Disticntive Features of Situation Ethics

What are the distinctive features of situation ethics?

Joseph Fletcher was the Anglican Theologian who invented the idea of situation ethics in 1966. This came at a time when free will and speech was important and people were in search of a time of social change and self-expression. We need to ask ourselves, what are the fundamental points of situation ethics? And what did Fletcher mean when he referred to love? By doing this we can analyse the theory and come to our own conclusions as to its practical use in the world today.

His theory was in opposition to the more traditional ideas of morality at the time, the most important two being Antinomian and Legalistic approaches. The Antinomian approach is the lawless approach where there are no set principles. The situation should tell us what is the right or wrong thing to do and if we are required to take any kind of action. We should use our intuition and listen for the 'inner voice' which many people see as being out conscience and do what it tells us to do. Fletcher disagreed with this approach because he said it would lead to 'moral anarchy'. It was too vague and many people would disagree on which 'inner voice' is correct.

The legalistic approach to moral issues is based on a set of absolute laws that everyone had to apply. It is said we should seek to apply these moral rules to our everyday lives and to do this there must be a large set of rules, sub rules and regulations we all must follow. Fletcher also disregarded this argument because he saw it as 'unsatisfactory to apply general rules to modern moral issues.' They did not allow for special circumstances or situations, which ethically made them unfair and unjust.

Fletcher saw the only fair way to deal with moral issues was to use the situation ethics approach. This was developed in opposition to natural law and is a very subjective or relative theory. Fletcher believed that we must take into consideration the different situations that things happen in. He said that individual people and situations take precedence over general moral rules.

The idea of situation ethics totally revolves around the one idea of love. Fletcher said that if we always did the most loving thing in every situation then this would always be the right thing to do.