context for situation ethics

non-traditional families

• changes in divorce laws → rise in single/ co-parenting families

• divorce act of 1969

student protest

• may 1968 france

• wave of anti-establishment protests world wide

• young parisian catholics demanded debate instead of mass

hippy movement

• ‘peace and love’ → ‘free love’ in place of traditional sex ethics

• challenged organised religion → explored spirituality

feminism

• 1960 → contraceptive pill

• abortion act of 1967 → enabled free + legal terminations. reproductive rights now challenged the edicts of natural law

rejection of authority

• bob dylan 1963

• “times they are a-changin’”

• summed up rejection of authority

rock and roll

• gave a voice to young people

• previously disenfranchised

• essential in rise (+influence) of ‘teenage culture’

emergence of theory

• it emerged during a difficult time for religious ethics in Europe

• after ww2 a new sort of society emerged with a very different views on right and wrong from previous generations

• This outlook which became mainstream among many young people in the 1960s, is known as the new morality and SE is a response to it

why was morality changing?

• in the enlightenment, people moved away from christian morality, questioned the goodness of the church’s rules

• (mainly bc of the crusades, religious wars and the christian leaders torturing people for being heretics)

• moved towards ‘new morality’

what is new morality?

• post-ww1, liberalism emerged in the roaring 20s

• 1960s also another time of cultural + social change brought on by baby boomers, who were children born in ww2, who created a permissive society

• based on assumption that happiness is the greatest good + nothing should stand in the way of this

• partly influenced by liberalism + J.S Mill’s harm principle

• influenced by freud, who helped changed attitudes towards sex/ instinctual desires, arguing that healthiest behaviour is expressing your instinctive wishes in a way that is safe + according to harm principle

existentialism

• philosophical movement traced back to mid-19th century that maintains that all philosophical thinking must be the experiences of the individual

• two types of existentialism, theistic existentialism (associated mainly w soren kierkegaard) and atheistic existentialism (linked w the writings, novels, plays and essays of Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir and germal philosopher heidegger)

sartre + beauvoir

• sartre argued that in a godless universe life has no definite pattern and human beings have no obvious purpose

• therefore, there can be no fixed moral rules that can be imposed on us from the outside, instead everyone must recognise their freedom and responsibility to create their own purpose in life and to make their own moral decisions

• beauvoir argued that women are not born women, but become women, in that women tend to accept male conceptions of what a woman is; but to be what men expect you to be is a choice, instead women, being free, can make up their own minds about about who and what they aspire to be

sitch ethics and existentialism

• there are a couple similarities between the two, but fletcher was never going to accept sartre’s atheism

• fletcher did believe that faith was a matter of will/ choice

• fletcher agrees up to a point with the existential rejection of the possibility of there being absolute moral norms and values

• legalistic rules should not be applied inflexibility

sitch ethics incompatibility with kantian ethics

• for fletcher, kantian maxims cannot be successfully universalised to all situatuons

• need to be exceptions to kantian duties, making it possibility right to lie in some situations

• so, as w biblical commandments and laws of the state, kantian principles can help us to guide us to the right moral decision, but no more than that

• sitch ethics is a relativistic moral theory which takes the sitch itself as the starting point rather than the rule/ law/ maxim that may seem to be most relevant to it

• also consequentialist vs deontological

→ although sitch ethics has more in common w consequentialist than deontological ethics, it can, up to a point, also be understood in terms of the latter.