CASUISTRY

Casuistry , a term derived from the Latin word meaning "event, occasion, occurrence" and in later Latin, "case, " was coined in the seventeenth century to refer pejoratively to the practice described by contemporary Christian theologians as "cases of conscience" (casus conscientiae ). Today the word might be defined as the method of analyzing and resolving instances of moral perplexity by interpreting general moral rules in light of particular circumstances. This entry will relate the origins and development of casuistry in Western culture, its decline, and its revival as a method of ethical analysis, particularly in bioethics.

Origins of Casuistry

The earliest discussions of morality in Western philosophy reveal the tension between general moral norms and particular decisions. The Sophists of fifth-century Greece maintained that since no universal truths could be affirmed in moral matters, right and wrong depended entirely on the circumstances: ethics consisted in the rhetorical ability to persuade persons about "opportune" action. Plato devoted his Republic to a vigorous refutation of this thesis, placing moral certitude only in universal moral truths: ethics consisted in transcending particularities and grasping permanent ideals from which right choice could be deduced. Aristotle proposed that in ethical deliberations, which deal with contingent matters, formal demonstration was not possible. Rather, plausible argument would support probable conclusions. Ethics belongs, he maintained, not in the realm of scientific knowledge but in the domain of practical wisdom (phronesis ). Phronesis is a knowledge of particular facts and is the "object of perception rather than science" (Nicomachean Ethics, VI. viii. 1142a). Criticism, interpretation, and amplification of these theses constitutes much of the history of moral philosophy. The Aristotelian viewpoint, which places moral certitude in the domain of practical judgments about what ought to be done in the actual circumstances of a situation, is the remote philosophical ancestor of the casuistry that developed in Western culture.

The Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.) designed an approach to moral problems that would powerfully influence the casuistic authors of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Cicero, although a philosophical eclectic, inclined to Stoic thought in ethics. Drawing from the Stoics Panaetius and Posidonius and inspired by the Roman passion for practicality, he held that to be a virtuous person one must become "a good calculator of one's duty in the circumstances, so that by adding and subtracting considerations, we may see where our duty lies" (On Duties, I, 59). This adding and subtracting was done by offering and evaluating "probable reasons." The primary moral problem was the continual conflict between duty and utility, a conflict resolved only by examining the circumstances of cases. In his On Duties, Cicero proposed a number of cases, some drawn from the Stoic philosophers and others from Roman history. Each case, representing an apparently insoluble conflict between duty and utility, was then analyzed to show how, if circumstances were taken into account, one could discern one's moral duty. Cicero also espoused the Stoic doctrine of natural law and often referred to its overarching precepts in his analyses of cases; but the problem, he affirmed, was how these precepts were to be interpreted in context. On Duties remained one of the most studied texts of antiquity through the subsequent centuries. By its organization of material and its methods of reasoning, On Duties powerfully influenced the way in which morality was conceived and taught in the Western world, and thus sanctioned subsequent casuistry.

While moral discourse always moves between the broad generalizations of principle and the particular decisions made in specific circumstances, religions that are monotheistic and moral in nature face a particular problem in moving from the general to the particular. The three "religions of the Book"—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have in common a Scripture in which the word of God is recorded; that is, in which God speaks to believers in concrete and specific language. Also, the divine message contains imperatives that enjoin moral obligations, sometimes stated in broad terms and sometimes referring to specific forms of behavior. It becomes necessary for believers to understand how the broad general imperatives apply to the great variety of daily life, and to learn how specific commands expressed in the language and cultural setting of the past are to be followed in the circumstances of later times. Thus, each religion of the Book developed a moral teaching that begins with affirmations from the divine text, moves through traditional interpretations of that text by the saintly and the scholarly, and comes, finally, to the task of bringing text and interpretation to bear on particular circumstances of time and place. Each of these religions, then, has developed a casuistry or manner of working at the task of concrete application. The particular forms of Jewish and Islamic casuistry are discussed elsewhere; this entry will relate the development of casuistry in Western Christianity.

