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The Situation Ethics Debate
Book by Cox, Harvey Gallagher
286 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1968
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19 people want to read
About the author
Harvey Cox
53 books45 followersHarvey Gallagher Cox Jr., Ph.D. (History and Philosophy of Religion, Harvard University, 1963; B.D., Yale Divinity School, 1955) was Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he had been teaching since 1965, both at HDS and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, until his retirement in 2009.
An American Baptist minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Temple University and the director of religious activities at Oberlin College; an ecumenical fraternal worker in Berlin; and a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are: urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and current spiritual movements in the global setting. His most recent book is When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today. His Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller with more than 1 million copies sold. It was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
An American Baptist minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Temple University and the director of religious activities at Oberlin College; an ecumenical fraternal worker in Berlin; and a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are: urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and current spiritual movements in the global setting. His most recent book is When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today. His Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller with more than 1 million copies sold. It was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
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June 30, 2024
A VERY HELPFUL GUIDE FOR INTERPRETING FLETCHER'S "SITUATION ETHICS"
Joseph Francis Fletcher (1905-1991) was an American professor who propounded the theory of “Situational Ethics” in the 1960s, and was a pioneer in the field of bioethics. Once ordained as an Episcopal priest [he taught Christian Ethics at Episcopal Divinity School and at Harvard Divinity School from 1944 to 1970], he later identified himself as an atheist. He was active in the Euthanasia Society of America, the American Eugenics Society, and the American Humanist Association [which named him “Humanist of the Year” in 1974]. He wrote books such as The Ethics of Genetic Control; Humanhood; Morals and Medicine, etc.
Fletcher's 1966 book Situation Ethics: The New Morality sold more than 150,000 copies and touched off a firestorm of controversy. This 1968 book includes reviews, criticisms, and essays (by persons including Charles Curran, James Pike, as well as an Introduction by editor Harvey Cox). There is also a "Reflection and Reply" by Fletcher at the end.
Cox wrote in his “Introduction and Perspective,” “Why… should ‘Situation Ethics: The New Morality’ have caused such a storm, ignited so many fires, and elicited such a wave of response both negative and positive?... In the lively discussion about ethics now going on in the world, the hour for the idea so eloquently presented by Fletcher had obviously come… ‘Situation Ethics’ rang a bell with thousands of readers. It did so because its time had come in the form of a man whose lifelong experience had prepared him for articulating it and because there was now an audience whose readiness to hear it had reached an optimum size… there is a large and growing group of readers today who are perfectly ready to cope with theologically and ethically sophisticated material… so long as it is not written in arcane or abstruse language. It may be true that church attendance figures are falling off… But at the same time there is a distinct upturn of interest in theological issues even among people who might once have been bored or overawed by such things…
‘Situation Ethics’ has made an important contribution to… the ‘democratization’ of the theological conversation… Most of its readers were people who have not attended seminary. Many, indeed, who were not even church members found its items stimulating… There is still another important tendency in present-day religious life to which the book makes an equally-important… contribution. It might be called the ‘rediscovery of experience.’ … what most ordinary people have to contribute to the ethical discussion is NOT … a high degree of skill in thinking through tangled ethical issues. Rather, it is their own EXPERIENCE, their own moral failures, successes, hopes, and fears. Situation ethics… tries to take particular cases into consideration, gives experience a central place in ethical method… These essays merely begin a process which will fail utterly unless it is extended into the reader’s own experience…. into that ongoing controversy about choices and decisions which is the substance of human life itself.”
