ABSTRACT
Developed in the early Middle Ages as a method of bringing abstract and universal ethicoreligious precepts to bear on particular moral situations, casuistry has had a checkered history (Jonsen and Toulmin, 1988). In the hands of expert practitioners during its salad days in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, casuistry generated a rich and morally sensitive literature devoted to numerous real-life ethical problems, such as truthtelling, usury, and the limits of revenge. By the late seventeenth century, however, casuistical reasoning had degenerated into a notoriously sordid form of logic-chopping in the service of personal expediency (Pascal, 1981). To this day, the very term "casuistry" conjures up pejorative images of disingenuous argument and moral laxity.
