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Building upon prior descriptions of casuistry, the author compares and contrasts casuistry and the business case method and then argues that synergies can be created when the two methods are used together in business practice.

Building upon prior analyses of casuistry’s normativity and use of analogy, this reading examines casuistry’s orientation to moral principles and explains how casuistry, when it incorporates moral rules at all, does so indirectly, subtly, and alongside other normative criteria.

Expanding upon earlier descriptions of casuistry as a moral method, the author explains here casuistry’s ability to convey normativity (how things ought to be, which things are good or bad, and which actions are right or wrong) and the ways casuistry uses analogy differently than other methods to reach moral judgments.

After explaining the ideological stalemate of proponents and opponents of genetically modified food products, the author argues for virtue-imbued casuistry as a method to facilitate discussions, defuse antipathies, and break down the intransigence that has led to the impasse.

The following piece explains casuistry’s restoration in clinical and medical ethics, its use in other disciplines, and its potential for use in business practice.

Describes casuistry and its history in the West, in particular ancient Greek, Hebrew, Muslim, and Roman Catholic and Protestant Christian casuistries and provides an explanation of how casuistry was bloodied by bitter controversies, but lived on to emerge later when needed.

Following upon prior examinations of casuistry’s relationship to principles, the author here compares and contrasts casuistry to narrow and wide reflective equilibrium to argue that casuistry and reflective equilibrium are similar but fundamentally different processes for reaching moral judgments.

Building upon prior descriptions of casuistry and virtue ethics, the following compares and contrasts the two methods and then argues that synergies can be created when the two are used together as “virtue-imbued casuistry.”

Building upon prior descriptions of casuistry, this reading compares and contrasts casuistry to popular ethical pluralistic approaches that apply principle-based methods in combination to reach moral judgments.

Develops a case about a fictitious home health care company to illustrate how statistics generated modeling and scenario-based planning are used in risk assessment and how virtue-imbued casuistry can advance moral prescience and prudential business strategizing.

Despite prior predominantly positive portrayals of casuistry, the following reading tackles the accusations that casuistry lacks moral force, is unstructured, conventional and insular, subjective, lax, and inferior to modern principle-based methods. It then explores each criticism in depth, compares casuistry to its alternatives, and argues for casuistry as a viable method for moral problem solving.

Pragmatism can degenerate into hedonism or nihilism, but this is not the American ideal. The declining influence of middle-class values in American life parallels the weakening of pragmatism as the public philosophy of America. Instead, narcissism and anonymity have increasingly become the source of public values. Pragmatism in the sense of res publica, the public good, is discussed followed by discussion of the work of Richard Rorty. Richard Rorty uses the philosophy of pragmatism to discuss the ends of life, in effect as a substitute for religion, rather than the means. His version of pragmatism is very close to existentialism. Much like in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, he believes people make their own ends. Pragmatism as a form of existential critique is further explored in some work by Richard Bernstein. Particular reference is then made to the ideas of John Dewey who provides an alternative in democratic theory to overethicized republicanism and empty proceduralism.

The professional discipline of bioethics for some time now has seemed to be concerned primarily with two major questions.1 One is how various ethical theories such as utilitarianism, deontology, natural law ethics, principlism, feminist care ethics or casuistry (and perhaps other systems as well) would assess a certain action, e.g., assisted suicide or cloning.

1. Introduction. Scholastics and Neo-Scholastics. 2. Sources and Authorities for Moral Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Thomas Aquinas and Jean Buridan on Aristotle's Ethics David Lines. 3. Action, Will and Law in Late Scholasticism Thomas Pink. 4. Michael Baius (1513-89) and the Debate on 'Pure Nature': Grace and Moral Agency in Sixteenth-Century Scholasticism M.W.F. Stone. 5. On the Anatomy of Probabilism Rudolf Schussler. 6. Casuistry and the Early Modern Paradigm Shift in the Notion of Charity Sven K. Knebel. Theories of Human Rights and Dominion. 7. Poverty and Power: Franciscans in Later Medieval Political Thought Roberto Lambertini. 8. The Franciscan Background of Early Modern Rights Discussion: Rights of Property and Subsistence Virpi Makinen. 9. Justification through Being: Conrad Summenhart on Natural Rights Jussi Varkemaa. 10. Ethics in Luther's Theology: The Three Orders Risto Saarinen. Reformers and Humanists. 11. The Reason of Acting: Melanchthon's Concept of Practical Philosophy and the Question of the Unity and Consistency of His Philosophy Gunter Frank. 12. Natural Philosophy and Ethics in Melanchthon Dino Bellucci. 13. Ethics in Early Calvinism Christoph Strohm. 14. Aristotelianism and Anti-Stoicism in Juan Luis Vives's Conception of the Emotions Lorenzo Casini. 15. The Humanist as Moral Philosopher: Marc-Antoine Muret's 1585 Edition of Seneca Jill Kraye. Index of Names.

