Quotes in this article extract are from Acta Apostolicae Sedis 44 (1956). In this document Pope Pius accuses Situation Ethics of being a form of existentialism, subjective, and against the natural moral law. The existentialist charge is one Joseph Fletcher consistently denied: he saw Situation Ethics as somewhere between antinomian existentialism and legalism. You might think carefully about this quote from Pius XII and try using some of it in your A grade essay (you might need a dictionary for “sophistic” and “casuistry”, not used very politely here!): 

“The Christian moral law is in the law of the Creator, engraved in the heart of each one, and in Revelation. . . . The first step or rather the first attack against the structure of Christian moral norms would be to free them from the narrow and oppressive surveillance of the authority of the Church. This would be done in such ways that, once liberated from the sophistic subtleties of the casuistic method, the moral law might be brought back to its original form, leaving it simply to the intelligence and determination of each one’s individual conscience.” AAS 44 pages 272-3 PB

In view of what was said by the Sovereign Pontiff on previous occasions, it is not surprising that the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office condemned Situation Ethics nominatim by a formal decree early in 1956.

This document observed that the “new morality” has insinuated itself even among Catholics, despite the fact that it is contrary to moral doctrines as taught and applied by the Catholic Church. “Situation Ethics” rests not upon principles of objective ethics rooted in being itself, but rather it claims to transcend the limitation of objectivity. Promoters of the system maintain that the ultimate and decisive norm of human activity is not some objective order of right, determined by the law of nature and certainly known in virtue of that law. Rather, they assert that the correct rules of moral action lie in some intimate light and judgment rooted in the mind of each individual person. This subjective intimation enables one who is placed in a particular concrete situation to determine for himself what he is morally obliged to do in each present case. There is no dependence on any immutable rule of action external to man; there is no measure of truth and rectitude beyond oneself; man suffices for his own moral guide.

The devotees of Situation Ethics do not accord any value to the traditional concept “human nature,” except perhaps as something relative and changable existing in this individual person in these individual circumstances. As a corollary, the concept “natural law” is of the same mere relative worth. Many things which are called absolute postulates of the natural law are, in point of fact, rooted in existential human nature. Fortified by this doctrine of the total adaptability of all principles to any challenge in one’s moral life, a man is no longer conscience-bound by objective law. By a kind of intuitive and personalized light, ethical problems that until now seemed virtually insoluble are susceptible of ready solution. In this way, one is freed from bothersome and perplexing moral dilemmas.

Pope Pius XII argued: “It is not difficult to recognize how the new moral system derives from Existentialism, which either prescinds from God, or simply denies Him, and in any case, leaves man to himself.”AAS 44 page 416

Man left to himself is no longer man, for as God is intelligible only in terms of Himself, so man is intelligible only in terms of his relation to God. Through the very fact that this is a created world, man’s reason catches sight of the power of God; of His wisdom; of His Providence, and concludes to transcendent obligations: man has to obey the laws God has impressed upon man’s nature.

Existentialism has for its bête noire the rational process. It is anti-intellectual, for all its brilliant phosphorescence of decay. Its method is to look to whatever is mysterious and illogical in human living to find any explanation of life. “The exploration of the irrational,” proclaims Sartre, “is the special task of the twentieth century.”

The refusal to use the intellect; the substitution of emotion for the rational process—these were linked to the denial of natural law and objective morality by Archbishop O’Hara in his address opening the annual convention of the American Bar Association less than two years ago. Nothing so pointedly reveals the split between Christian ethics and Situation Morality as the former’s ubiquitous insistence on reason in relation to morals.

“Reason is the rule and measure of human acts; it is their first principle,” teaches St. Thomas. (ST I-II Q90 a 2)

While it is the rational appetite which produces the moral act, it is, nevertheless, the reasoning intellect which provides the formal principle of the moral modality of that act. Hence, the moral order is an order of reason: the order of real beings governed in their esse and in their operari by the eternal and immutable law of God running through the warp and woof of human nature. Natural law, with its universal and timeless character, can be understood only in light of the metaphysical nature of man; moral norms are precisely the moral expression of an objective reality: who and what man is. The existential man is at the same time the essential man.

