Situation Ethics

The view that ethical judgments must be made within the context of the entirety of the situation and that all normative features of a situation must be viewed as a whole, that is, that there are no fixed moral recipes applicable to every dilemma. However, situation ethics does hold that there are some fixed norms that can be applied on a universal basis. Situation ethics, then, does not attempt to abstract morally relevant features from one particular case and apply them to other similar cases, as with high casuistry. In other words, the moral status of acts must be evaluated within the context of the entire situation, making use of some universal principles but insisting that these principles can only be understood appropriately within the particulars of the situation. For example, the situation ethics of Joseph Fletcher was based on the universal norm of brotherly love. According to Fletcher’s situational ethics, brotherly love was to be manifested differently in different situations by discovering the most loving act through calculating its consequences with respect to the specific circumstances.

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