Talk:Casuistry

message: Anonymous User:69.214.61.7 tagged this article 12 July 2005
*I'm no expert on casuistry, but I have never heard it described in terms of "pure cases, also called paradigms."  Please see  if you're looking for a simple dictionary definition. --LMS
(The dictionary definitions at the linked site:
::"1. Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead."
::"2. The determination of right and wrong in questions of conduct or conscience by analyzing cases that illustrate general ethical rules."
Does the Wikipedia article not support these definitions? Wetman 21:50, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The on-line of the History of Ideas, given as an External Link, might provide a guide to mainstream ideas. --Wetman 21:50, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

text: (...or perhaps they are just common everyday connotations after all. --Wetman 23:48, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Some of this material would easily find a place in the article. --Wetman 07:47, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Tagged "Disputed Neutrality"

message: :<<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.>>
This is misleading, the reason for supressing illegally obtained evidence is precisely practical and in spite of the concept of the court as "truth-seeker". The goal of preventing the police/prosecutor from illegally obtaining evidence (along with determination that there is no other way to accomplish this goal) motivates such an exclusionary rule. This is precisely the balancing of casual effects that we are trying to discuss!
On the contrary, a purist might pejoratively call an exclusionary rule casuistry on the grounds that it attempts create a solution for a broader problem than the scope would generally allow, i.e. a decision about admissible evidence growing into a policy meant to deter police misconduct. For the purist, whether or not the evidence is germane to the question at hand is the only criterion to be used. 134.10.9.159 10:35, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Just Plain Wrong!

message: Casuistry, applied ethics, ethics, ethical codes, moral codes, moral core, aesthetics, etiquette, criminal justice, arbitration, law, politics, legal codes (and various examples of same), precedent and case-based reasoning articles could all be better coordinated, and also much improved.  There are more articles on law and politics and political science that also need to be clear that no one views these as anything but applied ethics within states.
In the zeal to apply a 'relentlessly practical' approach to decisions, it would seem that Larry tried to eliminate all the pre-existing precedents, and ignore how most of the important decisions in our lives are actually made. This does not seem all that practical, although it was relentless.  And thankfully over.  It's time to fix these articles and remove this obvious bias.
===Trunk article is Applied ethics, right?===
The trunk article is Applied ethics, of which casuistry is an aspect. Is this right? So, at the article Applied ethics there should be a subsection, perhaps titled Casuistry: the argument from cases. That subsection, under the heading Main article Casuistry, should offer a concise abridgment of what is to be found in more detail here. Shouldn't many of the aspects of applied ethics in the post above be treated in similar fashion?
Is that the most useful approach? --Wetman 23:48, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Organization of the facets of [[Applied ethics]]

message: The trunk article is Applied ethics, of which casuistry is an aspect. Is this right? So, at the article Applied ethics there should be a subsection, perhaps titled Casuistry: the argument from cases. That subsection, under the heading Main article Casuistry, should offer a concise abridgment of what is to be found in more detail here. Shouldn't many of the aspects of applied ethics in the post above be treated in similar fashion?
Is that the most useful approach? --Wetman 23:48, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Trunk article is [[Applied ethics]], right?