It is inescapably true that the fundamental duties of the universal moral law have their binding force in the concrete (in the case that “happens only once”) precisely because that law is universal. It includes, necessarily and intentionally, all the individual instances that may confront man.

Evidently, the certitude with which one acts in his correspondence to the demands of the moral order is not always the same. That is to say, the decision one must make in a time of moral chal- lenge appears with special force when negative obligations are in question. But it is not alone in circumstances where one must omit some action that the force of the universal and natural moral law asserts itself in the conscience of man. It operates on the level of all essential relationships of human life. This is so simply because that moral law is ineluctably tied-in with the very nature itself of man. The Christian law, in the degree that it is superior to the natural law, is based on the essence of the supernatural order as established by Christ.

In view of this twofold order in which redeemed man lives and moves and has his being, the Church holds unswervingly to the essential evil of many acts. Directly to quote the Sovereign Pontiff (AAS 44, 417) :

“From the essential relationships between man and God, between man and man, between husband and wife, between parents and children; from the essential community relationships found in the family, in the Church and in the State, it follows (among other things) that hatred of God, blasphemy, idolatry, abandoning the true faith, denial of the faith, perjury, murder, bearing false witness, calumny, adultery and fornication, the abuse of marriage, the solitary sin, stealing and robbery, taking away the necessities of life, depriving workers of their just wages, monopolizing vital foodstuffs and unjustifiably increasing prices, fraudulent bankruptcy, unjust maneouvring in speculation—all these are gravely forbidden by the divine Lawmaker. No examination is necessary. No matter what the situation of the individual may be, there is no other course open to him but to obey.” 

The metaphysical foundation of the natural law is the ontological truth of things, i.e., as they really are in their conformity to the divine mind (God’s essence). The essences of all created things
(and that includes the moral order itself) are, therefore, not de- pendent on things as they are in the existing order. Rather, things in the existing order are dependent on the exemplary ideas in God. For this reason, the essential nature of things is inalterable. From this stems the immutability (unchangeability) of the natural law and the natural goodness (or badness) of certain actions.

The binding power of the natural law does not rest on man’s knowledge of God (although that knowledge is relevant to the discussion) but on the truth of things as they are. The natural moral law does not presuppose morality; it constitutes it through its expression of the truth of things as they are; this expression produces its activity in man’s reason. A good act is according to right reason; a bad act is opposed to right reason.

The exact meaning of recta ratio (right reason) is disputed. A satisfactory interpretation of its meaning is this: man is formally perfected by his rationality; he is specified by the possessing of a reasoning intellect. This ratio humana is the principle of rightness in his voluntary acts. The more perfectly man acts in accord with reason the more perfect he will be as man. In his acts of reasoning, ending in right judgment, the intellect does not work estranged from the real world about one. Speculative reason achieves right judgments when it is in conformity with the existing nature of its real objects. The practical reason is rectified by the judgments of the speculative reason, by which the real order is primarily known. (The role of the virtues will be explained later.) Accordingly, the morality of an act is determined by the consonance of practical reasoning with speculative reasoning, not immediately by comparison of the act with the nature of things.

If we stopped here, we should not have carried the analysis to its full term: the application of the natural law to the choice of human acts. Ultimately, reason is rectified, not by created and finite realities, but by the ordering mind of God which submits man (who participates in this eternal law) to its dictates. In this way, man’s elections and the motions of his free will fall under Providence to whose rule they are morally subject. Pius XII drew the antithesis between the demands of this natural moral law and the pretenses of Situation Ethics when he said in an allocution in March, 1952:

“The Christian moral law is in the law of the Creator, engraved in the heart of each one#, and in Revelation. . . . The first step or rather the first attack against the structure of Christian moral norms would be to free them from the narrow and oppressive surveillance of the authority of the Church. This would be done in such wise that, once liberated from the sophistic subtleties of the casuistic method, the moral law might be brought back to its original form, leaving it simply to the intelligence and determination of each one’s individual conscience.” AAS 44 pages 272-3

# This is the synderesis principle by which we are born with the desire to do good and avoid evil, and with an inbuilt sense of the primary precepts such as the preservation of life. For more discussion on this point, read my book Kant and Natural Law

Source AM Carr The Morality of Situation Ethics
ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ctsa/article/download/2438/2071