Christianity introduced a powerful and original morality into the Greco-Roman world. The thought of its founder, Jesus, both reflected the dedication of Jewish law to the sovereignty of God and refashioned it to include a demanding commitment to himself as Lord as well as self-sacrifice for one's neighbors, spelled out in strenuous, often paradoxical commands. His early disciples, seeking to follow these commands, preached an ascetic repudiation of "the ways of the world." This meant that the moderate virtues prized by the pagans among whom the early Christians lived were often deprecated and the vices of pagan life, which even pagan authors often criticized, were reviled. The morality of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Gospels, which condemned many attitudes and practices common in pagan culture and demanded adherence to self-discipline and altruism, posed profound difficulties to believers. How were they to live in a world that held different values? How were the "hard commandments" of the Gospels to be carried out in daily life? These problems perplexed Paul of Tarsus, the most influential of Jesus' first followers, whose efforts to answer them, especially in his First Letter to the Corinthians, adumbrated the work of later Christian casuists. In addition, early Christian thinkers were suspicious of the philosophical thought of the Greco-Roman world. However, by the third century, many Christian scholars had come to accept that Christian belief and "pagan" philosophy were compatible in important respects. The authors of the patristic era (second to sixth centuries) reflected on Christian moral problems with the help of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. The framework of virtues, natural law, and practical reasoning elucidated in these and other pagan authors were modified and incorporated by Christian authors and teachers. They sought, as did their pagan mentors, to understand the nature of the moral life but were concerned, above all, with providing practical advice about how the faithful should live a Christian life in a non-Christian world. Many Christian authors used Cicero's On Duties as a model for treatises on morality: St. Ambrose of Milan (339–397), friend and teacher of the great St. Augustine, also titled a book On Duties and, closely following Cicero, attempted to refashion the latter's thoughts within the perspective of Christian faith.

Christian teaching does not merely require belief; it strongly stresses the importance of morally correct behavior. While killing, deception, and adultery are condemned as sins, and charity, self-denial, and honesty are commanded, inevitably questions arise about what sorts of behavior belong in these general categories. Early Christians were intensely aware that failure to follow the rigorous commandments of their faith separated them from God and from their fellow believers. The practice of confession of one's sins before the community of believers and the imposition of penance that would once again reconcile the sinner to God and to the community became common in the early centuries. By the eighth century, private confession to a priest, who had the ecclesiastical authority to absolve the repentant sinner from guilt, had been introduced. This practice of sacramental confession and penance enhanced the need for clear descriptions of the moral dimensions of various behaviors and of the ways in which various circumstances excused or aggravated the seriousness of those behaviors. From the eighth to the twelfth centuries, educators of the clergy produced penitential books that presented systematic catalogs of sinful and virtuous actions under various typical circumstances (e.g., the killing of another out of vengeance, in fear, in ignorance, etc.). The motives, the consequences, and the social status of the agent were important considerations in evaluating the responsibility and seriousness of behavior. Appropriate penances were assigned in view of the gravity of the sin.

These penitential volumes, the earliest examples of which came from the Irish and Welsh churches, became widespread throughout Europe. In the course of four centuries, their content became more elaborate and their format more systematic. The first were collections of crudely described cases with simple distinctions, elaborated with biblical or patristic quotations. Later examples incorporated advancing biblical and theological scholarship and, above all, the work of the canon lawyers who, since the rediscovery of Roman law in the eleventh century, had exercised increasing influence over the formulation of church law as it touched the organization and practices of Christian life. The work of Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), Alain of Lille (d. c.1203), and Thomas Chobham (c.1200) were filled with well-described cases of moral perplexity, analyzed with reference to biblical texts, maxims from the fathers of the church, and the growing body of church law. These books were not only for the education of the parish priest but also to guide the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the formulation of policy and the making of judicial decisions. Some of these books were written for the instruction of the laity in making a proper confession and leading a good life.

