Casuistry

How Casuistry Works

Consider the following scenario: A maintenance supply vendor visits the manager of a large apartment building and demonstrates the advantages of switching to energy-efficient light bulbs. The vendor adds, “We're having a special promotion right now. Everyone who orders 10 cases of bulbs gets a free emergency radio.” Is it ethical for the manager to order 10 cases and accept the gift?

A casuist might approach the scenario by identifying its morally significant features. Those features might include

• the value of the gift,
• the quality of the product being offered for sale,
• the availability of similar products from other vendors at a lower price, and
• the timing of the gift offer relative to the timing of the manager's decision about whether to buy.

The casuist might next identify any generally accepted rules or values involved in the case. A rule in the case of the manager might be, “Get the best value for the building owner's money.”

At this point, the casuist might look for analogous paradigm cases. One paradigm would involve a clearly unacceptable gift, such as an expensive piece of luggage offered to promote a shoddy, overpriced product. A second paradigm would involve a generally acceptable gift, [Page 269]such as an inexpensive ballpoint pen given as a thankyou for purchasing a competitively priced, high-quality product.

The casuist would compare the building manager's case with the two paradigms. A closer resemblance to the paradigm involving an acceptable gift would argue in favor of letting the manager accept the radio. A closer resemblance to the opposite paradigm would argue against accepting the radio.

Casuistry's attention to the details of cases can help open up a range of options for those caught in ethically murky situations. In the case of the building manager, possibilities might include demanding a discount instead of the radio, asking for a delay to allow competitors' products to be evaluated, or simply rejecting the radio. The moral and practical advantages and disadvantages of the options would then be discussed.

When examining complex issues, casuists may arrange and sort many cases to create a resource called a taxonomy. Treating similar cases similarly, casuists use taxonomies to develop general guidelines or policies.

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