Situation Ethics

Overview

Recall questions on the new morality, agape and situationism between legalism and antinomianism, Fletcher's four working principles and six propositions, gospel examples, Robinson's contribution, Barclay's assessment, and the theory's strengths and weaknesses.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What was the mid-twentieth-century new morality reacting against?

   Model answer

   Against an inherited Christian ethic experienced as a list of prohibitions handed down by church authority. Post-war affluence, the loosening of deference, the contraceptive pill, and a wave of legal change on censorship, homosexuality, abortion and divorce made rule-based sexual morality look both unenforceable and unloving to its critics, while its defenders saw permissiveness rather than progress.

2. 2

   What is agape?

   Model answer

   The New Testament word for a love that is unconditional, self-giving and directed at the neighbour's good regardless of whether the neighbour is likeable or deserving. It is a disposition of the will rather than an emotion, which is why a theory can make it a decision-making principle.

3. 3

   Where does situationism sit between legalism and antinomianism?

   Model answer

   Legalism arrives with rules already fixed and applies them; antinomianism arrives with nothing at all and improvises. Fletcher's situationism arrives with the tradition's rules as illuminators, informed guides that can be set aside when love requires, but takes only agape as binding.

4. 4

   List Fletcher's four working principles.

   Model answer

   Pragmatism, that a course of action must actually work; relativism, that everything is relative to love and no rule is absolute; positivism, that faith in love is chosen rather than proved; and personalism, that people come before rules and principles.

5. 5

   What are the six propositions?

   Model answer

   Love alone is intrinsically good; love is the only norm for a Christian; love and justice are the same thing, since justice is love distributed; love wills the neighbour's good whether we like them or not; only the end justifies the means, and only love is that end; and love's decisions are made in the situation, not laid down in advance.

6. 6

   Sketch a case study of the kind Fletcher uses and show how the theory handles it.

   Model answer

   He presses cases such as a woman in a Soviet prison camp who could only be released to her children by deliberately becoming pregnant by a guard, or a family in hiding whose crying infant would betray everyone. A legalist condemns adultery and killing absolutely; the situationist asks which course serves the most loving outcome for the persons involved, and can permit an ordinarily forbidden act. Critics say the cases are extreme and prove nothing about ordinary life.

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The same content, four other ways.

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