A rehash of casuist controversies?

Conscience as a Stern Monitor, by Alexander Pruss

If either Newman or Socrates is right, then the voice of conscience does not speak of what is permissible but of what is forbidden or obligatory. Someone who says "My conscience permits me to do A" is at worst confused, and at best reporting that her conscience does not speak against doing A. But that is an argument from silence, and hence weak.

Thus, if two people argue about whether something is morally permitted, and both invoke the testimony of their conscience, all other things being equal, the one who claims it is forbidden is more likely to be right. For the same reason, moral progress tends to move primarily in the direction of more being seen as forbidden or, equivalently, more being seen required.

This can be seen as one view opposing probabilism. "For the same reason, moral progress tends to move primarily in the direction of more being seen as forbidden or, equivalently, more being seen required." Moral progress of an individual? I'm not sure if I would agree with this characterization--it certain seems to play upon the voluntarist's fears of losing freedom and being constricted (see Fr. Pinckaer's treatment of the development of moral theology in The Sources of Christian Ethics). If there is sufficient law-imposing during one's youth, then moral progress will be a greater understanding of the reasons why freedom is ordered in the ways that it is, not more imposition of laws. Complains about legalism can be understood in this way then--those who only see the coercive nature of law and an external source of law, and have not really formed in the "spirit" of the law and therefore able to understand its rationale.

And in any case, conscience, or at least our judgment about what conscience says, is only a fallible guide. So the claim that moral progress tends to be from the less restrictive to the more restrictive may have other exceptions. But there is a presumption that those claiming duty or prohibition are right than that those claiming permission are.

But anything can be restricted--such as intercourse with one's spouse because one does not wish to become impure, or because one wishes to observe abstinence the night before Divine Liturgy. There must be a reason given for the restriction that makes the restriction seem compelling to us during moral deliberation.

Pruss admits of two exceptions to this:
(1) "There are exceptions, of course, to the idea that claims about moral prohibition (or obligation) are more likely correct than ones about moral permission. A general class of exceptions is when we realize that an earlier prohibition was based on the conjunction of a true claim of conscience with a false empirical claim. Thus, a prohibition against women taking various roles in society might well have been based at least in part on false empirical claims about women's intellectual abilities."

(Or similarly, a misapplication of a rule or the use of the wrong premise(s) in moral reasoning. The example I am thinking of is the forbidding of women to sing in choir during the liturgy by Pius X--iirc, it was thought that singing was an office proper to the clergy. Later, when it became clear that singing is an office proper to all who participate in the liturgy (without blurring the distinction between liturgicalparts), the ban was lifted. Of course, this is not an example involving conscience, but it is an example of how a conclusion can be wrong because of the premises, and something similar could illustrate how conscience can be mistaken.)

(2) "Another major class of exceptions is when a claim of obligation logically depends on a prior claim of permissibility. These tend to be cases of positive duty. For instance, the claim that embryonic stem cell research is morally obligatory out of duty for the suffering depends on the prior claim that embryonic stem cell research is morally permissible (opponents of such research should also grant the conditional that if it were permissible, it would be obligatory). A prohibition on discrimination against exhibitionists would presumably be based on a presupposition of the permissibility of exhibitionism. In such cases, conscience's sternness cannot be invoked to defend the claim of duty, because what is really at issue is the logically prior permissibility claim."

What Pruss is addressing is a possible is a conflict between two opinions on what can be done/should be avoided--it doesn't matter if the source of both opinions is one's own moral training, or if they originate with others held to be authorities, etc. If one authority permits and another authority forbids, which is to be followed?

I wrote over at Right Reason:

It seems to me that you are advancing one possible response to the casuist controveries, but it is not clear to me what the practical import of your claim is. Doesn't one need to be able to distinguish between a prohibition that contains an authentic moral insight from scrupulosity? If you admit that the scrupulous are not reliable guides for telling us what is permissible and what is not, then are we not already on the path to elaborating norms and rendering them intelligible? 

No response yet, though I'm not sure if one would be needed. I just think the inquiry should be taken into a different direction, as the current discussion is rather pointless. (And I find talk of the voice of conscience and such, rather than the judgment of conscience, rather distracting. If one wishes to use certain terms because one is using the endoxa of accepted authorities, one better have a good reason for adopting those authorities as authorities in the first place. Otherwise, why talk about consicence without at least a nominal or popular definition in place? This was the same question Fr. Madigan brought up in response to Dr. Garcia, since Dr. Garcia did not give a definition of virtue in his talk about virtue based moral theories. Let us first call conscience the act of judging whether an act is forbidden or obligatory or permissible, and then by extension, the power ordered to this act. Of course this power may be identical with another power, say, the intellect.)

CE on probabilism
Fr. Hugh Barbour, O. Praem, Law or Liberty