The question of how to behave under the torture so as not to incur moral censure is an intriguing test case of moral reasoning. Consider that from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century European penal codes held torture to be an indispensable means of criminal investigation. As for the inquisitor, his only reason to query an extorted confession was its lack of circumstantiality. Thus, the defendant’s behaviour under the torture was a point of major concern. Not surprisingly, this posed no trifling problem for Christian casuistry. The crucial circumstance was, of course, the person’s supposed innocence. What a confessor should advise the defendant in this case became a topic of dispute in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While a sceptic like Pierre Charron (d. 1603) took it for granted that Seneca was right to assume that torture made the innocent lie, the majority of moral theologians expected the confessor to prevail on the person to persist in telling the truth. If she did not protest her innocence, she sinned mortally and, consequently, had to face eternal damnation. This dogma clearly supported the credibility of torture—and there are reports that it did have a tremendous effect on the behaviour of individuals accused in witch trials. A minority of theologians, however, allowed the innocent person to escape further trials by falsely charging herself—‘Yes, I am Satan’s confederate’—on the grounds that accepting one’s own capital punishment would not be followed by eternal damnation as well. In what follows, I shall survey the reasons why the majority held that perseverance in telling the truth was an obligation. Then, I shall inquire into the shift of premises which was the requisite condition for making the minority position possible and thus undermining the credibility of torture. I conclude that something critically important to understanding the development of moral reasoning, as well as criminal law theory, happened in Salamanca during the

Scholastic probabilism is a late and revolutionary product of the longstanding scholastic interest in moral decision-making in uncertainty. A deeper interest in this field arose around 1200, when medieval legal thought gained enormous importance and scholastic theories of conscience were brought into practice. For the scholastics, moral uncertainty was the result of the rational defensibility of both sides of a question. It was usually assumed that we should follow the side which is supported by weightier reasons. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, this dogma was challenged from within the scholastic tradition. The new doctrine of scholastic probabilism favoured a threshold model of rational, actionrelated deliberation. If an alternative was sufficiently supported by reason to be held true from some acceptable point of view, it could be chosen as a premise for action, even if the agent or authorities assumed that there are better reasons on the other side. Probabilism gained considerable ground in early modern times; but it did not survive the intellectual cataclysm of the scholastic tradition in the eighteenth century as an important doctrine of moral decision-making. Today, probabilism is familiar only to a few specialists in moral theology and early modern casuistry. I shall argue that this neglect is unwarranted. Contemporary ethics should restore to probabilism some of its former notorious prominence. There is something in the probabilistic blend of medieval and early modern ideas of moral decision-making in uncertainty which is still disturbing. The scholastic probabilists created a novel blend of thought, and it soon became apparent that the emergent mixture was dangerous. Later, the dangers of probabilism were largely forgotten in the wake of the demise of scholasticism. But by then some of the new ideas which had led to probabilism had become part of the mainstream of modern ethics by other routes. The study of probabilism can thus inform us about serious genetic defects in modern ethics. The study of these defects presupposes some knowledge of the structure and anatomy of probabilism. Therefore, the present investigation will play a mainly preparatory role by providing a rough sketch of the anatomy of scholastic probabilism. Unfortunately, this enterprise has its

The phenomenological orientation I have taken differs from the usual derivations of the ethics of medicine from the applications of existing moral philosophies to medical practice. It departs from the many current alternative ethical theories like narrative, casuistry, caring and principlism. Each of these, however, grasps some aspect of the life-world of doctor and patient. None is by itself sufficient as a philosophy or ethic of the clinical encounter. By bracketing these theories at the outset, the phenomenological orientation offers an alternative which may come closer to the thing in itself; namely, what medicine is as a human experience and a moral enterprise.

The essence of agapic casuistry is that cases of conscience are solved by applying the principle of ethical love. This principle requires that you should love your neighbour as yourself.1 From the point of view of natural law it is an universal commandment which binds every moral agent, independently of occupation, religion, race, gender, class and etc. Every conscience is able intuitively to grasp the content of this requirement. The cases of judicial conscience are legal cases. Therefore, this principle if applied inevitably affects the existing law. The Donoghue v. Stevenson case2 which will be considered later in more detail, is a good example of it.

