Situational ethics lives in one of the hardest corners of moral life.
Most of us want ethics to feel clean. We want the good choice to look good, feel good, and lead somewhere good. We want happiness, flourishing, or at least a little moral comfort. But real life does not always hand us that kind of choice. Sometimes the options are ugly. Sometimes every path carries harm. And in those moments, ethics stops feeling like a celebration of the good and starts feeling like a struggle to limit the bad.
That is where situational ethics enters the room.
At its core, situational ethics is about context. It is about those moments when a person is forced to choose between competing harms, competing loyalties, or competing responsibilities. It asks a painful question:
When no option feels pure, do you choose the lesser evil, or stand against the larger wrong?
You can see this tension in politics, especially in elections. In 2024, some voters were so disturbed by the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza that they could not bring themselves to support Kamala Harris. Some still voted for her. Some voted third party. Some stayed home. Some even turned to Trump, not because they admired everything about him, but because they were acting out of protest, disgust, or their own reading of the lesser-evil problem. That split was especially visible among some Arab American and Muslim voters in places like Michigan.
That is the moral pressure point I want to explore.
And that is why the public feud between Trump and Pope Leo matters. It was not just personal or partisan. It was a moral argument in public view. Pope Leo spoke in the language of peace, restraint, and limits, warning against escalation and attacks on civilians. Trump answered in the language of power and force. Their clash brought situational ethics into the open: when war is already in motion, does responsibility mean standing firm, striking back, or limiting the harm as much as possible?
Because this is not really a column about Trump. And it is not really a column about the Pope either, at least not in the cheap partisan sense. It is about what happens when morality does not offer clean hands. It is about what we do when refusing compromise feels noble, but compromise might reduce suffering. Or when compromise feels like betrayal, but standing firm might make things worse.
That is where this column begins.
Not with clean virtue. Not with easy outrage. But with the harder question:
What does ethics look like when every option leaves a stain?
From there, I want to explore two very different examples. Nancy Reagan’s hard moral line, and Augustine’s attempt to limit harm in an unclean world. Between them sits one of the oldest and most uncomfortable questions in moral philosophy:
When life gives you no good option, what do you do?
To explore situational ethics, let’s break the discussion into three parts: when war is justified, how war should be conducted, and what alternatives exist.
Just War
In Chapter 15 of 30 Philosophers, I explore war ethics through Augustine. He looked at war, one of the worst things humans do, and refused the easy fantasy that it would simply disappear if we said the right words. He had to wrestle with the possibility that, in a broken world, the moral task is sometimes not to keep yourself untouched, but to reduce the damage. In my telling, that stands in sharp contrast with Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no” style of moral clarity, a stance that has power precisely because it refuses compromise. Augustine chose a different path. He chose temperance. He tried to build a moral framework for limiting the horrors of war rather than pretending those horrors would vanish on principle alone.
Augustine’s contributions to human thought were varied, but his stance on war is one of his most enduring and uncomfortable. In the broader good intent-good results exploration, he leans hard into results. War is one of the clearest examples of terrible results, so he used situational ethics to temper them. Situational ethics reminds us that context matters. Sometimes ethics is not about choosing the ideal good, but about reducing harm in a world where clean options have vanished.
That is what makes Augustine so interesting here. He faced a grim question: should a Christian take the pure stance and simply say no to war, or accept that, in some situations, refusing all force may allow even worse harm to unfold? He tried to strike a balance between the Christian duty to love one’s neighbor and the brutal realities of war. That is the heart of Just War Theory. It is the attempt to say that war may sometimes be justified, but only under narrow moral conditions.
Under this view, war should be initiated only for serious reasons, such as self-defense against armed attack or the protection of the innocent. It should be guided by right intent, not revenge, conquest, pride, or bloodlust, but by the aim of restoring peace and justice. Peaceful alternatives should be exhausted first, and the expected good should outweigh the likely harm. Augustine’s core contribution is not a celebration of war. It is an attempt to place moral brakes on it before it begins.
