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The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning

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This is a thorough and challenging intellectual history of a form of ethical reasoning excoriated since the 17th century, only to emerge in the 20th as a principal method of analyzing contemporary ethical problems. It is an excellent and even necessary foundation for ethicists.

If asked to provide two bookends to a theology/philosophy library, my choices would be David Tracy's Blessed Rage for Order and this book, The Abuse of Casuistry. The former provides contemporaneous structure and language to the general propositions of the subject, this book obtains practical meaning (meaningfulness)from the individual case. Jonsen/Toulmin is a tour de force in a subject so laden with cliches (how many modern reader have read the Provincial Letters?) and "Enlightenment" baggage (this is the one we kept out of assorted discarded myths of the universal) that just reading it constitutes an act of intellectual rebellion. Henceforth, we are all casuists (not that we ever stopped being casuists, as the well developed narrative and examples point out)and informed at at...despite our pining for absolute platitudes..