![handle is hein.journals/valur32 and id is 429 raw text is: OF MONSTERS UNLEASHED:
A MODEST BEGINNING
TO A CASUISTRY OF CLONING
CATH JUNE COOKSON*
If an educated man is armed with only reason, if he is disdainful of
custom and ignores strength offeeling, if he thinks of prejudice and
intolerance as words with no connotations that are not disgraceful
and is blind to religious conviction, he had better not venture outside
his academy, for if he does he will have to deal with forces he cannot
understand.'
Fear. Horror. Hunger for glory. The driving urge to create and to
discover. These passions, and more, dominate the moral debate over cloning,
and we ignore them at our peril. The challenge is how to take due account of
the feelings and images that swirl around this issue, while not letting them
dominate the public discourse. In this Article, I offer a modest suggestion: the
process of casuistry2 is well suited to advance the public debate over the ethics
of cloning beyond the emotive level of discourse.
J.D., Rutgers University, 1980; M.A. [Religious Studies], The University of Virginia, 1992;
Ph.D. [Religious Studies], Indiana University, 1997; Visiting Assistant Professor, Indiana
University-Bloomington, Department of Religious Studies. The author's areas of interest are ethics,
law and religion in America, and religion and social issues. The author wishes to thank Ann
Mongoven for her helpful critique of the draft.
1. LORD PATRICK DEVLIN, THE ENFORCEMENT OF MORALS 95-96 (1968).
2. Casuistry is common to both legal and ethical reasoning. In a traditional casuistical analysis,
the context of the case at hand fuels the reasoning process: the first question asked is not what is
the law? but what is going on here? Context and facts, not vague impressions, drive the ethical
inquiry. Yet, casuistry is not a form of relativism or situation ethics. Principles are taken into
account, not as philosophical abstractions, but as they are embodied in clear paradigmatic instances
in which there is no doubt that the particular principle applies (in the common law, these paradigms
are called precedents). The particulars of the paradigm are compared with the context of the current
case to see how far, on a continuum, the paradigm is from the matter at hand. The closer our
present case is to the paradigm, the more certain is our ethical judgment.
Thus, the vital move in casuistry is from abstract principles to paradigmatic illustrations of
those principles. These paradigms concretize and embody the essence of the evil or harm that the
moral law was most clearly meant to avoid or prohibit, and/or the essence of the good that the
principle was most clearly meant to promote. Kenneth Kirk notes that every principle, to be
morally operative, must be accompanied by illustrations and examples and that such principle is
partially illuminated by the known instances in which it holds good. KENNETH E. KIRK,
CONSCIENCE AND ITS PROBLEMS: AN INTRODUCTION TO CASUISTRY 107 (1936).
419](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/valur32&div=21&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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