William Barclay criticised Fletcher in his 1971 text Ethics in a Permissive Society, observing that “we do well still to remember that there are laws that we break at our peril”, insinuating that situation ethics would fail to provide sufficient moral guidance if it replaced law, because humanity cannot survive with total antinomianism. However, one would postulate that the theory is useful, as it allows for moral development at a personal level. It is successful in the exceptional cases for which it was designed, as it is “able to take the least bad of two bad options,” which legalistic and absolutist approaches cannot.

Barclay criticised situation ethics as being too permissive, and when individuals are given the opportunity to make their own moral decisions, such “freedom can become licence… selfishness and even cruelty.” Pope Pius XII regarded the theory as “an individualistic and subjective appeal… to justify decisions in opposition to the natural law or God’s revealed will”; it was seen to encourage immoral behaviour because morality would not be derived from God, as it would be if individuals continued to follow the Decalogue. He later prohibited it in Roman …show more content…
He responds to Bishop J.A.T. Robinson’s statement that situation ethics is the only ethic for “man come of age” by arguing that “man has not yet come of age” - suggesting that humanity is too flawed to make decisions that would otherwise be made by God. Giving individuals the freedom to decide what to do takes away the authority of divine law, and without such law, Barclay states that our “love” can be misdirected and end up allowing that which is morally wrong - asking if it is permissible that “the law progressively makes what we think wrong easier?” in response to the progressive society of the 1960s beginning to allow acts such as homosexuality and