1.5.5: The Six Propositions of Situation Ethics

Fletcher gives six propositions (features) of his theory.

1: Only one ‘thing’ is intrinsically good; namely, love, nothing else at all

There is one thing which is intrinsically good, that is good irrespective of context, namely love. If love is what is good, then an action is right or wrong in as far as it brings about the most amount of love. Echoing Bentham’s Hedonic Calculus (see Chapter 1.1) Fletcher defends what he calls the:

agapeic calculus, the greatest amount of neighbor welfare for the largest number of neighbors possible.

Notice that here he talks about “welfare” rather than “love”. Fletcher does this because of how he understands love which, importantly, is not about having feelings and desires. We discuss this below.

2: The ruling norm of Christian decision is love, nothing else

As we have seen in the first proposition, the only way to decide what we ought to do (the ruling norm) is to bring about love. We need to be careful though because for Fletcher “love” has a technical meaning.

By love Fletcher means “agápē” — from ancient Greek. Agápē has a very particular meaning. Initially it is easier to see what it is not. It is not the feeling we might have towards friends or family member which is better described as brotherly love (philēo). Nor is it the erotic desire we might feel towards others (érōs).

Rather agápē is an attitude and not a feeling at all, one which does not expect anything in return and does not give any special considerations to anyone. Agápē regards the enemy in the same way as the friend, brother, spouse, lover. Given our modern context and how people typically talk of “love” it is probably unhelpful to even call it “love”.

Typically people write and think about love as experiencing an intense feeling. In cartoons when a character is in love their hearts jump out of their chest, or people “in love” are portrayed as not being able to concentrate on things because they “cannot stop thinking” about someone.

This is not what love means for Fletcher. In the Christian context agápē is the type of love which is manifest in how God relates to us. Consider Christ’s love in saying that he forgave those carrying out his execution or consider a more modern example. In February 1993, Mrs Johnson’s son, Laramiun Byrd, 20, was shot in the head by 16-year-old Oshea Israel after an argument at a party in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mrs Johnson subsequently forgave her son’s killer and after he had served a 17 year sentence for the crime, asked him to move in next door to her. She was not condoning his actions, nor will she ever forget the horror of those actions, but she does love her son’s killer. That love is agápē.

3: Love and justice are the same, for justice is love distributed, nothing else

For Fletcher, practically all moral problems we encounter can be boiled down to an apparent tension between “justice” on the one hand and “love” on the other. Consider a recent story:

Trevell Coleman, better known as the rapper G Dep, was a rising star on the New York hip-hop scene and had been signed to P Diddy’s Bad Boy record label. He also had a wife, Crystal, and twin boys.

Yet Trevell, who was brought up a Catholic and always retained his faith, had a terrible secret, as an 18-year-old, he had mugged and shot a man. He never knew what happened to his victim, yet 17 years later, in 2010, he could no longer bear the guilt and went to the police — a step almost unimaginable for someone from the Hip Hop world.

A police search of their cold case files revealed the case of John Henkel — shot and killed in 1993 at exactly the same street corner in Harlem where Trevell says he committed his crime. He is now serving a jail sentence of 15 years to life for Henkel’s murder. Yet he has no regrets; “I wanted to get right with God”, he says.

Trevell’s choice was perhaps hardest to bear for his wife Crystal, who now has to bring up their teenage boys on her own.

This could be expressed as a supposed tension between “love” of family and doing the right thing — “justice”. Fletcher thinks that most other moral problems can be thought of in this way. Imagine we are trying to decide what is the best way to distribute food given to a charity, or how a triage nurse might work in a war zone. In these cases we might put the problem like this. We want to distribute fairly, but how should we do this?

Fletcher says the answer is simple. To act justly or fairly is precisely to act in love. “Love is justice, justice is love”.

4: Love wills the neighbor’s good when we like him or not

This is self-explanatory. As we noted above, agápē is in the business of loving the unlovable. So related to our enemies:

Christian love does not ask us to lose or abandon our sense of good and evil, or even of superior and inferior; it simply insists that however we rate them, and whether we like them nor not, they are our neighbors and are to be loved.

5: Only the ends justify the means, nothing else

In direct rejection of the deontological approaches Fletcher says that any action we take, as considered as an action independent of its consequences is literally, “meaningless and pointless”. An action, such as telling the truth, only acquires its status as a means by virtue of an end beyond itself.

6: Love’s decisions are made situationally, not prescriptively

Ethical decisions are not cut and dried most of the time and they exist in a grey area. No decision can be taken before considering the situation. Fletcher gives the example of a women in Arizona who learned that she might “bear a defective baby because she had taken thalidomide”. What should she do? The loving decision was not one given by the law which stated that all abortions are wrong. However, she travelled to Sweden where she had an abortion. Even if the embryo had not been defective according to Fletcher her actions were “brave and responsible and right” because she was acting in light of the particulars of the situation so as to bring about the most love.