Conscience in making judicial decisions is a particularly complicated phenomenon which requires a special approach. Throughout the centuries moral philosophers and theologians have developed a discipline which deals with description and resolution of cases of conscience, that of casuistry. “The term ‘casuistry’ is derived from casus, Latin for ‘case’ and refers to the study of individual ‘cases of conscience’ in which more than one settled moral principle (or perhaps none) applies. More broadly, casuistry is the use of the ‘method of cases’ in the attempt to bring ethical reflection to bear on problems requiring the decision and action of some moral agent.”1

The concept of Christian love consists not only in the description of moral experience, but also has the advantage providing practical recommendations. The concept of conscience was developed by Christians not for the sake of pure academic interest, but it was born in the pangs of practising virtue. The concept is a result of reflection on this practice. John of Damascus described conscience as a power fighting against the irrational part of soul.1 The Christian vision of conscience reflects all the complexities and struggles which are inherent part of moral life of the human being. The judges are human, and as such they are also affected by the struggle to be moral. Every judge has irrational desires which may affect the outcome of the judicial process. The task of agapic casuistry is to make the judges more aware of their presence in order to neutralise their affect on judicial decisions in the process of passing an impartial sympathy judgement.

Impartial sympathy is the main implication of agapic casuistry in judicial decision-making. The principle of love implies that judges administering law should pursue the good of the people affected by their decisions. No one can do good to the other without the knowledge of the other’s needs, therefore sympathy judgement is based on the knowledge of the personality of the people affected by decision. It is opposed to judgements which disregard the uniqueness of the individual.

What does moral responsibility in science mean? Are experienced scientists more responsible than junior scientists? What responsibility lies with the scientific community? For what are scientists responsible? Do scientists have a responsibility for the applications of their findings? To whom are scientists responsible? Do scientists have a responsibility to future generations and to animals used in research? Is there a ‘real’ moral responsibility in distinction to the responsibility ascribed to scientists by different social groups? What light does the proposed modified social model of moral responsibility shed on the social activity of science? How can the approach of imaginative casuistry be used by scientists? These are some of the questions to be discussed in this chapter.

Groups promoting wildlife in churchyards, or other sites, discover that they face normative questions that have no scientific answers. The language of management is used for handling these questions, but this metaphor has unhelpful associations with predetermined goals, a culture of control and self-centredness. Using a case-study approach, conflicts between conserving natural entities or natural processes (e.g. transplanting scarce plants); between caring for the individual organism or for the system (e.g. felling trees); and between conserving the natural or the cultural heritage (e.g. repointing walls) are examined. These cases of conflicts of duty illustrate the value of attention to circumstances, proportionality, and compromise. The social mechanisms of moral debate include legal protection and the power of stories to give meaning and vision. Ethics is a communal activity. By listening to others and attending to nature our sensibilities will become more refined and our ethical judgements will develop.

Bioethics was born as a distinct field of study in the 1960’s. A range of topics, such as abortion, research with human subjects, selection of patients for scarce life saving treatments and, above all, the appropriate use of “extraordinary” measures of life saving therapy attracted the attention of theologians and philosophers. A literature on these subjects that benefited from the methodologies of these disciplines began to appear. Research centers were founded, conferences held, courses initiated. A cadre of scholars called “bioethicists” took places in medical school and college faculties. The nature of bioethics was, however, not entirely clear, even to its practitioners. In the early 1980’s, a spate of articles appeared in the bioethics literature that attempted to explain the relationship between ethical theory and practice. These articles were a reflection of a more general problem that moral philosophy had encountered in the 1970’s as it struggled to disengage itself from the remote abstractions of analytic and linguistic philosophy and return to “real moral problems.” But the writing of the bioethicists was different: it exposed not only the more general problem of the relation between theory and practice (which, after all, had plagued moral philosophy since Plato), but the perplexity of persons attempting to provide some guidance in ethical dilemmas faced by those actually working in clinical settings.

For the last several years a debate has raged about methods in general ethics, whether theological or philosophical, and in bioethics as one area of applied or practical ethics. It has often focused on what has been characterized as the dominant paradigm in bioethics — the appeal to principles. This approach has recently been disparagingly labelled “principlism” [18]. As a defender of principles in bioethics, I will nevertheless use this label of “principlism” as a short-hand expression for a position that I have presented in several works, especially in Principles of Biomedical Ethics ([3], [4], [5]) — hereafter PBE — which I co-authored with Tom L. Beauchamp.1

Jesus, when asked by a lawyer, “what should I do to inherit eternal life?,” advises him to observe the two great commandments of the law, “Love the Lord your God... and love your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer, hoping to get the last word, challenges Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the memorable parable of the good Samaritan: a stranger, despised as enemy and heretic, gives succor at cost to himself to a beaten and robbed Jewish traveller [Luke 10: 25–38]. That parable is a narrative answer to one of the persistent questions in the long history of debates over duty to others. Who is the other to whom I owe a duty? The answers given in popular morals are various: your own kin, those of your faith, your color, your race, your country. In philosophical ethics the answers are more sophisticated but equally various: all rational beings, future beings, those in special need, those with whom you contract or to whom you make promises.

