Chapter XIII.

CASUISTRY.

Casuistry is the application of the general principles of morality to
individual _cases_ in which there is room for question as to duty. The
question may be as to the obligation or the rightfulness of a particular
act, as to the choice between two alternative courses, as to the measure
or limit of a recognized duty, or as to the grounds of preference when
there seems to be a conflict of duties. A large proportion of these cases
disappear under any just view of moral obligation. Most questions of
conscience have their origin in deficient conscientiousness. He who is
determined to do the right, the whole right, and nothing but the right, is
seldom at a loss to know what he ought to do. But when the aim is to evade
all difficult duties which can be omitted without shame or the clear
consciousness of wrong, and to go as close as possible to the boundary
line between good and evil without crossing it, the questions that arise
are often perplexing and complicated, and they are such as, in the
interest of virtue, may fittingly remain unanswered. There are always
those whose aim is, not to attain any definite, still less any
indefinitely high, standard of goodness, but to be saved from the penal
consequences of wrong-doing; and there are even (so-called) religious
persons, and teachers too, with whom this negative indemnity from
punishment fills out the whole meaning of the sacred and significant term
_salvation_. It must be confessed that questions which could emanate only
from such minds, furnish a very large part of the often voluminous and
unwieldy treatises on casuistry that have come down to us from earlier
times, especially of those of the Jesuit moralists, whose chief endeavor
is to lay out a border-path just outside the confines of acknowledged
wrong and evil.

Yet there are *cases in which the most conscientious persons may be in
doubt as to the right*. We can here indicate only the general principles
on which such cases are to be decided, with a very few specific
illustrations.

*The question of duty is often a question*, not of principle, but *of
fact*. It is the _case_, the position and relations of the persons or
objects concerned, that we do not fully understand. For instance, when a
new appeal is made for our charitable aid, in labor or money, the question
is not whether it is our duty to assist in a work of real beneficence, but
whether for the proposed