Abstract

As its title suggests, this book is a discussion of ‘three starting-points, three different ways of throwing light on what ethics is all about’ ; it asks the question: Is ethics basically love, law or language? The first chapter, ‘Ethics as Love’, looks critically at what is generally identified as the situationist approach—‘All you need is love’. The New Testament insistence upon the primacy of love over law is well-known; but this must be balanced by appreciation of the fact that the law in question is the ceremonial law—Christ nowhere sets aside the moral law in favour of love. There remains the question of the status of moral rules; are they absolute or are they simply convenient rules of thumb suffering exceptions? The criticism of the latter view is searching without presenting anything novel. What is love? How does one know that an action is a loving action? To understand the meaning of love one must have experience—love is that kind of term. A consequence is that, even if we cannot positively describe all that is in love, we need at least to be able to state what love is not ‘however open-ended the term may otherwise be’. Love must exclude certain kinds of behaviour if it is to have any meaning; can sexual perversion or the killing of babies ever be an expression of love? On the other hand the word love is a ‘growing’ word and if its meaning occasionally outstrips semantic rules there must remain what the author calls a ‘revolutionary continuity between what love now means for us and what it used to mean’. Again, the idea of ‘situation’ is a good deal more complex than situationist theories sometimes allow. It is something more than the personal face-to-face encounter and must take in much wider fields of human relationship. Furthermore the individual usually finds himself in a number of overlapping situations the demands of which will frequently conflict. All this is well said; and it needs to be said, for situationism of the ‘only love counts’ variety is more prone than most theories to be content with re-assertion instead of meeting telling criticism.