message: "In a modern casuistic approach to say, a biomedical issue, two boards of experts are appointed. The ethical board might represent disparate ethical theories.  The scientific board represents relevant medical, legal, psychological and philosophical disciplines. The ethical board evaluates situations, and recommends and ratifies responses. The scientific board explains the causes and effects of each ethical state and response.
The boards then consider actions that are appropriate for relevant pure cases.  For example, most ethical systems agree that assault deserves punishment, while risking oneself to save lives deserves reward.  Other cases that are often relevant include theft, gifts, verified truth, verified lying, betrayal, and earned trust.  
Taking such cases as data, the board draws parallels with the problem under consideration, and attempts to discover a set of actions to respond to the case under consideration.  
For example, medical experiments without informed consent, performed on healthy persons, are often likened to assault with a deadly weapon performed by the experimenter. The experiments usually involve equipment or drugs, which provides the 'weapon.' The experimenter's malice is indicated by the secrecy. Therefore, harmful results can be attributed to the malice, and the degree of damage indicates the degree of assault.
If the experimenter gets informed consent from the subject, the scenario transforms completely because the moral choice moves from the experimenter to the subject. With informed consent, the subject then becomes either a tragic hero if the procedure fails, or a successful hero if the procedure succeeds.  The experimenter is then merely offering a brave volunteer an opportunity to contribute to human knowledge, and possibly benefit from the process.  
Note that in both cases, "villain & victim," or "scientist & volunteer," the actual experiment might cause the same clinical results. However, the moral relationships of the participants are completely different.
Since casuistry is concerned with facts and actions, rather than theories, it is often remarkably easier to come to agreement.  Although many ethical systems disagree about the justification for an action, the actions that they recommend are often remarkably similar.  There can be many rationales for the same action, thus avoiding any single rationale or the necessity to agree on language seems to remove a major barrier to agreement.  In legal terms, it removes the fear of setting precedent.  
Such an action-focused approach to applied ethics is thus also less likely to conflict with informal ethical theories of politics, etiquette, aesthetics and arbitration - each of which implies their own concept of a valid precedent.  In fact an approach based on casuistry involves practices from all of these - especially the production of hypothetical cases for deriving a common ethic - but does not permit the arbitrary introduction of precedents from any of them.
A specialized example of casuistry is a science court, in which scientists agree in advance what scientific theory would best explain a set of facts and thus what research program is recommended - making it extraordinarily difficult for scientists to disagree with that action if those facts turn out to be true.  A similar approach can be taken to engineering and regulatory decisions, with advocates of different potential actions competing to establish themselves.  These applications to public policy tend to resemble that of more traditional politics."
I don't particularly care for the style of this, and I am not well versed in "casuistry" so I'll leave it to others to see how much of this will be merged. Sam Spade 12:37, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Moved from [[applied ethics]]

message: I changed "The selection of a paradigm case is justified by warrants, and opposed by ??? [forgot the word]." to "The selection of a paradigm case is justified by warrants." I'm afraid I know nothing about this, so would someone who knows this mysterious word please add it there? --Tothebarricades.tk 03:52, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "forgot the word" 

message: What is the basis for this statement in the article?  Illegally obtained evidence is still "real evidence", and certainly many scholars, prosecuters and much of the public has thought so.  In the United States, the courts have just decided that the exclusionary rule is preferable to prosecuting law enforcement personale, for what are sometimes just technical violations.  It is possible for the credibility of evidence to be tainted by the manner in which it is obtained but that is a different matter.--Silverback 07:45, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  In contrast, a rigorous theoretical approach would find that such evidence is "not real evidence," 

message: It seems like the bibliography of a paper has been dumped at the end of the article to support a list of otherwise unsubstantiated statements. It would be better if the individual sentences or paragraphs ("While the roots of Western casuistry can (at least) be traced back to Aristotle (384-322 BCE), the high point of casuistry occurred from approximately 1550 to 1650") were given citations.  This particular statement, for example, seems quite misleading, even if the "at least" makes the first part technically true.  Sumerian magistrates were deciding cases on the basis of casuistry as early as the third millennium BC, and the practice may have succeeded in an unbroken line from them to the Babylonians and Assyrians and on to the rest of the ancient world.  One is also left wondering why the Jesuit use of casuistry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, if one accepts the claim, constituted the "high point" of casuistry.  As the article presently stands, one feels compelled to read all of the sources in the References before editing the article. modify 16:45, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: Should a comparison be drawn between the religious use of casuistry and the muslim practice of taqiyya?
On the intro, it's well written - looks better than large parts of the article, which reproduce discussion contained at the top - but it should be concise.--Shtove 15:23, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Taqiyya 

message: The following has been move here from the article. There is a difference between a list of books and papers and a set of references. Someone might like to re-insert the references that are actually used, and to add appropriate footnotes. Banno 08:34, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Since, per the article, the "Jesuit religious order extensively used casuistry", they would have undoubtedly recorded their thinking on the matter.  Therefore, I am very surprised no such references appear in the list below, nor in the original article.  To second and expand Banno's observation, I am surprised that of the references below, only four are before 1980, those four still being in the 20th century with publication dates of 1936, '67, '71 & '74, .  My opinion of course, but it seems a rather narrow selection for a topic that has been around a long time.  Dan Aquinas (talk) 18:51, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Added back as standard Further Readings § 72.228.150.44 (talk) 07:00, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: Lede currently has "and often is a critique of principle- or rule-based reasoning". Probably meant or should be something like "and is often a shortcoming of case-based reasoning approaches, particular those which are not principled". 72.228.150.44 (talk) 06:56, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually that's a glaring error that contradicts the body of the article. 72.228.150.44 (talk) 07:34, 23 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not Really 