Proper Warfare
If Just War asks when war may begin, Proper Warfare asks how it must be conducted once it does. This is where Augustine’s moral framework becomes even more practical. Even when war is judged necessary, he did not believe that anything goes. War still requires restraint. Moral limits do not disappear the moment fighting starts.
This is also where war crimes begin to get defined. It is not black and white, because this is war, but even in war we sometimes draw lines and say: this goes too far. That includes deliberately killing innocents, targeting noncombatants, using force far beyond the military objective, or destroying civilian infrastructure simply to pressure leaders by making ordinary people suffer. Force should remain proportional to the goal. When violence is required, morality requireds limiting it to what is necessary. We cannot allow destruction to spill into cruelty, revenge, terror, or excess.
This is one of the most important parts of the tradition because it recognizes a painful truth: even justified force can become unjust in the way it is used. In that sense, Proper Warfare is Augustine’s effort to put a moral leash on organized violence. It does not cleanse war. It does not pretend war becomes good. It simply insists that even in the worst human activity, limits still matter. Without those limits, war quickly collapses into atrocity.
Critiques and Alternatives
Of course, this is war we are talking about, so Augustine’s framework has never been free from criticism. Its principles are vulnerable to subjective interpretation. What counts as a just cause? What qualifies as right intent? How much harm is proportionate? Situational ethics may be necessary here, but it also opens the door to disagreement, rationalization, and abuse. Leaders often claim noble motives, even when their real motives are power, fear, or ambition.
That is why other approaches continue to challenge Just War Theory. Pacifism rejects violence altogether and argues that the moral answer is to seek peace through negotiation, diplomacy, and nonviolent resistance. Realism is less concerned with moral ideals and focuses more on power, state interests, and survival. Consequentialism shifts attention to outcomes, judging actions more by the balance of results than by fixed principles. Each of these alternatives highlights a weakness in Just War thinking, but also a truth Augustine forces us to face: if war is ever entered, it should never be entered lightly, and if it cannot be avoided, it must still be morally restrained.
Conclusion: Judging Acts of All Sizes
War is the extreme case, but the deeper lesson of situational ethics reaches into ordinary life. Just actions fit the context. Historically, that has sometimes meant rough formulas like “an eye for an eye,” but the more refined moral options are nuanced. Make sure your responses are proportionate. Make sure you responses do not escalate. Those judgments apply everywhere. Situational ethics and proper responses applies to war, clearly, but also to politics, to parenting, to friendship, to business, and to the thousand little moments when someone wrongs us. Each of us has to decide what comes next. To judge an act well, ask:
Does my response fit the situation, and will it make things better?
That is one reason Just War Theory still matters. It is not only about nations and armies. It is a dramatic example of a more general moral truth: even when force, punishment, or resistance feels justified, restraint still matters.
Pope Leo, in that sense, is doing what popes do: preach the higher ground. It is not like he has much choice. His whole life has been about promoting morality and fairness. The intent behind his call for peace, restraint, and an end to bloodshed is clear. He wants to reduce harm and stop the violence. Trump’s goal is also clear. He speaks in the language of force and dominance, with little concern for ethical restraint. That contrast reveals two very different answers to the same moral crisis: one tries to limit damage, the other tries to normalize it.
One final insight. You may have noticed that after war, the United States has sometimes helped rebuild the very countries it helped destroy. However imperfectly carried out, that too reflects part of war ethics. It recognizes that moral responsibility does not end when the battle ends. If force was used to stop a wrong, then what comes after should aim, at least in part, at repair.
This is where the idea connects naturally with natural rights, the social contract, and restorative justice. If civilization exists to preserve rights and hold a community together, then justice cannot be only about striking back. It also has to be about restoring harmony where possible. In that sense, Just War Theory addresses the effort to limit bad results in extreme conflict, to make restorative justice more effective afterward. The goals of humanity are to create fewer terrorists, not more.
In your daily life, you can take the same general approach with your daily conflicts. There is a higher moral insight within reach of each of us:
Not every wrong can be undone.
Wisdom asks us to respond in ways that reduce harm, resist escalation, and leave the world a little less broken than we found it.
