Word: fletcherize
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...systematic thinking about morality, and it claims an impressive array of advocates. In Europe it has found a home in the thinking of Karl Earth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann. Its chief American exponents include Paul Lehmann of Union Theological Seminary, James Gustafson of Yale, and Joseph Fletcher of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. In a recent issue of Commonweal, and in a book called Situation Ethics that Westminster will publish this spring, Fletcher offers a lively, readable defense and definition of this way to moral decision...
Principles as Tools. Fletcher argues that situation ethics avoids the pitfalls of other approaches to morality. In both the natural-law morality of Roman Catholics and the scriptural law of Protestantism, he argues, principles become inflexible and "obedience to prefabricated 'rules of conduct' is more important than freedom to make responsible decisions." On the other hand, the antinomian, or nonprincipled, approach of the existentialists leads to anarchy and to moral decisions that are "random, unpredictable, erratic, quite anomalous...
...situationist agrees with Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor who decided that it was his Christian duty to join the plot on Hitler's life, that "principles are only tools in the hand of God, soon to be thrown away as unserviceable." In the vast majority of instances, Fletcher believes, the principle will probably apply. Yet by refusing to acknowledge absolutes, the situationist can defend, for example, the World War II concentration-camp doctor who saved the lives of 3,000 Rumanian Jewish women by secretly performing abortions on them. Had she not done so, they would have been...
STUDENTS SENTENCED TO CUTS, the Rhodesia Herald reported: "At a special magistrate's court held in Senka Village yesterday evening, 239 African students from the Fletcher High School, aged between 15 and 21, pleaded guilty. The allegation was that they took part in an unlawful procession . . . The magistrate, Mr. D. K. Utting, imposed sentences ranging from four to six cuts on the juveniles, and on those aged 19 or more, one month imprisonment suspended for three years conditionally, plus six cuts...
Humphrey was delivering the first Edward L. Bernays Foundation Lecture at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He had just dedicated the Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy and lavishly eulogized Murrow throughout the speech...