Situational ethics

Situational ethics or situation ethics takes into account only the particular context of an act when evaluating it ethically, rather than judging it only according to absolute moral standards. With the intent to have a fair basis for judgments or action, one looks to personal ideals of what is appropriate to guide them, rather than an unchanging universal code of conduct, such as Biblical law under divine command theory or the Kantian categorical imperative.^[1] Proponents of situational approaches to ethics include existentialist philosophers such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, and Heidegger.^[2]

Specifically Christian forms of situational ethics placing love above all particular principles or rules were proposed in the first half of the twentieth century by liberal theologians Rudolf Bultmann, John A. T. Robinson, and Joseph Fletcher.^[3] These theologians point specifically to agapē, or unconditional love, as the highest end. Other theologians who advocated situational ethics include Josef Fuchs, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich.^[4]: 33 Tillich, for example, declared that "Love is the ultimate law."^[5]

Fletcher, who became prominently associated with this approach in the English-speaking world due to his book (Situation Ethics), stated that "all laws and rules and principles and ideals and norms, are only contingent, only valid if they happen to serve love" in the particular situation,^[4]: 30 and thus may be broken or ignored if another course of action would achieve a more loving outcome. Fletcher has sometimes been identified as the founder of situation ethics, but he himself refers his readers to the active debate over the theme that preceded his own work.^{[4]: 33–34}