Casuistry

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CASUISTRY

CASUISTRY . Moral knowledge comprises general principles and propositions: for example, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," "Honest persons do not lie or steal," and so forth. However, moral knowledge also bears on choices to act in specific ways in unique situations. Thus, general principles must be transformed into particular choices: "I should not make this offensive remark about him because I would not want him to say such a thing about me in the hearing of those people," "I could not consider myself honest if I told her she was capable enough to deserve promotion," and so forth. Casuistry is concerned with the transition from general moral knowledge to particular moral choices. It can be defined as "the technique of reasoning whereby expert opinion is formulated concerning the existence and stringency of particular obligations in light of general moral maxims and under typical conditions of the agent and circumstances of the action."

Religious moralities that rest upon strong divine commands and prohibitions are fertile ground for a casuistry. Unless a divine imperative is couched in terms that direct a particular person to perform or refrain from a particular act at a particular time (e.g., "Moses, you must proclaim the Commandments to the people when you descend the mountain"), interpretation of the general statement of a divine command is necessary. Does, for example, the command "Thou shalt not kill" apply to David facing Goliath? However, it is not only divine commands and prohibitions that generate the need for casuistry. All statements of moral principle are expressed in universal terms; thus, any ethical system, if it is to take effect in the lives and actions of its adherents, must have its universal principles fitted to the various situations in which decisions are to be taken.

Casuistry in Non-Christian Contexts

In the three major ethical monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, certain persons have assumed the role of interpreting to the faithful the overarching moral injunctions of the Lord God. In Judaism, the written law, collected in the five books of the Torah, and the oral law, taught by Moses to the Israelites, were expounded by the scribes. These detailed interpretations of the law, collected in the two Talmuds, were themselves commented upon by the learned teachers of the people. This immense body of literature, as well as the intellectual tradition enshrined in it and continued by the rabbis in the life of the people of Israel, is called halakhah ("the way"). Concerned with fidelity to the law in every aspect of daily life, it is the casuistry of Judaism. However, within this tradition, a special form of reasoning, employing very sharp distinctions and clever logic, came to be called pilpul ("pepper"). Flourishing in the late Middle Ages, it was criticized by the great rabbi Eliyyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman (1720–1797) and others for twisting the plain truth "like shaping a wax nose." In this respect, pilpul resembles the Roman Catholic casuistry of the seventeenth century that gave rise to the pejorative connotation of the word.

Sharīʿah (lit., "the path toward water") designates the holy law of Islam revealed in the Qurʾān. More particularly, the word refers to forms of ritual and social behavior to be observed by the faithful. In the eighth and ninth centuries, schools of interpretation coalesced: they attempted to define precisely the exact content and stringency of the law. The teachers of Islam, muftī s, issued fatwā s, considered opinions for the guidance of the faithful, distinguishing moral acts as obligatory, recommended, permitted, reprehensible, or forbidden. Since God's will is inscrutable, it is permitted to find hiyal ("stratagems") to avoid the letter of the law in favor of the spirit. Again, it is this aspect of Muslim casuistry that recalls the reprehensible approach that gave casuistry its bad name.

In the Western philosophical and theological tradition, two sources of casuistry are manifest. Socrates suggested cases to test whether the general definitions of virtue proposed by his interlocutors were adequate (e.g., in Euthyphro, Laches ). Aristotle noted, as the premier methodological point of his Nicomachean Ethics that, while the nature of the human good and of virtue can be stated in general, "fine and just actions exhibit much variety and fluctuation" (Nicomachean Ethics 1.3). The Stoics proposed the most general precepts (e.g., "Follow nature"), and their opponents, particularly the Cynics, retorted with cases to show that rules of such generality could lead to no definite conclusions for action, or even to contradictory ones. Certain questions that become perennial first appear in this debate: for example, "Which of two shipwrecked men clinging to a spar has a right to it?" and "Should a merchant reveal defects of his merchandise?" Cicero recalls these questions and employs them to illustrate his theses regarding the priority of virtue over expedience. The third book of his On Duties is, in effect, the first book of casuistry in Western moral philosophy, even though it contains much material from authors of the Late Stoa.

Casuistry in the Christian Era

The teachings of Christ contain many "hard and impossible" commands: "If you will follow me, leave father and mother," "Turn the other cheek," "It is as hard for a rich man to enter heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle." Those dedicated to following his ideals of love and mercy had to discern how these difficult and paradoxical commands were to be carried out in daily life. They also faced the problem of whether they and all converts from Judaism and paganism were bound by the law of the Jews. There is therefore some casuistry in the Gospels, in the Acts of the Apostles, and in the epistles of Paul, all of it employing reasoning of the type familiar to the rabbinical schools. In the early centuries of the church, many Christian writers faced the problem of how the Christian should live. In Can a Rich Man Be Saved? Clement of Alexandria advises that the severe words of Jesus do not condemn those who, while rich in goods, are poor in spirit. Augustine's On Lying is a premier work of casuistry in which appears the question analyzed centuries later by Kant: "Should a person lie to conceal an innocent person from persecutors?"

