Casuistry

[7] The French mathematician, religious philosopher and Jansenist sympathiser attacked priests who used casuistic reasoning in confession to pacify wealthy church donors.

For example, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes a 1738 essay[8] by Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke to the effect that casuistry "destroys, by distinctions and exceptions, all morality, and effaces the essential difference between right and wrong, good and evil".

Casuistic authors include Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, whose Summula casuum conscientiae (1627) enjoyed great success, Thomas Sanchez, Vincenzo Filliucci (Jesuit and penitentiary at St Peter's), Antonino Diana, Paul Laymann (Theologia Moralis, 1625), John Azor (Institutiones Morales, 1600), Etienne Bauny, Louis Cellot, Valerius Reginaldus, and Hermann Busembaum (d.

It was famously attacked by the Catholic and Jansenist philosopher Blaise Pascal during the formulary controversy against the Jesuits, in his Provincial Letters, as the use of rhetorics to justify moral laxity, which became identified by the public with Jesuitism; hence the everyday use of the term to mean complex and sophistic reasoning to justify moral laxity.

[14] In 1679 Pope Innocent XI publicly condemned sixty-five of the more radical propositions (stricti mentalis), taken chiefly from the writings of Escobar, Suarez and other casuists as propositiones laxorum moralistarum and forbade anyone to teach them under penalty of excommunication.

Its facility for dealing with situations where rules or values conflict with each other has made it a useful approach in professional ethics, and casuistry's reputation has improved somewhat as a result.

[18] Pope Francis, a Jesuit, has criticized casuistry as "the practice of setting general laws on the basis of exceptional cases" in instances where a more holistic approach would be preferred.