LOA’s

Question 1

Is situation ethics a helpful method of moral decision-making?

Answer 1

• Situation ethics intends to offer a loving and flexible guide for decision-making, especially within the Christian context.

• However, it ultimately fails to be a helpful method of moral decision-making due to:
• Its radical subjectivity and lack of moral boundaries
• The unreliable assumption that humans will act lovingly without rules
• Its incoherence with broader Christian teachings
• The theory’s reliance on agape, while noble in intent, collapses under the weight of interpretive disagreements and practical failures.

Final line of argument: Although situation ethics is motivated by compassion and may serve as a supplementary guide in some moral dilemmas, it is not a reliable or helpful standalone system for moral decision-making, especially when societal or religious coherence is required.

Question 2

Can an ethical judgement about something being good, bad, right or wrong be based on the extent to which, in any given situation, agape is best served?

Answer 2

Although Fletcher’s agape-centred ethics aims to offer compassionate flexibility in moral decision-making, it is ultimately unsuitable as the primary or sole basis for determining what is good, bad, right, or wrong.

•	It grants too much power to individual judgement, fails to reliably reflect the full ethical teachings of Christianity, and collapses into subjectivity, undermining its own aim of love.

•	In practical terms, ethical judgements must be grounded in more stable, universally interpretable principles, even if agape remains a central value.

•	Therefore, ethical judgement cannot be based solely on agape, despite its admirable intentions.

Question 3

Is Fletcher’s understanding of agape really religious?

Answer 3

Fletcher’s situation ethics fails to be genuinely religious because it reinterprets agape into a secular, relativistic principle rather than treating it as a divine command.

While it superficially echoes Jesus’ teaching, it rejects the necessary structure of Christian moral theology—commandments, scripture, and objective divine authority.

In doing so, it strips agape of its religious context and reduces it to a subjective human tool, thus severing it from the religious tradition it claims to represent.

Question 4

Does Fletcher’s agape mean nothing more than wanting the best for the person involved in a given situation?

Answer 4

While Fletcher’s agape goes beyond wanting the best in intent and structure, its radical subjectivity and rejection of Christian commandments mean it fails as a stable or authentically Christian ethical theory.

Therefore, Fletcher’s agape is not just wanting the best—but it ends up being no more useful than that due to its failure to ground ethics in anything objective or reliably Christian.

Question 5

Is there a danger posed by making moral decision-making entirely individualistic and subjective

Answer 5

While Fletcher’s theory offers a morally sincere alternative to rigid legalism, it overcorrects by relying too heavily on individual judgement.

This invites moral instability and opens the door to antinomianism.

Therefore, the danger of making moral decision-making entirely subjective is not merely theoretical but demonstrable, and Fletcher’s situation ethics proves this through its own internal tensions.