Persons and situations

Persons constitute situations or rather situations are depended upon the persons who create uniqueness of the situation. This we see in the exemplary life of Mother Theresa. She saw the poor and the suffering outside the convent walls which gave her a higher calling within her call to be a Lorretto Nun. Many people did not feel in the same way as Mother Theresa did. It was the call of Love that called her to respond in love.

While studying situation ethics, I was perplexed by the convincing arguments that it puts forward. But I was also confounded with a concrete experience or a situation that confronted me. I saw a lady, who seems to have nothing to say as her own. She is mentally sick and often hurls abusive language to those who passes by her. Even at times she bursts out into fits of temper and runs around very wildly. The society and even I name her as a public nuisance. Nobody is moved like Mother Theresa to respond to this woman in need.

Just take into account the possible way of her being-in-the-world. First of all she is definitely born out of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, She must have been abandoned by everyone in her family since they found out that she was good for nothing; she is vulnerable to all possible kinds of physical/ external abuses not even with an exception to sexual abuse;

Now the concern is- She is a human person with her own dignified existence. Now when the situation ethics upholds that we have to respond to situations in love, how can I be practical in attending to a woman who is deemed to have a vegetable existence or that of a stray dog? Joseph Fletcher in defending his positions on love, he gives the examples of homosexuality and premarital sex (in both the kind of practices, the form of love is not the agapeic love but merely erotic). Then how can Fletcher justify his position?

He seems to me as a philosopher who proposes a philosophy to justify all actions which are conveniently done and not out of love in the form of seeing the good of the other.