An article in Time magazine [Jan 21, 1966] noted, “To the situationist, says Fletcher, ‘even a transient sex liaison, if it has the elements of caring, or tenderness and selfless concern, is better than a mechanical, egocentric exercise of conjugal ‘rights’ between two uncaring or antagonistic marriage partners.’” (Pg. 24)
Dean Charles H. Buck preached a sermon on October 30, 1966, in which he said, “[Situation Ethics] is nothing but a general license for promiscuity. Doesn’t Joseph Fletcher realize that the more you want to do a thing the easier it is to persuade yourself that your motive is one of love?...’ When I had finished, my colleague said, ‘Charles… you don’t know what you’re talking about… [Fletcher told students] that love is based on respect for the one you love as a whole person… and while it is conceivable that this kind of love might justify sex outside of marriage in a very few exceptional situations, in normal situations it dictates just the reverse, because love forbids you to make use of another person as a means to and end…’ It was a rebuke and I deserved it… Perhaps the law of love is not the final answer. But it is the kind of answer to which this generation will listen… And I notice that young people seem to be willing to take the new morality more seriously than they can take the old preachments.” (Pg. 29-30)
A 1967 newspaper editorial said, “[Fletcher] pointed up his new-found freedom by offering the Ten Commandments as an example. He would amend them to read this way: ‘Thou shalt not covet, ordinarily.’ ‘Thou shalt not kill, ordinarily.’ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery, ordinarily.’ ‘In other words, Dr. Fletcher declared, ‘for me there are no rules.’ … We would like to hear Dr. Fletcher’s explanation of a rape case, or the mass murders of the nurses in Chicago a few months ago. What he is saying is that in some situations, those crimes could be right.” (Pg. 31-32)
John C. Bennett argues, “I agree with most of what Fletcher says about the need of flexibility in dealing with the changing and distinctive elements in situations. I have two major criticisms… To use love as the great simplifier of ethics is to place too much emphasis on the motive of the one who acts and not enough on the sources of illumination concerning what is good for those who are affected by the action… My other major criticism is that … Fletcher has taken most of the tension out of Christian ethics in practice… Indeed in the whole area of social ethics this method of Fletcher’s is likely to be far too simple and the reduce the range of the ‘situation’ that is recognized.” (Pg. 67-68)
A book review to Wilford Cross says, “One objects at times, to the polemical character of much of the writing, and its prophetic but sometimes rather tedious attack upon ‘legalism,’ especially since no effort is made, really, to distinguish between the uses of law as guidelines and the imposition of legalistic requirements in morality. One objects also to the radical oversimplification of human personality that is present in the method in that it largely disregards values, virtues and conscience, and the human structures by which we usually make our moral decisions. Indeed, the method tends to reduce moral problem-solving to an application of love, as ‘the most loving thing to do,’ to a situation. This is indeed reductionism of the complex mechanisms of psychological decision.” (Pg. 73-74)
In a book review by Joseph F. Green, it was stated, “Judgment, of course, is called for. Rigid legalism is not adequate. It is right for Bonhoeffer to plot to kill Hitler. Yet the exceptions are quite extraordinary. Fletcher’s mistake lies in implying that they are relatively common. The larger good calls for consistency, and the New Testament is on the side of the larger good.” (Pg. 79)
Edward LeRoy Long Jr. argues, “This approach to ethical decision seems…. to acknowledge that the claim of the person who stands in the concrete situation… is greater than the claim of any abstract conception of the right… A second important aspect of the new morality is its willingness to make common cause with the moral practices of its culture. It regards the moral changes that are taking place in our time as more to be welcomed and transformed than to be resisted or reversed.” (Pg. 108-109)
Robert E. Fitch comments, “There is nothing ‘new’ in this ethics… It is more absolutist than anything in Immanuel Kant. The fact that this is a love-absolutism… does not make things better. It makes them worse. In the hands of humans, or in their hearts and heads, all absolutes are destroyers. Absolutes are only for God.” (Pg. 117)
Charles Curran points out, “Occasionally, situationists propose the problem in terms of love versus law. Joseph Fletcher inaccurately states the problem in terms of opposing methodologies of legalism and situationalism. Such a formulation of the problem is totally unfair. The principalist would never admit that the law or principle should always be followed even when love would demand something else… Rather the proper question is: does love demand constant, uniform ways of acting? Are there certain actions which are always incompatible with love… The problem centers on the very few, specific, universal prohibitions… To admit that certain actions are incompatible with Christian existence does not mean that one subscribed to code morality.” (Pg. 188-189)
Harvey Seifert observes, “the distinctive emphasis of contextualism is that it leaves the norm of love too nebulous to be meaningful. Outgoing concern for others gives little guidance until we ask WHAT in general is to be sought for others. Principles or middle axioms are necessary to spell out such meanings… the concept of love can easily be given all kinds of curious meanings… Either we give meaningful content to love by a system of principles or we leave conduct essentially unguided by love, except possibly in some erratic or intuitional sense.” (Pg. 226)
John Lachs notes, “it is difficult to take seriously [Fletcher’s] assertion that situation ethics is a method only… [It] is both more and less than a method… to designate something as the summum bonum is to do far more than merely providing a method of making moral decisions. If love is the only thing good as an end, we know not only HOW to make choices, we also know WHAT to choose.” (Pg. 241)
In Fletcher’s “Reflection and Reply” that closes the book, he says, “The old morality with its classical absolutes and universals is a form of Pharisaism… The new morality… follows love (freedom to put human need before anything else), staying as close to law as possible yet departing as far from it as need be. Jesus taught this situationist kind of freedom from moral law. He held that morals were made for man, not man for morals.” (Pg. 249)
He acknowledges, “Some critics have been shrewd enough to recognize that situationism is, by traditional standards, a little ‘weak’ on the side of guilt, sin, repentance, and forgiveness. Its sharp distinction between remorse or contrition, and regret, is bound to narrow the range of the forgiveness business. It holds that sins are offenses against love (i.e., against God), but if love in any situation calls for violation of a moral law, no sin is committed that needs excuse of remission. If an act is loving, it is right and therefore good.” (Pg. 256)
Interested persons might also want to read Fletcher's exchange with evangelical apologist John Warwick Montgomery (Situation Ethics: True or False?).
