Casuistry

Casuistry (argument by cases) is an attempt to determine the correct response to a moral problem, often a moral dilemma, by drawing conclusions based on parallels with agreed responses to pure cases, also called paradigms (from the Greek word &#960;&#945;&#961;&#940;&#948;&#949;&#953;&#947;&#956;&#945; (paradeigma) which means "pattern" or "example", from the word &#960;&#945;&#961;&#945;&#948;&#949;&#953;&#954;&#957;&#973;&#957;&#945;&#953; (paradeiknunai) meaning "demonstrate"). Casuistry, which most famous example remains the Jesuit casuistry, attacked by Pascal in the Provincial Letters (1656-1657) is a method of ethical case analysis. Used with a negative connotation, casuistry refers to reasoning that is specious or hair-splitting and seen as intentionally misleading.

Meanings
Casuistry is a branch of applied ethics. Casuistry is the basis of case law in common law. It is the standard form of reasoning applied in common law.

The casuist morality
Casuistry takes a relentlessly practical approach to morality. Rather than applying theories, it examines cases. By drawing parallels between paradigms, so called "pure cases," and the case at hand, a casuist tries to determine the correct response (not merely an evaluation) to a particular case. The selection of a paradigm case is justified by warrants.

A particular strength of casuistry is its flexibility. When a legal fact (or "legal fiction") does not correspond to reality, the mere existence of that legal fact does not impede a rational casuistic response. For example, casuistic reasoning would easily accept that illegally obtained evidence should still be admitted to a legal argument because the illegality of the methods used to obtain the evidence does not negate the value of the evidence itself. The illegal methods themselves should be prosecuted, but that is a separate issue. In contrast, a rigorous theoretical approach might find that such evidence is "not real evidence," and therefore refuse to admit it to permissible reasoning.

Casuistry is successful because it does not require participants in the evaluation to agree about ethical theories or evaluations before making policy. Instead, they can agree that certain paradigms should be treated in certain ways, and then agree on the similarities, the so-called warrants between a paradigm and the case at hand.

Since most people, and most cultures, substantially agree about most pure ethical situations, casuistry often creates ethical arguments that can persuade people of different ethnic, religious and philosophical beliefs to treat particular cases in the same ways. For this reason, casuistry is the form of reasoning used in English law.

Casuistry is prone to abuses wherever the analogies between cases are false. Often late medieval reasoning applied false analogies in casuistry, through allegorical interpretations, a mode of illogic that found support in the elaborate parallels deduced by Christians between Old Testament Law and New Testament events.

Casuistry in early modern times
The casuistic method was popular among Rabbinic scholars and Catholic thinkers in the early modern period, especially the Jesuits. It was encouraged by the Catholic practice of confession of sins to priests, which created a demand for manuals for confessors with detailed advice on cases of conscience. Casuistry was much mistrusted by early Protestant theologians, because it justified many of the abuses that they sought to reform. It was famously attacked by Pascal in his Provincial Letters as the use of overly complex reasoning to justify moral laxity; hence the everyday use of the term to mean complex reasoning to justify moral laxity. Pascal defended the Jansenist Port-Royal Logic against the Jesuits' casuistry and their legitimation of power (the Jesuit order had substituted itself to the Dominicans as the dominant order, and enjoyed a strong influence in Europe's royal courts).

Criticism
Casuists have often been mistrusted as too self-serving, and their reasoning thought too inaccessible. The reasoning is often inaccessible because successful casuistry requires a large amount of knowledge about paradigms, and how parallels can be drawn from those paradigms to real life situations. In modern times, there is a similar tremendous resentment against lawyers and law.

Casuistry in modern times
In modern times, casuistry has successfully been applied to law, bioethics and business ethics, and its reputation is somewhat rehabilitated. G.E. Moore dealed in chapter 1.4 of his Principia Ethica with casuistry; he claimed that "the defects of casuistry are not defects of principle; no objection can be taken to its aim and object. It has failed only because it is far too difficult a subject to be treated adequately in our present state of knowledge."

A good reference, analysing the methodological structure of casuistic argument is The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1990), by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (ISBN 0520069609).