by Claude Opus 5.5
Does casuistry (Jonsen and Toulmin) give better guidance here than principle-based reasoning? Which paradigm cases would you reason from?
In The Abuse of Casuistry (1988), Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin set out to rehabilitate a method of moral reasoning that had fallen into disrepute. Casuistry, associated with medieval and early modern moral theology and mocked by Pascal for its apparent laxity, reasons from cases rather than from theories. It begins with paradigm cases about which there is broad agreement, identifies the morally relevant features that make them clear, and then reasons by analogy to new and harder cases, attending closely to circumstances. Jonsen and Toulmin were partly inspired by their experience on the US National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects in the 1970s, where commissioners who disagreed deeply about moral theory often agreed about particular cases. The suggestion was that moral knowledge is often more secure at the level of cases than of principles.
Principle-based reasoning, by contrast, begins with general principles, whether derived from a theory such as utilitarianism or Kantian ethics, or from mid-level principles such as the autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice framework of Beauchamp and Childress, and applies them to particular situations. Which approach gives better guidance in the case behind these seminars?
The case for casuistry here
Several features of the case favour casuistry.
It is factually rich and uncertain. Principles tend to deliver verdicts only once facts are settled. Casuistry, with its attention to circumstances, is better at working with partial information and at noticing which details matter.
It is a composite. The case contains many distinct moral questions: about sexual violence, bystanders, institutional responses, prosecution, journalism, online shaming and privacy. No single principle governs them all. Casuistry can assemble a set of paradigms, each relevant to a different dimension.
Public intuitions about it are already case-shaped. People reason about this case by comparing it with others they remember. Casuistry makes that reasoning explicit and disciplined, rather than leaving it to unexamined association.
Principles conflict here. Respect for the complainant’s autonomy and dignity, fairness to the accused, freedom of the press, privacy, institutional accountability: each is compelling, and they pull in different directions. Principle-based reasoning offers limited guidance about how to weigh them. Casuistry suggests looking at how they have been weighed in cases where we are more confident.
Candidate paradigm cases
Which cases would serve as paradigms? Each illuminates a different dimension.
Steubenville, Ohio, 2012. Two high school football players were later convicted of raping a sixteen-year-old girl at a series of parties, and images and messages about her circulated on social media among students who did not intervene. This is the closest paradigm for the bystander and social media dimensions: a group of peers receiving information in real time and failing to act.
The Duke lacrosse case, 2006. Three students were charged with sexual assault on the basis of an allegation that collapsed; the state Attorney General later declared them innocent, and the prosecutor was disbarred for misconduct. This is the paradigm for the risks of public rush to judgement, prosecutorial overreach and the destruction of reputations before evidence is tested.
Rolling Stone and the University of Virginia, 2014. A magazine article about an alleged group sexual assault at a fraternity was retracted after its account could not be substantiated, and a review by Columbia Journalism School identified serious failures of verification. This is the paradigm for journalistic responsibility when reporting allegations.
Penn State, 2011. The university’s leaders were found to have failed to act on reports of child sexual abuse by a former coach, protecting the institution rather than victims. This is the paradigm for institutional failure and reputational self-protection.
The Christopher Jefferies case, 2011. A man was arrested, vilified by the press and later shown to be entirely innocent. This is the paradigm for the harms of public identification before charge.
The weakness casuistry exposes
Listing these paradigms reveals casuistry’s central difficulty: the choice of paradigm is itself contestable, and often determines the conclusion. Someone who reasons from Steubenville will see this case as a story of bystander complicity and institutional failure to protect a victim. Someone who reasons from Duke lacrosse will see a story about the dangers of public presumption of guilt. Both can claim relevant similarities. The analogies are not wrong, but they cannot by themselves tell us which similarities matter most.
This is where principles return. To decide that the relevant similarity to Steubenville is the bystander group, rather than, say, the age of the parties, or that the relevant similarity to Duke is the publicity rather than the specific evidential failures, we need some account of what makes features morally significant. That account is a principle, however implicit.
Casuistry also has a known risk of drift. Its historical critics complained that, by reasoning from case to case, casuists could reach almost any conclusion through a chain of plausible analogies. Principles provide anchors that resist such drift.
A combined approach
The most defensible answer is that neither method is sufficient alone, and that the best reasoning moves between them. Paradigm cases ground and test principles; principles discipline the choice and interpretation of paradigms. This is close to what John Rawls called reflective equilibrium, the process of adjusting principles and judgements about cases until they cohere.
Applied here, that suggests using a range of paradigms deliberately rather than a single favourite, so that the strengths of each are balanced, and being explicit about which features of the present case are being treated as relevant and why. A seminar might ask students to argue from Steubenville and then from Duke, and to identify what principle would decide between them. That exercise shows both the power of casuistry, in surfacing considerations that abstract principles miss, and its dependence on principles to resolve the tensions it reveals.