SE

[Sarahboo2002]

Hi miss I am so sorry to message again.
I just have a couple of questions for situation ethics:
I am firstly not sure of the difference between Jesus’ ‘individualistic’ love and Fletcher’s interpeation of agape in the Bible, my textbook says: However, Fletcher’s idea of love isn’t the same as Jesus eg Jesus individualised love eg helping centurion, which were not v popular acts of love.
Would you be arguing is SE good as a way to make all of our moral deicisons or just that it can be used in extreme circumstances

Could you say SE is good because it permits rules and allows breaking them in only exceptional circumstances? But then how doe you judge an exceptional circumstance.
Fletcher felt rules should generally be followed, and breaking them is not a decision to be taken lightly, therefore the idea SE provides little to no guidance and no social cohesion is false, as on the whole people would be following a legalistic system with exceptions being made only in rare, extreme cases.— could argue what is an extreme case? Still to subjective as different people might say different things are extreme cases?

[Aimee Horsley]

Hi Sarah,
Jesus focused upon individuals, often in one to one situations and often people who where not liked in society. Whereas Fletcher’s agape from St Paul’s ideas are more based on unconditional love on a bigger scale. St Paul brought in the idea of agape to stop feuding Christian communities, so it is about applying it on a bigger rather than individualistic scale.

I think your point above is spot on. A problem with SE is how do you know when a situation is ‘extreme’ enough to break the rules. Plus if you break the rules because of Agape love, you are still breaking the law = illegal and will be punished accordingly, so it doesn’t have a lot of application in reality 🙂

[Author]

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