Joseph Francis Fletcher (1905-1991) was an American professor who propounded the theory of “Situational Ethics” in the 1960s, and was a pioneer in the field of bioethics. Once ordained as an Episcopal priest [he taught Christian Ethics at Episcopal Divinity School and at Harvard Divinity School from 1944 to 1970], he later identified himself as an atheist. He was active in the Euthanasia Society of America, the American Eugenics Society, and the American Humanist Association [which named him “Humanist of the Year” in 1974]. He wrote books such as The Ethics of Genetic Control; Humanhood; Morals and Medicine, etc.
Fletcher's 1966 book Situation Ethics: The New Morality sold more than 150,000 copies and touched off a firestorm of controversy. This 1968 book includes reviews, criticisms, and essays (by persons including Charles Curran, James Pike, as well as an Introduction by editor Harvey Cox). There is also a "Reflection and Reply" by Fletcher at the end.
Cox wrote in his “Introduction and Perspective,” “Why… should ‘Situation Ethics: The New Morality’ have caused such a storm, ignited so many fires, and elicited such a wave of response both negative and positive?... In the lively discussion about ethics now going on in the world, the hour for the idea so eloquently presented by Fletcher had obviously come… ‘Situation Ethics’ rang a bell with thousands of readers. It did so because its time had come in the form of a man whose lifelong experience had prepared him for articulating it and because there was now an audience whose readiness to hear it had reached an optimum size… there is a large and growing group of readers today who are perfectly ready to cope with theologically and ethically sophisticated material… so long as it is not written in arcane or abstruse language. It may be true that church attendance figures are falling off… But at the same time there is a distinct upturn of interest in theological issues even among people who might once have been bored or overawed by such things…
‘Situation Ethics’ has made an important contribution to… the ‘democratization’ of the theological conversation… Most of its readers were people who have not attended seminary. Many, indeed, who were not even church members found its items stimulating… There is still another important tendency in present-day religious life to which the book makes an equally-important… contribution. It might be called the ‘rediscovery of experience.’ … what most ordinary people have to contribute to the ethical discussion is NOT … a high degree of skill in thinking through tangled ethical issues. Rather, it is their own EXPERIENCE, their own moral failures, successes, hopes, and fears. Situation ethics… tries to take particular cases into consideration, gives experience a central place in ethical method… These essays merely begin a process which will fail utterly unless it is extended into the reader’s own experience…. into that ongoing controversy about choices and decisions which is the substance of human life itself.”
An article in Time magazine [Jan 21, 1966] noted, “To the situationist, says Fletcher, ‘even a transient sex liaison, if it has the elements of caring, or tenderness and selfless concern, is better than a mechanical, egocentric exercise of conjugal ‘rights’ between two uncaring or antagonistic marriage partners.’” (Pg. 24)
Dean Charles H. Buck preached a sermon on October 30, 1966, in which he said, “[Situation Ethics] is nothing but a general license for promiscuity. Doesn’t Joseph Fletcher realize that the more you want to do a thing the easier it is to persuade yourself that your motive is one of love?...’ When I had finished, my colleague said, ‘Charles… you don’t know what you’re talking about… [Fletcher told students] that love is based on respect for the one you love as a whole person… and while it is conceivable that this kind of love might justify sex outside of marriage in a very few exceptional situations, in normal situations it dictates just the reverse, because love forbids you to make use of another person as a means to and end…’ It was a rebuke and I deserved it… Perhaps the law of love is not the final answer. But it is the kind of answer to which this generation will listen… And I notice that young people seem to be willing to take the new morality more seriously than they can take the old preachments.” (Pg. 29-30)
A 1967 newspaper editorial said, “[Fletcher] pointed up his new-found freedom by offering the Ten Commandments as an example. He would amend them to read this way: ‘Thou shalt not covet, ordinarily.’ ‘Thou shalt not kill, ordinarily.’ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery, ordinarily.’ ‘In other words, Dr. Fletcher declared, ‘for me there are no rules.’ … We would like to hear Dr. Fletcher’s explanation of a rape case, or the mass murders of the nurses in Chicago a few months ago. What he is saying is that in some situations, those crimes could be right.” (Pg. 31-32)
John C. Bennett argues, “I agree with most of what Fletcher says about the need of flexibility in dealing with the changing and distinctive elements in situations. I have two major criticisms… To use love as the great simplifier of ethics is to place too much emphasis on the motive of the one who acts and not enough on the sources of illumination concerning what is good for those who are affected by the action… My other major criticism is that … Fletcher has taken most of the tension out of Christian ethics in practice… Indeed in the whole area of social ethics this method of Fletcher’s is likely to be far too simple and the reduce the range of the ‘situation’ that is recognized.” (Pg. 67-68)