message: M-W generally lists senses in historical order, so this doesn't give any indication of frequency or importance.  Not R (talk) 18:17, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This was found in a paragraph of almost pure original research (see "Original research' section below). I've removed some of the paragraph, including the passage to which you object. What remains is still questionable, but I'm not yet decided what to do about it. (By the way, Merriam-Webster has published possibly hundreds of dictionaries. Do we know that they all give more than one definition of casuistry with the non-pejorative definition listed first? Shouldn't we be more specific about what dictionary we mean?) TheScotch (talk) 07:42, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  "though Merriam-Webster lists the neutral one first" 

message: This article is atrocious.  The definition of casuistry is somewhat adequate but casuistry in ethics is not exclusively associated with the Jesuits but is more universal than that.  The term "Jesuit pope Francis" is ridiculously used to demonstrate the prejudicial intent of the article.  Casuistry is a term used by ethicists to show an inadequate moral argument and is nowhere associated with one group of people.  Some of the previous commenters have noted some of the same things.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.42.185.74 (talk) 14:39, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Manipulative use of language 

message: Re: "Most online dictionaries list a pejorative meaning as the primary definition before a neutral one,[6][7][8] though Merriam-Webster lists the neutral one first.[9] In journalistic usage, the pejorative use is ubiquitous.[10][11][12][13]"
This is grotesquely abusive use of citation. [6],[7], and [8] do not say that "most online dictionaries list a pejorative meaning as the primary definition before a neutral one"; they are merely examples of dictionaries that list meanings in this way, and three dictionaries are not "most dictionaries". Likewise, [10],[11],[12], and [13] don't say that "in journalistic usage, the pejorative use is ubiquitous"; they are merely examples of pejorative journalistic usage. It would require every single journalistic usage ever made to establish ubiquity in the literal sense (which is the sense an encyclopedia should restrict itself to), and four examples come nowhere near to making a dent in establishing ubiquity in even the loose hyperbolic sense (which is anyway inappropriate for Wikipedia). In any case, it is not the job of a Wikipedia editor to look at dictionaries or newspaper articles and decide what they tend to do. What is needed is an authoritative source that already says what dictionaries or newspaper articles tend to do. If no such source can be found, then Wikipedia must keep silent on the matter. TheScotch (talk) 07:26, 12 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original research 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I propose merging of Jesuitism into this article for several reasons:
# These are essentially the same meaning and history. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a dictionary.
# The term Jesuitism is essentially an old pejorative slur against Jesuits, lacking significant meaningful content.
# Both of these articles are of low quality and it is better to focus the energy of editors on a single (hopefully better) article.
The first reason is obviously most important. What do others think? Sondra.kinsey (talk) 14:20, 22 August 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Klbrain (talk) 21:38, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jesuitism merger proposal 

message: The sentence  "It was not until publication of The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (1988), by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin,[8] that a revival of casuistry occurred. " is dubious and needs a citation or a re-write.  In what way did that book revive casuistry? Does this apply world-wide, or is it just a US thing? Casuistry has surely been alive and well in judicial reasoning in Common Law countries.
Rick Jelliffe (talk) 02:10, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I have a feeling that the OED has more to say about the definition of "Casuistry" then a quote from Bolingbroke from 1749. Would anyone care to check it out? Mannanan51 (talk) 06:23, 12 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  OED 

message: I am moving the following material here until it can be properly supported with reliable, secondary citations, per WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:IRS, WP:PSTS, et al. This diff shows where it was in the article. Nightscream (talk) 14:49, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Uncited material in need of citations

message: This is an interesting article that uses the term casuistry differently from the wikipedia article.  I may try to look for further citations and possibly use some of it here. 2601:648:8202:96B0:25EB:282F:5576:C543 (talk) 02:48, 4 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Philosophy Now article 

message: Can we find and cite examples that were actually used in the literature? 142.182.136.105 (talk) 01:36, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Do we have examples?