Turns Out, I Wasn’t Buying It Even Then

In my last post I included Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of the idea of situation ethics or relative morality.  When writing that post I was put in mind of my having read Joeseph Fletcher’s book “Situation Ethics: The New Morality” for a sociology class.  That would have been in the late 60s (the copyright date is 1966).  My memories were that I was swayed by the arguments in that book to look at my views of morality differently.  Turns out I actually still have my original copy (price on cover: $1.95) with my notes from the time.

My notes throughout the book reveal that I seem to have open mindedly considered as well as questioned the arguments and theses of the book, but that in the end I wasn’t sold.  Indeed, I seem to have at least intuited the criticisms spoken by Solzhenitsyn 5 or 10 years later.  The inside cover includes my handwritten comment that reads as follows:

whole book, & idea appears as just a way of rationalizing your sins, and “is trying to get out of it.”

makes us all out to be gods, who can choose to take a life for example, but we aren’t and we can’t.

Seems very slanted.  Only uses a very few Biblical examples over and over.

I don’t recall myself as being that perceptive.  But maybe it takes one looking back with later experience and history to see what one actually knew in the past.  The fact that my memory was that I had a fairly positive and transformative reaction to the book when I studied it is telling as to how the book and this new philosophy of relativism must have taken hold within our culture. 

Now, looking back with what I know and what I see around me today, I find the book truly frightening.  I see how right Solzhenitsyn was when he noted that the Communist ideology of relative (or class and identity) morality was a successful tool in its (and today’s Leftist Progressive ideology) anti-humanity crusade to gain power only for itself and gain the ability to fully manipulate the rest of us.

THE LURE OF SITUATIONAL MORALITY

The back of my copy of Situation Ethics touts it as “a manifesto of individual freedom and individual responsibility, elaborated within an ethic of love, which extricates modern man from rigid, archaic rules and codes.”

That was the 60s.  Think how enlightened that sounded.  “Individual freedom and individual responsibility”: isn’t that what people of the 60s were discovering – their ability to be themselves, to not conform and be like everyone else?  “Elaborated within an ethic of love”:  love one another was a sound and phrase of the times, how could that be bad?  And with these positive slogans we will “extricate modern man from rigid, archaic rules and codes”:  those would be the absolutes, the good and evil that served us well since civilized time began, the absolutes whose removal, Solzhenitsyn notes, leave us with nothing but the manipulation of one by another.

On page 56 of the book one finds a summary of the six propositions on which its philosophy of situation ethics rests: “The first one pins down the nature of value.  The second reduces all values to love.   The third equates love and justice.  The fourth frees love from sentimentality.  The fifth states the relation between means and ends.  The sixth authenticates every decision within its own content.” 

According to the author, “The new morality, situation ethics, declares that anything and everything is right or wrong, according to the situation.”  The author declares this new morality is not new, but is Bible-based and, like so many false prophets before and after him, he takes selected quotes from the Bible out of context to justify his philosophy that essentially comes down to:  do what feels good for you – if it feels good, it’s OK.

WHERE DID IT LEAD US

I think that in the 60s most who considered it didn’t notice the possible consequences of what embracing situational or relative morality might mean.  It is, I believe, a part of the lives of most of us today, and the Left has fully embraced it.

I think most everyone today will ignore otherwise rigid rules in at least some situations.  And probably people have always done this to some extent (is there anyone who has never told “a little white lie”?). 

But when there are absolute rules of right and wrong, good and evil, the breaking of these rules is less prevalent and is accompanied by some sort of guilt and understanding of one’s own wrongdoing.  When those “rigid” rules are gone one is ultimately left to do whatever one wants, regardless of what may be right or wrong for others.

Today, beyond more prevalent acceptance of excusing rule breaking in some circumstances, there are those who seem to believe that there really are no rules – they truly believe that a situation itself is the governing body in all circumstances. 

How else would we find people justifying theft and robbery (because they are just taking what they need), justifying the killing of police (because they are allegedly systemically racist), justifying violent riots called protests when they claim to serve a popular cause, even when they hurt or kill innocent bystanders, businesses, and government buildings (BLM riots after Floyd killing) but demanding severe punishment, even death to those whose protests violated the perimeter of the Capital building for a cause out of favor with the Left?

How else would we find people justifying the silencing of opposing viewpoints that they find uncomfortable, the disinviting of conservative speakers to college campuses because their views are offensive to Left-leaning students and faculty, the justification of harassing, namecalling, and sometimes physically attacking individuals who speak out in opposition to Leftist causes (most recently those who oppose CRT)? 

How else would we find the entertainment business and the elite and progressive individuals who profit from it justifying a daily diet of “entertainment” that sexualizes women and children while then acting as if they are horrified when someone whose politics are contrary to theirs commits even the slightest “MeToo” violation?

How else would we find the Left asserting its support for women’s rights and equal opportunity, then undermining those assertions when a biological male wants to compete as a female?   

How else would we find people believing that they can claim to be a devout follower of Catholicism yet be pro-abortion (a mortal sin in that faith) and demand they still be allowed to participate in the holy eucharist which requires adherence to the Catholic liturgy?

How else would we have a President requesting that social media censor and ban any posting that does not speak the truth, yet giving no criteria for what is “truth” or who will decide if a posting meets it, resulting, for example, in the idea that any suggestion that the Wuhan Virus came from the Wuhan lab should have been banned as untruthful, even though that now is the prevalent scientific theory?  How can science and humanity progress if no one is allowed to question or to present alternate ideas and theories?

THE RESULT OF EMBRACING RELATIVE MORALITY IS NOT PRETTY AND IT IS ANTI-HUMANITY

The above list could go on and on.  It includes just some of the examples of situation ethics in action that immediately come to mind.  I am sure every reader of this blog can think of many others.

We are destroying ourselves while believing that we have raised ourselves to some higher level of love.  Self-love seems to be the guiding principle – open any lifestyle magazine, any Sunday supplement, any self-help blog, any TV morning-show type supplement and you will hear about the importance of “self-care.”    That is where situational morality has taken us – to place the self as a god and the center of one’s universe. 

That’s fine if you live alone on some mountain top, but when two or more people come together who believe the situation and their feelings govern all even to the extent of justifying murder of the other, someone is going to have to determine whose self-love is superior. 

Once people have been manipulated into giving up absolute moral values, they need someone in power to decide what is OK in this or that situation.  That is where the progressive Leftist philosophy comes in.  They believe they can and should decide for each and every one of us, not because they know or care what is best, but because their philosophy requires and entitles them to do so.  They will take away humanity and replace it with manipulation and indifference.  As Solzhenitsyn so aptly noted, their goal is to destroy our social order.  The back cover of the Situation Ethics book essentially admits that as its intent.

My 1960s notes on Situation Ethics were more accurate than I understood at the time. I didn’t buy into it then, even though I thought I had.  Perhaps you didn’t buy into Situation Ethics either when you were first introduced.  But when there is what Solzhenitsyn calls a “constant dinning” and what we would today call propaganda with a daily barrage of one viewpoint taught from almost birth, it is easy to lose what one knows to be true and to buy into what we inherently know to be a mistake.   

We are not gods and relative morality, no matter how honorable and humane and even holy it may sound, is nothing more than a way to destroy the human essence and individuality and replace it with an ugly and oppressive power wielded by an elite and selfish few.  Each one of us who has let this destructive situation ethics into our lives needs to exorcise it immediately.