During the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, great theological scholars such as Abelard, Peter Lombard, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham elaborated systematic treatises or summas in which they attempted to present the full range of Christian belief and to support it with rational argument. In doing so, they placed the questions of morality within larger frameworks of interpretation and justification, drawing heavily on philosophers of antiquity. These treatises did not discuss cases, as did the penitential literature, but created theoretical foundations for the discussion of cases. The relevance of scriptural admonitions, natural law, custom, and civil and canon law to moral decisions was explored in great depth; the relevance of principle, motive, and circumstances was carefully examined. These theologians, while not casuists, greatly influenced the next generations of casuists.

Casuistic Writings

Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many books of cases of conscience were published. The Summa Angelica (1480) and the Summa Sylvestrina (1516) were the most famous. However, these works were staid, unimaginative, and formalistic; many authors simply plagiarized from more celebrated authors. But casuistry properly speaking came into its own in the mid-sixteenth century. In 1556 a Spanish canonist, Martin Azpilcueta, published A Handbook for Confessors and Penitents, which revitalized the literature of cases of conscience. This book abandoned the practice of listing moral problems alphabetically and adopted a less frequently used device of organizing various sins under the Decalogue. This allowed for a more flexible and nuanced treatment and for comparison between various categories of moral behavior. Above all, it introduced the analysis of issues from the more clear and obvious to the more complex, a method that later casuists would exploit and that is described below as reasoning by paradigm and analogy.

Azpilcueta's style was widely copied. The Jesuit order, founded in 1534, was dedicated to the work of moral education and guidance of conscience, especially in sacramental confession. The Jesuits introduced Azpilcueta's approach into their own training of priests as ministers of the sacrament of penance. They published many volumes of cases of conscience. John Azor's Moral Instruction (1600) was the preeminent work. Jesuit casuistry was, in general, careful, scholarly, sensible, and practical. It was also comprehensive. While the general rubric of the Decalogue was used to organize materials, the duties of various occupations, the obligations of princes and bishops, and the moral dimensions of diplomacy, Jesuit casuistry also dealt with economics, warfare, and exploration. It has been suggested that the origins of modern economics, sociology, and political science lie in the work of the seventeenth-century casuists. Certainly, their advice was often sought by popes and kings in matters that we would today consider political or economic rather than moral. But in the seventeenth century, the moral questions on a king's or pope's conscience often concerned politics and finance.

The seventeenth-century casuists not only analyzed and resolved complex cases. They also elaborated speculative positions, writing treatises on topics such as justice, usually as prolegomena to their analyses of cases of government or trade. Among the central speculative questions was that of the degree of moral certitude required to act in good conscience, that is, how sure a person must be that a casuistic resolution of a moral problem is the correct one before acting upon it. A vigorous intellectual debate on this question took place in the last half of the seventeenth century between the Jesuits and their theological rivals, the Dominicans, and among the Jesuits themselves. From that debate, the position of the leading Jesuit theologians emerged as dominant. That position, probabilism , maintained that a person was entitled to act in good conscience if there were probable arguments in favor of the choice; probable arguments are those supported by solidly reasoned opinion and defended by respected authors. Probabilism, while defended with elegant argument and sanctioned by ecclesiastical authority, remained a contentious issue and led to the tarnishing of the casuists' reputation in the seventeenth century, since many critics accused them of being able to find any probable argument to justify their preferences.

The Jesuits were by no means the only authors of casuistry; many other Catholic theologians were so engaged. Anglican divines produced clear and sensible books of casuistry; and since most works of classical casuistry have not been translated from their original Latin, Anglican casuistical books offer the best access to casuistry for English readers (see Perkins). Lutherans were not well disposed toward casuistic analysis: Luther had cast into the flames the Summa Angelica, calling it "Summa Diabolica." Still, the Jesuits attained the reputation of being the premier casuists. Since they were deeply involved in the religious and secular politics of the era, they won enemies on every side and their casuistry appeared to many to serve their own interests rather than the good conscience of their penitents. In particular, the genius mathematician Blaise Pascal found distressing the Jesuits' opposition to Jansenism, a particularly rigoristic Catholic theology that he favored; and at the urging of other Jansenists, he set out to destroy the Jesuits' anti-Jansenist arguments.

