Situation ethics; the new morality by Fletcher Joseph F

Author:Fletcher, Joseph F
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Christian ethics, Situation ethics, Morale, Situatie-ethiek
Publisher: Philadelphia, Westminster Press
Published: 1966-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Christian situation ethics says faith is works, i.e., simply put, that faith works. In the same way various systems of Christian ethics have related love and justice: love versus justice (opposites),^ love or justice (alternatives),^° love and justice (complements).^^ We say, however, very positively, that love is justice or that justice loves. They are one and the same. To be loving is to be just, to be just is to be loving.

The tendency to reify, to imagine that predicates are actually properties, is as potent in the case of justice as of love. Psychologically, it becomes easier to separate them into different entities when they are supposed to he something. Nygren with his motif research separated and opposed them, putting justice in eros or self-interest and love in agape or disinterestedness.^^ So did Denis de Rougemont.^^ Reinhold Niebuhr separated and made them alternatives, love transcendent and impossible, justice relative and possible.^* (Rather than saying with Niebuhr that love is ideal and justice is actual, we should be saying that love is maximum justice and justice is optimum love.) Emil Brunner and William Temple have separated them, assigning love to interpersonal relations and justice to intergroup relations. All Catholic moraHsts separate them, making love a "supernatural" virtue and justice a "natural"

^ See Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros, tr. by Phihp S. Watson (The Westminster Press, 1953).

^° Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941-1943), Vol. II, pp. 245 ff.

^* William Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1950), p. 75; Emil Brunner, Justice and the Social Order (London: Lutterworth Press, 1945), pp. 114-118, 125. Also, see any competent work in Roman Catholic moral theology.

^2 Agape and Eros.

^^ Love in the Western World (Pantheon Books, 1956).

^* His constructive ethics is equivocal because he uses "mutual love," meaning a relative "possible" love.

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