In this extract from Honest to God (pages 119-121) we can see the similarities between Robinson’s views in Honest to God and Fletcher’s views in Situation Ethics. Indeed, Fletcher (1966: 32) quotes Robinson approvingly on the place of tradition in ethics to make the point that situation ethics doesn’t despise tradition.  Robinson in turn quotes Fletcher in several places, showing his indebtedness to Fletcher's views.PB

Nothing can of itself always be labelled as 'wrong'. One cannot, for instance, start from the position 'sex relations before marriage' or 'divorce' are wrong or sinful in themselves.They may be in 99 cases or even 100 cases out of 100, but they are not intrinsically so, for the only intrinsic evil is lack of love. Continence and indissolubility may be the guiding norms of love's response; they may, and should, be hedged about by the laws and conventions of society, for these are the dykes of love in a wayward and loveless world.But, morally speaking, they must be defended, as Fletcher puts it, 'situationally, not prescriptively'–in other words, in terms of the fact that persons matter, and the deepest welfare of these particular persons in this particular situation matters, more than anything else in the world. Love's casuistry (case by case approach) must cut deeper and must be more searching, more demanding, than anything required by the law, precisely because it goes to the heart of the individual personal situation. But we are bound in the end to say with Professor Fletcher: If the emotional and spiritual welfare of both parents and children in a particular family can be served best by a divorce, wrong and cheapjack as divorce commonly is, then love requires it'.2

This will once again be greeted as licence to laxity and to the broadest possible living. But love's gate is strict and narrow and its requirements infinitely deeper and more penetrating. To the young man asking in his relations with a girl, 'Why shouldn't I?', it is relatively easy to say 'Because it's wrong' or 'Because it's a sin'–and then to condemn him when he, or his whole generation, takes no notice. It makes much greater demands to ask, and to answer, the question 'Do you love her?' or 'How much do you love her?', and then to help him to accept for himself the decision that, if he doesn't, or doesn't very deeply, then his action is immoral, or, if he does, then he will respect her far too much to use her or take liberties with her. Chastity is the expression of charity–of caring, enough. And this is the criterion for every form of behaviour, inside marriage or out of it, in sexual ethics or in any other field. For nothing else makes a thing right or wrong.

This 'new morality' is, of course, none other than the old morality, just as the new commandment is the old, yet ever fresh, commandment of love. It is what St Augustine dared to say with his dilige et quod vis fac, which, as. Fletcher rightly insists, should be translated not 'love and do what you please', but 'love and then what you will, do'. What 'love's casuistry' requires makes, of course, the most searching demands both upon the depth and integrity of one's concern for the other–whether it is really the utterly unself-regarding agape of Christ–and upon the calculation of what is truly the most loving thing in this situation for every person involved. Such an ethic cannot but rely, in deep humility, upon guiding rules, upon the cumulative experience of one's own and other people's obedience. It is this bank of experience which gives us our working rules of 'right' and 'wrong', and without them we could not but flounder. And if is these, constantly re-examined, which, in order to protect personality, have to be built into our codes of law, paradoxically, 'without respect of persons'. But love is the end of law (Romans 13:10) precisely because it does respect persons–the unique, individual person–unconditionally. 'The absoluteness of love is its power to go into the concrete situation, to discover what is demanded by the predicament of the concrete to which it turns' (Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I page 169). Whatever the pointers of the law to the demands of love, there can for the Christian be no 'packaged' moral judgements – for persons are more important than 'standards'.

1. Situation Ethics page 16
2. Situation Ethics page 15