A book review to Wilford Cross says, “One objects at times, to the polemical character of much of the writing, and its prophetic but sometimes rather tedious attack upon ‘legalism,’ especially since no effort is made, really, to distinguish between the uses of law as guidelines and the imposition of legalistic requirements in morality. One objects also to the radical oversimplification of human personality that is present in the method in that it largely disregards values, virtues and conscience, and the human structures by which we usually make our moral decisions. Indeed, the method tends to reduce moral problem-solving to an application of love, as ‘the most loving thing to do,’ to a situation. This is indeed reductionism of the complex mechanisms of psychological decision.” (Pg. 73-74)
In a book review by Joseph F. Green, it was stated, “Judgment, of course, is called for. Rigid legalism is not adequate. It is right for Bonhoeffer to plot to kill Hitler. Yet the exceptions are quite extraordinary. Fletcher’s mistake lies in implying that they are relatively common. The larger good calls for consistency, and the New Testament is on the side of the larger good.” (Pg. 79)
Edward LeRoy Long Jr. argues, “This approach to ethical decision seems…. to acknowledge that the claim of the person who stands in the concrete situation… is greater than the claim of any abstract conception of the right… A second important aspect of the new morality is its willingness to make common cause with the moral practices of its culture. It regards the moral changes that are taking place in our time as more to be welcomed and transformed than to be resisted or reversed.” (Pg. 108-109)
Robert E. Fitch comments, “There is nothing ‘new’ in this ethics… It is more absolutist than anything in Immanuel Kant. The fact that this is a love-absolutism… does not make things better. It makes them worse. In the hands of humans, or in their hearts and heads, all absolutes are destroyers. Absolutes are only for God.” (Pg. 117)
Charles Curran points out, “Occasionally, situationists propose the problem in terms of love versus law. Joseph Fletcher inaccurately states the problem in terms of opposing methodologies of legalism and situationalism. Such a formulation of the problem is totally unfair. The principalist would never admit that the law or principle should always be followed even when love would demand something else… Rather the proper question is: does love demand constant, uniform ways of acting? Are there certain actions which are always incompatible with love… The problem centers on the very few, specific, universal prohibitions… To admit that certain actions are incompatible with Christian existence does not mean that one subscribed to code morality.” (Pg. 188-189)
Harvey Seifert observes, “the distinctive emphasis of contextualism is that it leaves the norm of love too nebulous to be meaningful. Outgoing concern for others gives little guidance until we ask WHAT in general is to be sought for others. Principles or middle axioms are necessary to spell out such meanings… the concept of love can easily be given all kinds of curious meanings… Either we give meaningful content to love by a system of principles or we leave conduct essentially unguided by love, except possibly in some erratic or intuitional sense.” (Pg. 226)
John Lachs notes, “it is difficult to take seriously [Fletcher’s] assertion that situation ethics is a method only… [It] is both more and less than a method… to designate something as the summum bonum is to do far more than merely providing a method of making moral decisions. If love is the only thing good as an end, we know not only HOW to make choices, we also know WHAT to choose.” (Pg. 241)
In Fletcher’s “Reflection and Reply” that closes the book, he says, “The old morality with its classical absolutes and universals is a form of Pharisaism… The new morality… follows love (freedom to put human need before anything else), staying as close to law as possible yet departing as far from it as need be. Jesus taught this situationist kind of freedom from moral law. He held that morals were made for man, not man for morals.” (Pg. 249)
He acknowledges, “Some critics have been shrewd enough to recognize that situationism is, by traditional standards, a little ‘weak’ on the side of guilt, sin, repentance, and forgiveness. Its sharp distinction between remorse or contrition, and regret, is bound to narrow the range of the forgiveness business. It holds that sins are offenses against love (i.e., against God), but if love in any situation calls for violation of a moral law, no sin is committed that needs excuse of remission. If an act is loving, it is right and therefore good.” (Pg. 256)
Interested persons might also want to read Fletcher's exchange with evangelical apologist John Warwick Montgomery (Situation Ethics: True or False?).
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October 30, 2011Call Number: 170 COX
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