In the history of Christianity, casuistry was given its greatest impetus by the practice of confession of sins and absolution by a priest. When private confession first appeared, in the sixth to the eighth centuries, books of direction were written for priests advising them what penances to impose. These "penitential books," while lacking precise analysis of moral acts, show an incipient sense of discrimination regarding the moral seriousness of certain acts and the circumstances that modify or excuse. In the twelfth century the canon law of the church, working with the large corpus of ecclesiastical case law, as well as with rediscovered Roman law, provided distinctions and categories for a more refined casuistry, as did the speculative theology of the thirteenth century. The books for confessors published from the late thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries manifest this influence in careful but succinct delineations of the nature of conscience, of law, and of imputability. These later volumes were stimulated by a universal law of the church requiring that all confess at least yearly and that the confessor deal with penitents "as a prudent physician of the spirit" (Fourth Lateran Council, 1215). These books present innumerable cases involving marriage, commerce, feudal obligations, and justice. In each example the purpose is to assist the confessor in judging whether a particular act that appeared to violate a moral commandment of church law did in fact do so in the particular circumstances of its commission. Raymond Pennafort, Peter the Cantor, Alain of Lille, William of Chobham, and Peter of Poitiers were the principal authors of this genre. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, certain summae that presented material in alphabetical order (e.g., from Absolution to Uxoricide ) became immensely popular: the Summa Astesana, the Summa Sylvestrina, and the Summa Angelica.

During the Reformation, casuistry was stimulated by several circumstances. The Council of Trent (1551) required Roman Catholics to confess sins by kind and number, a reaction to Protestant rejection of confession to a priest. The Society of Jesus, founded in 1540, dedicated itself to propagating the proper use of the sacrament of penance and to the education of the Catholic laity and clergy. In the religious turmoil of the last half of the sixteenth century, many settled moral positions were upset. Catholics faced novel problems of personal relationship (e.g., how to deal with non-Catholics) and of public moment (e.g., how to continue to observe traditional prohibitions regarding money lending in the new mercantile economy, how to govern newly discovered lands, whether to give allegiance to rulers of newly formed national states). The Jesuits and other theologians undertook to analyze these problems, both in speculative treatises and in more practical case presentation. They produced a vast literature, known collectively as "cases of conscience." In the century between 1565 and 1665, over six hundred titles appeared, many of them in multiple editions.

In 1663 Blaise Pascal, the great mathematician and physicist who had taken the side of the Jansenists (a Catholic sect of extreme piety and rigor) against the Jesuits, published the Provincial Letters. In this brilliant satire, he attacked the Jesuit casuists, citing case after case in which ingenious analysis led to outrageous moral conclusions. The casuists, with their clever distinctions, seemed able and willing to dispense with all moral probity, allowing killing, adultery, and lying, if only the circumstances were right. The criticism, justified to some extent, was too far-reaching: it condemned the entire enterprise of casuistry for the faults of some of its authors and the weakness of some aspects of its methodology. From that time onward, casuistry has carried the opprobrious sense of moral sophistry.

Casuistry continued to be an integral part of Catholic moral theology. Alfonso Liguori (1696–1787), a most revered Catholic moralist, was a master casuist. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, casuistry had become sterile and was much criticized, within and without the church, for its failure to promote moral ideals and its dwelling on minimal obligation. Nevertheless, some fine casuistic analyses continued to appear: about the just war, the just wage, abortion, and so forth.

Protestant theology showed little interest in casuistry—indeed showed early antipathy. (Luther cast the Summa Angelica into the flames, calling it the "Summa Diabolica.") Anglican theologians engaged in a vigorous casuistry in the seventeenth century, with Jeremy Taylor and William Perkins being the leading authors. In the twentieth century, Conscience and Its Problems (1927), one of the very few modern English works on casuistry, was written by an Anglican theologian, Kenneth E. Kirk.

In the 1970s, interest in medical ethics led to the revival of a sort of casuistry both within and without the theological context. The occurrence of many cases of note, such as that of Karen Ann Quinlan, brought theological and philosophical moralists to analyze the ethical issues. The National Commission for Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1974–1978) employed a method of case analysis to develop the ethics of research. In the 1980s, concern about nuclear armaments further stimulated casuistry, and a case analysis of various "scenarios" of defense was developed. The Church and the Bomb (1983), a publication of the Church of England, and the pastoral letter on nuclear warfare (1984) of the American Catholic bishops are both examples of sound casuistry.

Methodology of Casuistry

Casuistry differs from moral philosophy in a number of ways. The work of the casuist is discrimination; that of the moral philosopher, generalization. Casuists discuss moral problems; moral philosophers discuss moral reasoning. Casuists analyze the morality of choice in circumstances; moral philosophers analyze the meaning of moral principle in general. While the work of moral philosophers has been richly described and many methodologies have been proposed, the work of casuists—although we are all, in a sense, casuists in our personal moral deliberations—is hardly understood, and it has no accepted methodology. Even the casuists of the seventeenth century developed no overall method of resolution of moral problems. Inspection of their work, however, reveals the outline of their method.

Casuists developed positions by first stating a case in which the moral obligations entailed by a rule were most clear and then moving, step by step, to more complex cases. These steps were taken by adding various circumstances and weighing their relevance to the stringency of the rule. They assessed the degree of credence that various options deserved and the consequent weight of moral obligation. They aimed at resolving the case not by settling theoretical problems but by practical advice concerning how seriously a person involved in certain sorts of circumstances should consider himself bound by or excused from the moral principles generally incumbent. The strength of the casuists' method lay in an appreciation of exceptions and excuses generated by different circumstances; the weakness lay in the absence of any theoretically established boundaries of this appreciation. Casuistry at its best is vigorous moral common sense; at its worst, it is moral sleight of hand.

Bibliography

Häring, Bernhard. The Law of Christ, vol. 1, General Moral Theology. Translated by Edwin G. Kaiser. Westminster, Md., 1961. See especially chapter 1.

Jonsen, Albert R., and Stephen Toulmin. The Abuse of Casuistry. Berkeley, 1988.

Kirk, Kenneth E. Conscience and Its Problems: An Introduction to Casuistry. London, 1927.

Long, Edward L. Conscience and Compromise: An Approach to Protestant Casuistry. Philadelphia, 1954.