Casuistry

« Casuistry Casuistry, from the Latin casus (cases), has been understood in three separate yet related senses.

In its first sense casuistry is defined as a style of ethical reasoning associated closely with the tradition of practical philosophy influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas.

In its second sense it is reasoning about 'cases of conscience' (casus conscientiae ).

The third sense, moral laxism, arose out of Pascal 's famous critique of casuistry, which did much to diminish its influence.

In recent years, however, a renewed interest in the first and second senses of casuistry has been witnessed in the areas of practical reasoning and applied philosophy. In its widest sense, casuistry can be described as a method of ethical reasoning which, drawing on the tradition of practical philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, aims to construct a 'dialectic' between the facts of particular cases and the antecedent assumptions, evaluations and convictions which individual agents bring to bear in their consideration of such cases.

The purpose of the dialectic is to enable agents to arrive at informed decisions as to what is morally possible and impossible for them to do in particular cases.

In a narrower sense, the term casuistry has been employed to characterize different systems of moral theology within the Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions, in which all-inclusive norms are derived from judgments in particular cases, instead of being laid down in advance by absolute moral codes.

In its narrowest sense, casuistry refers to the use of subtle definitional distinctions in the handling of the problems of moral theology, with the aim of drawing fine dividing lines between what is and is not permissible at the level of action.

The technique has at times been used to excuse crimes and sins, thereby exculpating the immoral, and such is the extent of the modern association of casuistry with all varieties of obfuscation, quibbling and laxism, that a pejorative connotation of the word itself is now established in most European languages. The identification of casuistry with its narrowest definition is due to Blaise Pascal 's Lettres écrites à un provincial (The Provincial Letters) (1656-7) ( Pascal, B. ).

This famous satire delivered to casuistry a near fatal blow, from which, in the popular mind, it has never recovered.

It was Pascal 's urbane yet brutal vilification of the Jesuit confessors of the University of Paris, individuals who had attempted to base an account of practical conduct on the analysis of cases ( casus ) and circumstances ( circumstantiae ), that stereotyped casuistry as the doctrine that sought 'to excuse the inexcusable' . Pascal 's attack on casuistry can be considered unjust since it was based on a partial understanding of the theories he was aiming to expose, and of the individual casuists he was attempting to ridicule.

His aim in writing this work was to enlist the reader's support for a version of moral absolutism that was peculiar to Jansenism, a rigoristic Roman Catholic sect to which Pascal was aligned.

Pascal was forever trying to illustrate the laxism inherent within Jesuit casuistry in order to establish an unfavourable contrast with the moral rigorism of the Jansenists. The method embodied in the second definition of casuistry as case-reasoning was developed in the penitential. »