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 object, and under the direction of those who make the appeal, our labor or money will be lucratively invested in the service of humanity. There are, certainly, benevolent associations and enterprises for the very noblest ends, whose actual utility is open to the gravest doubt. It is sometimes difficult even to determine a question of justice or equity, simply because the circumstances of the case, so far as we can understand them, do not define the right. Instances of this class might be multiplied; but they are all instances in which there is no obscurity as to our obligation or duty, and therefore no question for moral casuistry. We are, however, obviously bound, by considerations of fitness, to seek the fullest information within our power in every case in which we are compelled to act, or see fit to act; nor can we regard action without knowledge, even though the motive be virtuous, as either safe or blameless.
