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Responsible Decision Making
By Joseph Fletcher

RECENTLY I lectured at the United States Air Force Academy, near Colorado Springs, on the subject of situation ethics and responsible decision making. Among other things, I said that the war in Viet Nam is illegal, immoral, and insane. This was hard for most of the cadets to take, but they heard me out because I had first made it clear that as a situationist I cannot be a pacifist or embrace any other ideological or doctrinaire approach to any moral problem. What is right in any situation, including wars, depends on the variables.

When I let my memory run, I realize that this shift from principled to situational ethics came more from secular than from religious sources. In fact, I found the model for it in the clinical method of medicine, business management, social work, and personal counseling. Responsible decision makers, and people in the helping professions, are concrete and particular. They do not resort to prefabricated answers in their treatment of human needs and ills.

While I was theologizing professionally and teaching Christian ethics, I tended to reason deductively (as they do in traditional moral theology). I would start with doctrines of creation, providence, the incarnation, the eucharist, soteriological theory, and then try by logical implication to deduce what is good or evil, right or wrong. Then I tried to apply these doctrinaire abstractions to specific problems of conscience. Sometimes I would try to justify judgments out of the Bible, using texts and hermeneutical footwork-an equally a priori device.

Formerly Professor of Pastoral Theology and Christian Ethics at the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass., Joseph Fletcher is the author of Situation Ethics (1966) and Moral Responsibility (1967). He is now serving as Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Virginia Hospital, Charlottesville, Va.

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But over the years this style ate more and more at my intellectual vitals. Sociology, medicine, and biomedical science, as well as clinical pastoral theology, finally forced me to change over from the traditional approach to an empirical and contextual one, adducing (instead of deducing) values and obligations from real situations and objective data and using inductive (rather than deductive) logic. I finally saw clearly that a syllogism is either a platitude or a mistake stemming from a false major premise.

This de-theologization reduced my method radically to only one constant or universal duty, namely, to act with loving concern. In its Christian form, it seems to me that situationism is a radical agapism as to its substantive good and a radical relativism as to its normative obligation. Not doctrines but data become the all-important consideration.

A second de-theologization of Christian ethics was for me of equal significance. My observations of human acts and cultural forms led me to recognize (as perhaps before I had not really wanted to) that Christians have no monopoly of love, either as to its perceptions or its performance. On the contrary, much of the time I found that non-Christians and even anti-Christians put us to shame. I drew the conclusion (reluctantly, I admit) that there is nothing distinctive in Christian ethics as to what we ought to do or how we ought to do it---only, sometimes, as to why. As Christians we have our own faith-reasons for making agape our ultimate motive and criterion, but as Christians we have no special insights or powers for "doing" it.

Paul Lehmann, in the mainstream of piety, challenges this "leveller's doctrine" with his conviction about the koinonia. But I know of no evidence to support the claim that Christians are better "lovers" than lots of atheists, Marxists, infidels, and humanists.

Enjoying the privilege of being a sexagenarian, I can say very comfortably that my life and thought have reduced me to the basic dogmas of the historic faith, with not much interest anymore in the doctrines with which theologizers have tried to interpret and relate the dogmas. God is pretty much an "oblong blur," but I hold onto that dogma stubbornly because it "makes sense" more than its alternative, once we give up the pretension of thinking his thoughts after him (strike the personal pronouns, if you like). Jesus, that man for others, I can still call Lord because he is the model and paradigm of love. But let it be clear that on this basis one believes in God be-

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cause one believes in Jesus, and one believes in Jesus because one believes in love, and one believes in love because of his humanity. It does not hang on special revelation.

Some of the kids these days are calling this the "superstar" commitment. In my stodgy, older-generation rhetoric, I would call it standing with Herbert Butterfield on the saying, "Hold fast to Christ and for the rest be uncommitted." Systematic theology is pretty much a shambles, but out of the present revival of religion, going on all around us, the Christian faith could take on a great new lease of life.