I. History

The term situation ethics was probably coined by T. Steinbüchel, a Roman Catholic moral theologian, who used the term Situationsethik in 1938 to criticize the ethics of E. Grisebach, focused solely on the “present,” and more generally any existential ethics following in the footsteps of S. Kierkegaard. The term was used in a positive sense a few years later by the philosopher of religion and psychotherapist Ernst Michel (1889–1964): “From th…