A REASONABLE MORALITY; Situation Ethics

(I've rewritten this three times and it is still too long. But, it is what it is and I can't get it any shorter without messing with the logic and meaning, Sorry!)

TWO THINGS SHOULD BECOME CLEAR AS WE PROCEED:
1. That situation ethics are not exactly new, either in method or in content.
2. That as a method, its roots lay securely, even if not conventionally, in the classical tradition of Western Christian morals.

During the Republican National Convention in Dallas, in the middle 80"s, one of my “Moderate” Republican friends said, “I and my father and grandfather before me, and their fathers, have always been straight-ticket Republicans.”
“Ah,” I said, “I take it that means you will vote for President Reagan.”
“No,” my friend said, “there are times when a man has to push his principles aside and do the right thing.” There is no way I can put into this essay, a better definition of situation ethics. My Republican friend is the Hero of this piece.

In N. Richard Nash’s “THE RAINMAKER,” a morally outraged brother of a lonely, spinster girl threatens to shoot the sympathetic Rainmaker because he makes love to her in the barn at midnight. The Rainmaker’s intention is to restore her sense of womanliness and her hopes for marriage and children. Her father, a wise old rancher, grabs the pistol away from his son, saying, “Son, you’re so full of what’s right you can’t see what’s good.”

Situation Ethics is based on “LOVE.” Now, there are so many meanings and definitions of “LOVE” that there is a temptation to drop the word altogether in ethical discourse. Christians want to use only the “AGAPE,” and this is not what is meant. The word LOVE is too rich to through away ruthlessly.

There are only three alternative routes or approaches to follow in making moral decisions. They are:
1. The legalistic
2. The antinomian (unprincipled approach)
3. The situational

Just as legalism triumphed among the Jews after the exile, so in spite of Jesus’ and Paul’s revolt against it, it has managed to dominate Christianity constantly from the very early days. As we shall be seeing, in many real-life situations legalism demonstrates what Henry Miller, in a shrewd phrase, calls “The immorality of morality.”

1. LEGALISM
With this approach, one enters into every decision making situation encumbered with a whole apparatus of prefabricated rules and regulations. Not the spirit but the letter of the law reigns. Solutions are preset, and you can look them up in a book (Rules, The Bible, The Torah). Statutory and code law inevitably piles up, ruling upon ruling, because the complications of life and the claims of mercy and compassion combine and accumulate and elaborate system of exceptions and compromise, in the form of rules for breaking the rules! It leads to that tricky now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t business of interpretation that the rabbis called “PILPUL”–a hairsplitting and logic-chopping study of the letter of the law. Any web thus woven sooner or later chokes its weavers. With Catholics it has taken the form of a fairly ingenious moral theology that, as its twists and involutions have increased, resort more and more to a CASUISTRY that appears to evade the very LAWS of right and wrong laid down in its textbooks and manuals. (CASUISTRY=the solving of cases of right and wrong by applying principals of ethic, and deciding how far circumstances alter the case, usually used to evade the law)

When visiting my lawyer in Dallas one day, we went into the conference room/law library. The walls were lined with law books, about six feet high and about fifty feet around the room. I told him that I was amazed at how many laws we had. He told me that the laws were up front, six foot high and ten foot across. The rest were the exceptions to those laws.

Protestantism has rarely constructed such intricate codes and systems of law, but what it has gained by its simplicity it has lost through its rigidity, its puritanical insistence on moral rules. They have lost touch with the headaches and heartbreaks of life. How else can one explain burning at the stake in the Middle Ages for homosexuals? Even today imprisonment up the sixty years is the penalty in one state for those who were actually consenting adults, without seduction or public disorder. This is really unavoidable whenever law instead of LOVE is put first. The puritan type is a well-known example of it. But even if the legalist is truly sorry that the law requires unloving or disastrous decisions, he still cries, “Do what is right even if the sky falls down.” He is the man Mark Twain called, “. . . a good man in the worst sense of the word.”

Today, a Christian “LITERALIST” thinks an adulterer more wicked than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a thousand times more harm. That is what Bertrand Russell said in, “WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN.” Most literal churches hold that it is better for the Sun and Moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extreme agony . . . than that one soul should commit one single venial sin.

CAN YOU SEE THIS HAPPENING IN OUR FAIR TOWN?
A Mrs. X is convicted of impairing the morals of her minor daughter. She had tried to teach the child chastity but at thirteen the girl bore the first of three unwanted, neglected babies. Her mother then had said, “If you persist in acting this way, at least be sure the boy wears something!” On this evidence she was convicted and sentenced. The combined forces of “SECULAR” law and legalistic puritanism had tried to prevent loving help to the girl, her bastard victims, and the social agencies trying to help her. Situation ethics would have praised that woman; it would not have pilloried her.

2. ANTINOMIANISM
Over against legalism, as a sort of polar opposite, we can put antinomianism. This is the approach with which one enters into the decision making situation armed with no principles or maxims whatsoever, to say nothing of rules. In every “EXISTENTIAL MOMENT” or “UNIQUE” situation, it declares, one must rely upon the situation of “ITSELF,” to provide its ethical solution.

Antinomianism means, “AGAINST LAW,” and is at issue in I Corinthians 6:12-20. One form is “LIBERTINISM=the belief that by grace and by the new life in Christ and salvation by faith, laws or rules no longer apply to Christians.” Their ultimate happy fate is now assured, and it matters no more what they do. Anything, and I mean anything goes. Thus the warning in I Peter 2:16, “Live as free men, yet without using freedom as a pretext for evil, but live as servants of God.” This license led by inevitable reaction to an increase of legalism, especially in sex ethics, under which Christians still suffer today. The other form of antinomianism, was a Gnostic claim to special, esoteric knowledge. They would just know what was right when they needed to know. While legalists are preoccupied with law and its stipulations, the Gnostics are so flatly opposed to law--even in principle–that their moral decisions are random, unpredictable, erratic, and quite anomalous. They cast out the Torah, but because their decisions are not bounded by LOVE, the baby goes with the bath water!

3. SITUATIONISM
Situationism is between legalism and antinomianism, or unprincipledness. The situationist enters into every decision making situation fully armed with the ethical maxims of community and heritage, and he treats them with respect. Just the same he is prepared in any situation to compromise them or set them aside in each situation if LOVE seems better served by doing so. Situation ethics goes part of the way with natural law, by accepting reason as the instrument of moral judgment. The situationist follows a moral law or violates it according to LOVE’S need.

The situationist never says, “Almsgiving is a good thing, Period!” If help to an indigent only pauperizes and degrades him, the situationist refuses a handout and finds some other way. A legalist might say that even if he tells a man escaped from an insane asylum where his intended victim is, and he finds and murders him, at least only one sin has been committed (murder), and not two (lying as well)! The error of the legalist consists of deducing particular laws from a universal law. Just as though all could be arranged beforehand . . . LOVE, however, is free from all this predefinition. What acts are right may depend on circumstances. We are only obligated to tell the truth if the situation calls for it; if a murderer asks us his victim’s whereabouts, our duty might be to lie. The situationist must make certain that they understand the total situation before making a decision. What is needed is, “FAITH, HOPE, AND CLARITY.”

Rules are, “PUNT ON FOURTH DOWN,” or “TAKE A PITCH WHEN THE COUNT IS THREE BALLS.” These rules are part of the wise player’s know-how, and distinguish him from a novice. But they are not unbreakable. The situational factors are so primary that we may even say “circumstances alter rules and principles.” It is “Casuistry”(case-based) in a constructive and non pejorative sense of the word. A man who makes the law his standard, is obligated to perform all its precepts, because breaking a commandment is breaking the law. He who lives by LOVE is not judged on that basis, but by a standard infinitely higher and at the same time more attainable. LOVE is for people, not for principles. Situation Ethics can be called “PRINCIPLED RELATIVISM.” Edmond Cahn said, “Every case is like every other case, and no two cases are alike.” Situationists cannot give to any principle less than LOVE, more than tentative consideration.

Situation ethics has been branded by some theologians as EXISTENTIAL, and it became synonymous with SITUATIONAL. Many academies and seminaries banned it as a “NEW MORALITY.” Therefore, in determining a choice and a line of judgment, you must decide if you are going to use the LAW ETHIC or the LOVE ETHIC.

EXAMPLE
A patient in a state mental hospital raped a fellow patient, an unmarried girl, ill with a radical schizophrenic psychosis. The victim’s father, learning what had happened, charged the hospital with culpable negligence and requested that an abortion to end the unwanted pregnancy be performed at once. The staff and administrators of the hospital refused to do so, on the grounds that the criminal law forbids all abortions except “THERAPEUTIC” ones when the mother’s life is at stake–because the moral law, it is supposed, holds that any interference with an embryo after fertilization is murder.

The legalists would say NO ABORTION. Their position is that killing is absolutely wrong, inherently evil. The Catholics go far beyond even the rigid legalism of the criminal law, absolutizing their prohibition of abortion ABSOLUTELY, by denying all exceptions and calling even therapeutic abortions, wrong. To the legalist, the life of the mother is in the hand of God, but the life of the child is arbitrarily extinguished. The question whether the life of the mother or the life of the child is of greater value can hardly be a matter for human decision. The situationist might reason that it is not killing because there is no person or human life in an embryo at an early stage of pregnancy, or even if it were killing, it would not be murder because it is self-defense against, in this case, not one but two aggressors. First there is the rapist, who being insane was morally and legally innocent, and then there is the “INNOCENT” embryo which is continuing the ravisher’s original aggression! Even self-defense legalism would have allowed the girl to kill her attacker, no matter that he was innocent in the forum on conscience because of his madness. The embryo is no more innocent, no less an aggressor or unwelcome invader!

Is not the most LOVING thing possible, to terminate the pregnancy?