Pascal's Provincial Letters (1656) was a brilliant and wittily written refutation of the Jesuit arguments against Jansenist theology and, in particular, of the casuistry that, he claimed, made a mockery of Christian moral beliefs. He gave numerous examples of Jesuit resolution of cases of conscience and found them tainted by a probabilism that bred moral laxity, intellectual sophistry, and disguised heresy. Despite the fact that Pascal took cases out of context and chose only those that suited his polemical purposes, his diatribe became immensely popular. At best, it can be said that his critique demolished not casuistry itself but the lax casuistry that was counted reprehensible even by the Jesuits whom he accused. It was not only Pascal's popular book that tarnished casuistry's reputation. Certain casuists, few of them Jesuits, did take the skill at case analysis to an extreme: Almost any argument could be presented plausibly and fine distinctions could be drawn to make, as Plato said of the Sophists, "the worse appear the better." Casuistry and sophistry became invidious synonyms, as did casuistry and Jesuitry. And casuistic argument, once quite liberal, became legalistic in tone and content, promoting a morality of observance rather than of conscience. Finally, casuistry was falling out of step with the prevailing intellectual progress. The interest in intellectual systems, seen in Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza, and Hugo Grotius, made the casuists' interest in particular cases appear disorderly and without solid foundation. By the end of the seventeenth century, casuistry was discredited in the European intellectual world. The word casuistry was invented as a term of abuse (earlier the word casista was used merely to describe a scholar who presented cases of conscience). Bayle's Dictionary (1697) defined casuistry as the "art of quibbling with God." At the close of the eighteenth century, Kant, who was familiar with traditional casuistry as a way of teaching ethics, found the only interesting question to be how to transform the limited and probable maxims of moral discourse into categorical certitude.

Casuistic writing continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within the Roman Catholic tradition, particularly in the education of the clergy, but it was a desiccated casuistry, wary of innovative solutions and bound by ecclesiastical pronouncements on moral matters. The work of the French Jesuit J. Gury (1862) was representative of the fading tradition; a journal titled The Casuist, published for American Catholic clergy (1906–1917), shows the tradition at its nadir. Still, casuistry continued to serve the practice of sacramental penance for which it had been created. Outside this tradition, remnants of casuistry lingered in the teaching of ethics. The textbooks of the time included fragments of Aristotle and Cicero and many of the classical cases, loosely grouped around virtues and duties. In 1870, revolted by the untidy and incoherent presentations of these texts, Henry Sidgwick, professor of casuistical divinity at Cambridge University (he had his chair renamed "moral philosophy"), undertook to construct a systematic presentation of an ethical theory, utilitarianism, in which tenets were tightly argued, inconsistencies rectified, and opponents refuted. The progress of moral philosophy from Sidgwick's time until recently has been toward greater articulation of theory and away from analysis of cases of conscience.

The Practical Need for Casuistry

Casuistry then almost disappeared from the formal academic disciplines that study moral discourse. However, in the 1960s, a number of important moral questions began to trouble the American conscience, and moral philosophers were spurred to attend to the practical application of their discipline. The war in Vietnam required many to examine their consciences concerning support of and participation in what they felt was an immoral war. At the same time, the civil rights movement stimulated consciences concerning discrimination and racial injustice. The analytic moral philosophy current in academic circles had little advice to offer. Even the widely accepted and elaborate utilitarian theory seemed to lead to no firm conclusions.

