Situation ethics

‘Situation ethics’ accords morally decisive weight to particular circumstances in judging whether an action is right or wrong. Thus we should examine critically all traditional rules prohibiting kinds of actions. Proponents of these views have exerted their greatest influence in Europe and North America in the twentieth century, although such influence waned by 1980. The views received extensive scrutiny in Christian communities. Three quite different warrants were offered for privileging discrete situations. First, we should remain dispositionally open to God’s immediate command in a particular time and place (theological contextualism). Second, we should take the actual consequences of particular actions as morally decisive (empirical situationism). Third, we should be ready to perform actions that compromise moral ideals when doing so improves matters in ways a given situation, with its distinctive constraints, makes viable (mournful realism).