Word of the Day!

casuistry [kazh-oo-uh-stree]

noun:
1 specious, deceptive, or oversubtle reasoning, especially in questions of morality; fallacious or dishonest application of general principles; sophistry
2 the determination of right and wrong in questions of conduct or conscience by analyzing cases that illustrate general ethical rules

Examples:

At each of the 2,430 games played this past season, official scorers, nestled in the press boxes, have devoted considerable intellectual energy and an elaborate casuistry to working out which plays are errors and which aren't. The statistic’s sublime pointlessness is pure baseball. (Stephen Marche, The Error in Baseball and the Moral Dimension to American Life, The New Yorker, October 2017)

Casuistry may be defined as adroit rationalization, but what it suggests to most people is a degenerate ability, ordinarily attributed to lawyers, to justify anything or to defend any conceivable act or point of view. (Richard A Shweder, Storytelling among the Anthropologists, The New York Times, September 1986)

Hubert Lepel was wonderfully well versed, in subtle turns of argument - in casuistry of the abstruser kind. It was long since he had looked truth full in the face or drawn a sharp boundary-line between right and wrong. (Adeline Sergeant, A Life Sentence)

And the paradoxes in which Raffles revelled, and the frivolous casuistry which was nevertheless half sincere, and which his mere personality rendered wholly plausible at the moment of utterance, appealed very little to me when recalled in cold blood. (E W Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman)

Brown demonstrates that Donne employed an explicitly Protestant form of casuistry wherein the individual was responsible for making moral choices, based on conscience, reasons, and scripture. (Meg Lota Brown, 'Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England', Journal of Church and State, September 1997)

Origin:

1703, in ethics, 'the solution of special problems of conscience by application of general principles or theories,' see casuist (from French casuiste (17c) or Spanish casuista) + -ry. Even in the earliest printed uses the sense was pejorative. (Online Etymology Dictionary)