For the justification of actions that a multitude of agents is responsible for and/or affect a multitude of others a consensus about moral judgements is necessary. This consensus can be subject to dispute on a number of levels. There may be dissent in the judgement about an individual action; or the dissent may be about the formation of norms which are the basis for the justification of a class of actions; or there may be dissent about the principles on the middle or higher levels of universality which determine the formation of such norms; lastly, the dissent may concern the entire metaphysical, religious or other interpretations of the meaning of life from which the obligatory force of those principles may be derived. If the agents are all members of a group that share a comprehensive yet specific ethos, i.e., a determined conception of the good life, dissent will only concern particular actions or perhaps the formation of norms but not the acceptance of their underlying principles. The necessary formation of a consensus presents itself as a problem of casuistry or of the finding of specific norms. The matter differs for communities such as modern society which allow room for the development of more than one specific ethos. For here the dissent may be not just about specific norms but also about the principles which determine them. The problem is not just which common moral principle can be appealed to if a consensus is to be found, but also which strategy is to be chosen to achieve the desired result. While a group with a common ethos will aim at a consensus as complete as possible, this is not a reasonable goal for a pluralistic society. If consensus within a specific ethos is desirable, a society which does not share such an ethos must admit dissent, i.e., freedom. Here consensus may only be aimed at where it is necessary, i.e., where many agents of different moral convictions act together and/or the consequences of such actions are relevant to many or all.

Introduction P.F. Camenisch. Section I: Methods of Biomedical Ethics in the Religious Traditions. Hindu Bioethics K.K. Young. Methodology of Buddhist Biomedical Ethics S. Taniguchi. Taoist Bioethics in the Final Age: Therapy and Salvation in the Book of Divine Incantations for Penetrating the Abyss R.F. Campany. Islam and Medical Ethics J. Kelsay. Method in Jewish Bioethics D.S. Davis. Text and Tradition in Contemporary Jewish Bioethics L.E. Newman. Section II: Methodological Questions across Traditions. Bioethics and Impartial Rationality: the Search for Neutrality M.M. Mendiola. The Confessor as Experienced Physician: Casuistry and Clinical Ethics A.R. Jonsen. Ethical Theories, Principles, and Casuistry in Bioethics: an Interpretation and Defense of Principalism J.F. Childress. Why the Virtures are not Another Approach to Medical Ethics: Reconceiving the Place of Ethics in Contemporary Medicine L.G. Jones, R.P. Vance. Elements of a Feminist Approach to Bioethics B.H. Andolsen. Section III: Methodological Focii and Resources within a Tradition. Scripture and Medical Ethics: Psalm 51:10a, the Jarvik VII, and Psalm 50:9 A. Verhey. A Moral Matrix: Religious Practices and Health Care T.F. Sedgwick. On Being Medieval without Menace: Catholic Magisterial Teaching as a Source for Bioethics P. Lauritzen. On Donating Bone Marrow to an Unknown Half-Brother: a Guided Tour through a Liberal Jewish Responsum on a Biomedical Issue F.L. Weiss. Index.

As commentators on Thomas De Quincey’s literary theories have discovered to their dismay, it is dangerous to assume that De Quincey himself ever intended a systematic categorization and analysis of literary types and effects. He wrote his pieces hastily, under the pressure of deadlines, and seldom with the relevant texts at hand. John Jordan has demonstrated at considerable length that De Quincey’s best criticism was occasional and affective: what first arrested his attention with respect to any literary work was his own emotional response. This did not make his criticism merely impressionistic, however, for De Quincey was as much enamored of philosophical analysis and moral casuistry as of poetical sentiments and moral sublimity, and his finest contributions to literary criticism arose from his careful examination of the specific feature of a work — whether a verse, a passage of prose, or a dramatic speech or scene — once it had excited his emotional response (Jordan, p. 4).

The primary goal of this essay is to examine the character of and problems within the translation of a particular type of moral doctrine into the sort of particular moral judgments we all must make as professional moralists and even as human beings. In particular, I shall be examining the translation or application of certain of the moral dictates of the type of individualistic moral rights theory which is now commonly designated as ‘libertarian’. However, I shall approach this issue of the application of moral dictates to concrete cases within the context of medical ethics and, more specifically, within the context of life-and-death medical decisions. This means that I shall not be concerned with the application to concrete cases of the whole panoply of libertarian rights, e.g., rights to this or that economic good. I will only be concerned with instances in which the relevant right is the right to life and the relevant question is whether a physician’s (or nurse’s, etc.) action violates this right to life. I believe that the main claim which I wish to make about the application of this right to life to concrete medical cases applies very broadly to the application to specific cases of libertarian-type rights at large. That main claim is that the identification of the rights involved in particular cases, i.e., the identification of what the relevant parties have rights to, only provides half of what is needed to reach a judgment about the moral permissibility or impermissibility of a particular action.