Fletcher Ethics Quotes

It is not enough to simply listen to student voice. Educators have an ethical imperative to do something with students, and that is why meaningful student involvement is vital to school improvement.

Every artist carries upon his shoulders a profound moral responsibility. This responsibility is not, as supposed, the duty of teaching us to conform to the modern official distortion of Christian ethics, by which we are ruled. It is not the duty of upholding a system of negations, of prohibitions, of compromises, striking at the very roots of life. It is a far nobler, far more difficult task. The duty of the artist is to affirm the dignity of life, the value of humanity, despite the morbid prejudices of Puritanism, the timid conventionality of the mob, despite even his own knowledge of the insoluble riddle of suffering, decay and death.

A third form of relativism smuggled into the popular culture is called situation ethics. Popularized by Joseph Fletcher in the 1960s and 1970s, situation ethics holds that all morality is relative to the situation in which one finds oneself, and one’s moral obligation is to do the loving thing in that situation.

There is another use of the term ‘human’, one proposed by Joseph Fletcher, a major figure in the development of bioethics. Fletcher compiled a list of what he called ‘Indicators of Humanhood’ that includes the following: self-awareness, self-control, a sense of the future, a sense of the past, the capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication and curiosity.

Christian situation ethics has only one norm or principle or law...that is binding and unexceptionable, always good and right regardless of the circumstances. That is 'love' -- the agape of the summary commandment to love God and neighbor. Everything else without exception, all laws and rules and principles and ideals and norms, are only contingent, only valid if they happen to serve love in any situation.