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.
Other theologians who advocated situational ethics include Josef Fuchs, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich.
"[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.
[citation needed] There was an active debate in the mid-twentieth century around situational ethics, which was being promoted by a number of primarily Protestant theologians.
When deciding whether to use "the most terrible weapon ever known" the US President appointed an Interim Committee made up of distinguished and responsible people in the government.
Now this went against her morals, but if it brought the war to an end, saving thousands of lives, would it be worth breaking those standards?These situations were criticised as being extreme.
Philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, in his autobiography, characterized situation ethics as a "half-baked theory of conduct aired during the early sixties.