Situation Ethics Criticisms

Situation Ethics Criticisms

1. William Barclay

   • Fletcher’s cases are extreme ones
     • How often are we going to make the kind of life and death choices on which he bases Situation Ethics?
     • ‘It is much easier to agree that extraordinary situations need extraordinary measures than to think that there are no laws for ordinary everyday life.’
   • Fletcher overestimates the value of being free from rules and the constant decision-making process it forces us into.
   • The law has several vital functions which we would be ill-advised to do away with: preventing crime, protecting society, etc.

2. Pope Pius XII

   • “It is an individual and subjective appeal to the concrete circumstances of actions to justify decisions in opposition to the Natural Law or God’s revealed will.”
     • absolutist criticism
   • claiming that situation ethics is un-Christian because it is prepared to break the laws of Christianity to do ‘the most loving thing’. But absolutist Christians believe those laws can never be broken.

3. too individualistic

4. subjective. So two people might disagree about what the most ‘loving thing’ is.

5. dated: rooted in 60s counter-culture

6. Peter Vardy

   • ‘There is a danger of selfishness creeping in under the banner of “love,"
     • is a truly selfless act really possible? This is a real problem for situation ethics, since the entire theory depends on agape.

7. not easy to determine the consequences/outcome of an action.

8. Aren’t some actions just intrinsically wrong, in and of themselves?

   • Can murder, theft, adultery, etc. ever be justified? This is an absolutist criticism.

9. Situation Ethics bring us to the brink of a “slippery slope”

   • euthanasia can be justified in some circumstances why not all?

10. some ask to what extent is Fletcher really in tune with the ethic of Paul and Jesus?

    • In Romans (in the Bible), Paul rejects the idea that we may ‘do evil so that good may come’
      • Paul is saying that the ends never justify the means; but this seems to contradict Fletcher’s working principle that ‘love is the only means’.

11. It is a religious ethical system and therefore will not appeal to all, unlike Utilitarianism, which is secular.

12. love may not be as easy to define as it seems: our ideas of love may be subjective, rather than objective.

13. rejected by many Christians.

    • Roman Catholics who adhere to Natural Moral Law do not see consequentialist ethics as valid.
    • Christianity appears to be deontological: Jesus said that he had not come to erase the Jewish (deontological) law.