The emerging interest in the ethics of medical and healthcare also opened vistas for a new casuistry. Medical care is about cases: the illness and the treatment of particular persons with particular diseases. Philosophers and theologians who engaged in this work had initially tried to bring the standard ethical theories to the analysis of medical problems, but they found themselves discussing cases, not theories, and felt the need for an approach that would stay closer to the particulars of the case under discussion than did the standard theories. Above all, they realized that cases were being discussed not merely to elucidate the meaning of concepts but also to arrive at a resolution: physicians, nurses, and patients were interested in what moral philosophy had abandoned: answers to practical moral perplexity. By the late 1970s, talk of "case method" had become common in bioethics. At the same time, ethical issues in business, government, and journalism seemed to call for study of individual cases rather than flights into ethical theory. Also, influential moral philosophers were beginning to criticize the dominance of moral theory in practical ethics and to call for approaches that were more concrete than speculative.

Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin published The Abuse of Casuistry in 1988. Aware that many were interested in inventing a "case method" for ethics, they hoped to show that such a method had been invented long ago and that, although discredited and seemingly outmoded, classical casuistry had much to offer modern ethicists. Case method in ethics might be similar in many respects to the case method in Anglo-American common law, which had developed in parallel with classical casuistry. Both the common law, about which much research has been done, and casuistry, which has been invisible to the scholarly world for several centuries, need to be explored if a case method for ethics, of "morisprudence, " is to be re-created. These authors attempted to restore casuistry to intellectual respectability. After a historical survey of the rise and fall of casuistry, they contrast it with current approaches to moral philosophy and define it as follows:

[T]he analysis of moral issues, using procedures of reasoning based on paradigms and analogies, leading to the formulation of expert opinion about the existence and stringency of particular moral obligations, framed in terms of rules and maxims that are general but not universal or invariable, since they hold good with certainty only in the typical conditions of the agent and circumstances of the case. (p. 257)

Methodology

The term methodology may be too formal a word to describe how casuistry works. The casuists of the past left almost no formal description of their way of working; the casuists of the present, pressed by their critics based in moral philosophy, are still asking themselves questions about methodology. Still, certain characteristics of the casuistic approach can be noted. These characteristics appear to have their origins in the classical discipline of rhetoric rather than in philosophy as such. The historical casuists had, like all educated persons of their time, been educated thoroughly in rhetoric. Aristotle and Cicero, the authors from whom they learned rhetoric, also taught them ethics. Classical rhetoric was defined as having a moral purpose: the persuasion of persons toward right and just action. Indeed, the classical books of rhetoric, because they were so rich in comments about and examples of moral behavior, were often used as texts in ethics. In the centuries during which casuistry flourished, moral philosophy was not a clearly defined discipline. Thus, it is not surprising to find the historical casuists implicitly using the techniques of rhetoric in their analysis of cases of conscience. Both rhetoric and casuistry had morally correct attitudes and action as their ultimate goal.

Two characteristics of rhetorical technique are particularly important for casuistry: topics and the comparison of paradigm and analogy. Rhetoricians taught that discourse in general could be divided into a set of common ideas, such as "causality, " "temporal sequence, " and so on, which they called "topics." Each of these topics had sets of definitions and forms of argumentation that were invariant. Also, each special realm of discourse, such as discourse about politics, art, or economics, has its own set of "special topics, " the features of the field that must be understood and discussed if an adequate argument is to be made about what should be done. A casuistic approach to an ethical problem, then, requires that the field of discourse be analyzed to designate the invariant features. For example, it has been suggested that the topics of clinical ethics are: (1) medical indications, (2) patient preferences, (3) quality of life, and (4) contextual features, such as costs of care and allocation of resources (Jonsen, Siegler, and Winslade). Each of these topics has certain definitions, maxims, and arguments that must be taken into account in discussion of any case. The particular circumstances of time, place, personal characteristics, various behaviors, and so on that are the details of any case are viewed in the light of these topics.

