Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics: Volume 5 - Issue 1

Situation Ethics and Incremental Reform of American Health Delivery Systems
Joseph C. D'Oronzio
Published online by Cambridge University Press:

29 July 2009, pp. 169-172
- Article
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
The classic formulation of situation ethics in the 1960s was the result of the contention that the deductive application of general rules and principles in ethics was inherently flawed by the uniqueness of every situation. Quite often, ethical problems are problems precisely because existing rules do not apply four square to the singular situation at hand. There is a need, the argument ran, to assert the primacy of the special situation and to formulate a resolution of the unsettling circumstances appropriately attuned to it. Situation ethics is, in a sense, a moral theory equivalent to case law in a legal system devoid of rule by law.

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics