"New morality" follows the situation ethics set forth popularly by Joseph Fletcher. Fletcher summarized his view of ethics by saying, "We must always do what love requires in the situation." This maxim, if it stood alone, would be sound. We are always responsible to do what love demands in a situation. Love is the linchpin of the law of God. The problem remains how to know what love requires in a given situation. God's law reveals what God's love requires.

When Paul speaks of the ethics of love, he says, "And live a life of love, just as Christ loved us..." (Eph. 5:2). But the apostle does not stop with an ambiguous appeal to love. In the next breath he says, "But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people" (Eph. 5:3). Here the law of God defines what is consistent with love. Appeals to love are frequently used to excuse sin. The oldest ploy in the world for sexual seduction is, "If you love me, you will." Yet Paul declares, "If you love God, you won't. Ever."

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

Death with dignity normally is not thought to be secured simply by allowing to die: It must be imposed, even enforced, by imposing that strange "right" to die; in other words, by mercy killing. Do we not like the word killing? Unless it is just the sound we do not like, we dare not swallow the surrogates "right to die" and "death with dignity." If it is the thing in itself that we do not like, namely the killing of patients by their healthcare professionals, we must relentlessly expose the sugary words intended to help the "medicine," that deadly draft, go down.

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

The physician, once called in to see a patient, has an open-ended responsibility for that patient's well-being. She or he has in the past worked through that responsibility in the terms we have noted: healing if possible, treating symptoms if not. The notion that the physician is really attending to consumer wants is novel. Not only so, it is subverting the whole system of health care in opening the door to medical killing; for if medicine is consumer driven, death may be what the consumer wants.

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

Most men according to Rousseau are perverted by society, but there are a few in whom the voice of "nature" is still strong and who, to be good and at the same time beautiful, have only to let themselves go. These, to use a term that came to have in the eighteenth century an almost technical meaning, are the "beautiful souls." Those whose souls are beautiful are a small transfigured band in the midst of a philistine multitude. They are not to be judged by the same rules as those of less exquisite sensibility.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The only guiding principle in this paradigm is consent. You, a free agent, can do anything you want, as long as it does not compromise the free agency of another. Let me be clear: consent is crucial. An emphasis on the importance of consent is perhaps the one good feature of this paradigm. The problem is not that consent is a primary value in this view; the problem is that it's the only value. Consent should be the starting point rather than the end of the discussion about sexual morality. It is not enough to say that the best we can expect from sex, morally speaking, is that it's not rape.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

Evil men account those things alone evil which do not make men evil. It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life.

—Augustine, The City of God

So long as the soul keeps the firmness of purpose which sanctifies even the body, the violence done by another's lust makes no impression on this bodily sanctity, which is preserved intact by one's own persistent continence.

—Augustine, The City of God