Casuistry

Abstract

Casuistry has had a bad press, ridiculed on stage, feared for subverting morality, and in a Protestant world indelibly stained with Jesuitry and Machiavellianism, it was nevertheless, as it still remains, a dimension of any serious moral reflection.¹ Only a little needs to be said about it here as a preliminary for the more specific context of the casuistry of lying. In fact, because of casuistry’s reputation for diminished moral responsibility, it has been too easy to simplify the principal theories of ethics into consequentialist and deontological, with Bentham and Kant respectively being the names around which such theories gather and with casuists being seen only as amoral consequentialists.² This notwithstanding, casuistry constitutes a third dimension to ethical theorizing in its own right. In ethics there is effectively a triadic relationship between deontological principles, consequences and cases.³

But tell me, old Boy, hast thou laid aside all thy Equivocals and Mentals in this case?’

John Arbuthnot, Lewis Baboon Turned Honest, ch. 4.