From Decision to Vision: Virtue, Community, and Hauerwas’ Critique of Fletcher’s Situation Ethics

In the 1960s and 70s, Joseph Fletcher’s “situation ethics” (or “new morality”) emerged as a prominent attempt to loosen Christian moral reflection from inherited legalism and dogmatism amid new dilemmas in medicine and public life. While influential, it also provoked sustained criticism from many Christian ethicists, not least because its appeal to love risked reinforcing a decision-centered account of moral agency. This essay reconstructs that debate and highlights Stanley Hauerwas’s early engagement with Fletcher in Vision and Virtue, where Hauerwas affirms the ambiguity of moral notions yet resists reducing ethics to case-by-case adjudication. Drawing on Iris Murdoch and Wittgenstein, Hauerwas describes Christian ethics as an “aesthetics” in the limited but important sense that moral life depends on trained perception: we can act only within the world we are able to see. Crucially, such “vision” is not an individual achievement but is learned through participation in the community of believers – its narratives, practices, and disciplines – that forms the virtues by which the world can be truthfully described. The result is a reorientation from deciding well in isolated cases to becoming the kind of people who can see and live faithfully.