving our enemies
- Only the end justifies the means - any loving end is justified by any means - it is whether the end is worthwhile that determines whether the action is worthwhile
- Love's decisions are made situationally, not prescriptively - love is the norm but it doesn't tell us what to do in a specific situation, we have to gather the facts rather than decide the case before we know the facts
- Situation ethics is a Christian teleological theory, developed by Fletcher, which suggests the best thing to do in any situation is what leads to the most loving outcome
- Fletcher bases his theory on the idea of agape, the love that Jesus taught in the New Testament
- Fletcher sought to find a middle ground between legalism (over-reliance on laws) and antinomianism (no laws)