Reply #4: "Situational ethics" is quite different from Situationism [View All]

[leveymg]

The former is being used here as a polemical term for opportunism. It can be applied just as easily to CIA operations to destabilize societies as to alledged Leftist immorality. In reality, "Situational ethics" posits that that love is the only absolute, and the rest is a function of socialization and historical situation. The latter is an anarchist-artists movement that flowered during the 1968 Paris uprising. There are some interesting cross-usages by intelligence agencies of both, but this isn't the time or place to go into an exegesis on that.

I think what the ill-educated goons on the Right are trying to allude to is "moral relativism", which posits that there is no absolute right or wrong.