Once the particular case is described by its circumstances and topics, casuistical analysis seeks to place this case into a context of similar cases. The classical casuists were accustomed to line up cases of similar sorts, so that cases describing various sorts of homicide, for example, were aligned in order that the similarities and differences between cases would become clear. This enabled the casuist to see those cases in which the moral principles and maxims appeared to lead to an unambiguous resolution. Thus, the prohibition against killing another human being seemed most obviously to hold if the circumstances described a vicious, unprovoked attack on an unoffending person; the prohibition would allow an exception if the circumstances described a killing that resulted from that unoffending person's self-defense against a lethal attack. This technique of lining up cases, rather than seeing them in isolation, is the essence of casuistical analysis. It is called by some authors the technique of paradigm analogy: The paradigm case is the case in which circumstances allow moral maxims and principles to be seen as unambiguously relevant to the resolution of the case; the analogies are those cases in which particular circumstances justify exceptions and qualifications of the moral principles. A high degree of assurance, or moral certitude, pertains to the resolution of paradigm cases, while varying degrees of moral probability, or probabilism, attach to the resolution of analogous cases.

Finally, the resolution of each case depends on what Aristotle called phronesis, or moral wisdom: the perception of an experienced and prudent person that, in these circumstances and in light of these maxims, this is the best possible moral course. As one commentator on modern casuistry has written, "for casuistry, moral truth resides in the details … the meaning and scope of moral principles is determined contextually through the interpretation of factual situations in relation to paradigm cases" (Arras, p. 37).

Bioethics is the most prominent field in which casuistry is beginning to be reintroduced as a method for ethical analysis. This is not surprising, since a strong interest of bioethics is the clinical care of patients, and many cases that came to the early attention of bioethicists involved life-and-death decisions arising from the use of new medical technologies. Cases about whether life-supporting technologies should or should not be continued for particular patients lend themselves to casuistic analysis. The differing circumstances of individual patients, the topics (the significant categories into which a medical-ethical decision can be factored), and the maxims (such as "do no harm" or "respect the patient's informed choices") are each in their own way crucial to the resolution of any case. The placing of the case in a lineup of paradigm and analogy, from the most obvious— in which the patient is brain dead, or continued care is manifestly futile—to the problematic, in which diminished quality of life or unclear preferences are at issue, allows for discretionary judgment between cases (Jonsen). This sort of casuistry can also be applied to questions of healthcare policy, such as those surrounding the various programs proposed for allocation of resources, although relatively little of such analysis has been done.

Casuistry, then, keeps moral reflection close to cases. Neither classical nor modern casuistry repudiates principles: Casuistry is not merely another name for situationism or contextualism. Rather, principles are seen to be relevant to cases in varying degrees: In some cases, principles will rule unequivocally; in others, exceptions and qualifiers will be appropriate. Modern casuists dislike the description of casuistry as "applied ethics, " since they explicitly repudiate the notion that an ethical theory must be elaborated and then "applied to" the circumstances of the case. Still, the relationship between cases and ethical theory is unclear and poses the principal speculative problem that casuists and moral philosophers must ponder, just as the historical casuists pondered the problem of the certitude of practical judgment. On the one hand, casuistry is not simply applied ethical theory; on the other, it is not simply immersion in the factual circumstances of cases, which would reduce it to situationism. Casuistry is not tied to any single theory of ethics but can be comfortable with selected elements of multiple theories. For example, a casuistic argument might draw on utilitarian, deontological, and contractual justifications in a single case. Also, the designation of topics and the selection of paradigms have theoretical presuppositions. Finally, the normative nature of principles and maxims, which must be clarified in order to specify the obligatory nature of casuistic resolutions, requires reference to theory. Casuistry, then, is not "theory free" but is rather, as one commentator has suggested, "theory modest" (Arras, p. 41). Theories, for contemporary casuistry, are not mutually exclusive, a priori foundations for practical ethical discourse but limited and complementary perspectives that illuminate practical judgment. Much work remains to be done on the relationship between theory and practical judgment. Still, as suits the style of casuistry through its history, it can grapple effectively with difficult cases even though all speculative and theoretical questions about its methods and presuppositions have not yet been answered.

albert r. jonsen (1995)

SEE ALSO: Bioethics; Conscience; Conscience, Rights of; Ethics: Normative Ethical Theories; Narrative; Natural Law; Principlism; Responsibility

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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