When asked to answer a question on Christian ethics, the two most popular approaches from students are to use ‘natural law’ or ‘situation ethics’ in their response. While natural law has its origins in Aristotle, many mistakenly see situation ethics as a purely twentieth-century phenomenon.
In fact, the theory has its roots in the New Testament teaching of Jesus and the early church and was developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has been hailed as being largely the work of Joseph Fletcher (1905–91). Fletcher was an American Episcopalian minister who later became an atheist. He developed situation ethics in the 1960s as a reaction to Christian legalism and antinomianism under the influence of thinkers such as William Temple (1881–1944) and Paul Tillich (1886–1965). Much of Fletcher’s thinking was condemned as heresy at the time of the publication of his work Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966).
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
