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Key Questions

Key Questions. What does it mean for an action to be loving ? How might love be defined ? Is moral behaviour about following rules or working things out for ourselves ? Are there unbreakable laws to govern moral behaviour, or should we make our own moral decisions?. Situation Ethics.

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Key Questions

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  1. Key Questions • What does it mean for an action to be loving? • How might love be defined? • Is moral behaviour about following rules or working things out for ourselves? • Are there unbreakable laws to govern moral behaviour, or should we make our own moral decisions?

  2. Situation Ethics • Learning Objectives • To examine and understand the key ideas of Situation Ethics. • To assess the usefulness of the theory as a method of moral decision making.

  3. Key Terms • Law of love • Legalistic ethics • Personalism • Positivism • Pragmatism • Prescriptive • Proportionalism • Relativism • Agapé love • Antinomian ethics • Conscience • Four working principles • Individualistic • Intrinsically good • justice

  4. Joseph Fletcher Fletcher maintains that there are essentially three different ways of making moral decisions. • Legalistic ethics - Set of moral rules and regulations • Antinomian ethics - No Rules - Spontaneous • Situation ethics

  5. Situation Ethics • One single rule – the rule of agape. This love is not merely an emotion but involves doing what is best for the other person, unconditionally.

  6. Situation Ethics • The situationist follows a moral law or violates it according to love’s need’. Fletcher • For the situationist, all moral decisions are hypothetical. They depend on what best serves love. • They don’t say that ‘giving to charity is a good thing’. They only say that giving to charity is a good thing if …’

  7. An insane murderer who asks you the whereabouts of his next victim… • Should be lied to! A situationist would be able to do this. • In that situation, a legalist must tell the truth.

  8. Task • A teenage girl has become pregnant as a result of being raped by a close family member. She’s very poor and very young. How would legalists, antinomians and situationists go about considering what the moral thing to do is?

  9. Evaluating Situation Ethics • Strengths • Weaknesses

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