The Abuse of Casuistry:

...James Gaffney The authors' special interest in identifying and vindicating nonabusive casuistry was occasioned by their mutual involvement in a congressionally sponsored project seeking ethical guidelines for the use of human subjects in biomedical research...

...The book's best historical sections deal with the casuistic modifications of moral views about usury, equivocation, and killing to avenge an insult.venge an insult...

...It is difficult to understand why the authors wish to apply the term "casuistry" to a procedure in which, it seems, particular cases came first, concrete solutions second, and general principles emerged (somehow) only afterwards...

...it does not present a balanced or reliable history...

...So long as the debate stayed on the level of particular judgments, the eleven commissioners saw things in much the same way...

...What the authors most oppose is what they call the "tyranny of principles," meaning by that a rigid and monolithic application of moral rules without sensitivity to the peculiarities of circumstances...

...is not the recognition that principles must eventually be applied, but rather a particular account of the logic and derivation of the principles that we deploy in moral discourse...

...The book's subtitle, "A History of Moral Reasoning" may raise false expectations...

...Apparently cases were grouped on a basis of similarity, and participants tended to concur about how they should be dealt with, while differing widely as to their reasons why...

...In the author's paradigmatic field of medical ethics, organizational and economic issues of vast complexity are scarcely of less moral importance than clinical dilemmas, but the applicability to them of casuistry, in the authors' sense, is much more remote, while the need of reasoning upon trusted ethical principles is insistent and acute...

...And it concludes with an appeal for the revival of casuistry in circumstances that favor its effectiveness...

...In words they cite from John Arras, "What differentiates the new casuistry from applied ethics...

...The congressional commission in which they formed these impressions comprised eleven members with a diversity of professional and cultural backgrounds, and their deliberations produced a paradoxical combination of practical consensus and theoretical discordance...

...Some moral questions, of the utmost importance, are simply not reducible to cases that can be collected into sets of closely similar, readily comprehensible moral perplexities...

...They were struck also by the remoteness of these procedures from what seem to be the underlying assumptions of public moral controversy over such issues as abortion, and from prevailing interests of moral philosophers as well...

...This eclecticism illustrates the authors' positions...

...In their own words, this "account sees the primary locus of moral understanding as lying in the recognition of paradigmatic examples of good and evil, right and wrong: the typical cases of, for example, fairness or unfairness, cruelty or kindness, truth-telling or lying, whose merits and shortcomings even a small child 'knows at a glance.'" But then, why not simply rely on practical moral wisdom to resolve concrete moral cases, and relegate the theories and principles to intellectual game-rooms housed in ivory towers...

...but the one thing they could not agree on was why they agreed about it...

...No such insensitivity is detectable in Jonsen and Toulmin, whereas their "case for casuistry" deserves attention from ethicists of every stripe...

...Much of the book is devoted to selectively reviewing that tradition and some of the criticism it has incurred...

...What it offers is a selection from certain philosophers and theologians of passages or themes that illustrate approaches to ethics that either tend or do not tend to "get down to cases...

...The moment it soared to the level of 'principles,' they went their separate ways...

...They "were largely in agreement about their specific practical recommendations...

...These are questions about instituting, supporting, or modifying complex social arrangements and procedures, or practices whose ramifications are enormous...

...The influence they attribute to Aristotle on Christian casuistry seems exaggerated in view of the abundance of Christian casuistry during thirteen centuries before Aristotle's rediscovery...

...Such questions constantly arise for persons having any large scope of governmental or managerial control, and for others having any influence over such persons...

...Moral wisdom is not universally shared in any high degree and, even in those who have a lot of it, its acuity is frequently dulled by our passions and partialities...

...Principles offer guidelines to ensure some moral constancy over the variations of moral wisdom not only in societies but within each of their members...

...This further meaning gains clarity in the book's concluding pages where, in fact, they redefine casuistry...

...Here the basic tools of decision must be principles, and sometimes very broad principles, derived ultimately, it may be hoped, from moral wisdom schooled in concrete cases...

...Casuistry, in their sense, has more obvious and immediate bearing on "micro-ethics" than on "macro-ethics...

...Another answer, equally valid, has become more prominent in recent times...

...The authors seem to have no doubt that the practical consensus was, in fact, correct, but they give us no reason to share their confidence, or even to understand what "correct" might mean to them in this context...

...The classic answer retains its validity...

...For the definition of casuistry they themselves cite is "that part of ethics which resolves cases of conscience, applying the general rules of religion and morality to particular instances in which circumstances alter cases or in which there appears to be conflict of duties (italics mine...

...They consider casuistry, thus understood, to have a long, honorable, and under-esteemed tradition...

...If insistence on casuistry means only that in selecting and applying general principles one must be sensitive to the concrete circumstances of particular cases, the contention would seem indisputable but banal...

...Even the weakest and dullest of us have to deal with them every election day...

...And because of that greater obviousness and immediacy, casuists have often been insensitive to "macro-ethical" questions...

...What the authors appear to have derived from this experience is a firm conviction that concentrating immediately upon cases gets better results than applying commonly held general principles...

...That the authors do mean more than that was implied from the start in their account of how their congressional commission proceeded...

...In my own opinion, such insensitivity has been one of the saddest facts about Catholic moral theology throughout a great part of its history, whereas a renewed sensitization on that score is one of the happiest facts about its current phase...

...They consider that approach to typify what they mean by casuistry...

...they agreed what it was they agreed about...

...The discussion of Pascal is seriously marred by a fundamental inconsistency, at first admitting that his satire may have attacked "just bad casuistry" and that "sometimes he seems to be writing from within the casuistical tradition," but afterwards simply asserting that "convinced that casuistry inevitably bred laxity, he repudiated it root and branch...

...They were struck by the resemblance of the "case-method" they found themselves developing to the casuistic procedures of confessional guides and pastoral theologians...

...It is hard to tell from this book what really went on in the congressional commission...