Abstract
Ethical dilemmas within any system are created when moral principles are cited for opposing actions with neither side presenting the obvious right course to follow. Principle-driven decision making has its obvious limitations. Casuistry presents an alternative system for making ethical decisions. Principles in this approach are neither ignored nor discarded; rather they serve as general statements describing human behavior, out of which come “paradigm cases” illustrating the most manifest breaches of the general principle for the casuist. Scrutiny of a series of cases from the simplest most parsimonious to the most complex is undertaken to resolve the doubt inherent in ethical dilemmas; reasonable expectations are discovered in subsequent cases, driving the search until resolution is reached. The casuist sets out to join unique individual cases with general principles without discounting the validity of either, all the while determining how exactly to act in a particular situation.
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