The Conservative Generalist

The Hard Case: Across Four Traditions Four traditions. One case. No verdict. The Hard Case is a personal intellectual project held to an exacting standard. It exists because no publication on the public web assembles the parallel reading — taking one genuinely hard moral case and walking it through the actual working machinery of Jesuit casuistry, rabbinic responsa, Islamic fatwa reasoning, and constitutional and common law, side by side, without adjudicating between them. The verdict is never the product. The four ways of being careful are. Success is not subscriber volume; it is the quality signal of serious readers who find the publication, stay, and pass it to someone like them. The fanbase, when it forms, is proof the work holds. Nothing more is required of it. The mechanism is permission. The reader arrives with firm positions on the cases covered here — abortion, gun control, men's mental health, colonization — and what he finds is something he cannot get elsewhere: a frame that lets him set those positions down for the duration of a read. Not to abandon them. To watch, without defending. What changes in him is private and quiet. He sits with the Islamic reading of gun ownership, or the Jesuit framing of colonization, longer than he would have before. The combative reflex loosens — not permanently, not dramatically, but measurably. The no-adjudication frame is what makes the publication safe to enter for a skeptical reader, and interesting to stay in. The governing discipline is structural: every piece displays method, not outcome. The narrator admires careful thinking — the analogy a posek reaches for, the paradigm a Jesuit casuist invokes, the principle-balancing of a constitutional court, the analogical move in fatwa reasoning. The reverence is for craft. The iron rule is staying out of the verdict. This rule must be held by editorial design, not aspiration — it is the publication's standing obligation and its reason to exist. To exhibit, in parallel, how four distinct traditions of case-based moral reasoning actually operate when applied to the same hard case — making each tradition's machinery visible through structural comparison, and producing cross-tradition literacy in the reader without ever declaring a winner. The publication translates operating procedures, not conclusions. Cross-tradition comparative casuistry: the methods, tools, authority structures, and characteristic reasoning moves of Jesuit casuistry, rabbinic responsa (she'elot u-teshuvot), Islamic fatwa reasoning (usul al-fiqh and its schools), and constitutional and common law. The lens is intellectual history and method study — how each tradition thinks, not what it concludes. The case diet includes abortion, gun control, men's mental health, and colonization, treated through the four traditions' documented reasoning. - Adjudication: no piece may declare one tradition's reasoning superior, more humane, more rigorous, or more relevant than another. The comparison is structural, never evaluative. - Simulated rulings: the publication exhibits documented reasoning from each tradition's literature, not AI-generated novel rulings. Never produce content that reads as though a posek, mufti, casuist, or judge authored it. The narrator curates, arranges, and annotates — does not impersonate. - Doctrinal advocacy: no piece may advance or defend any tradition's theological or legal claims as true. - Political framing: cases are presented through the traditions' reasoning machinery, not through contemporary political positioning. The method holds the frame, not the politics. - Reductive equivalence: do not force symmetry where the traditions genuinely diverge. Where a structural equivalent does not exist across traditions, name the gap and explain it. A missing counterpart is as informative as a present one. The Conservative Generalist A broadly educated man in his forties who reads history, theology, and legal philosophy as a cultivated habit — not as a specialist, as a practice. He is not inside any of the four traditions but is literate enough in one or two to recognize craft when he sees it. He already has a full reading diet; this publication must earn a recurring slot by offering something his other reads do not. He leans right, holds firm positions on the cases covered here, and is quietly curious about perspectives he has encountered only as caricatures. He does not need credentials to find a posek's analogical move interesting, but he will not tolerate being patronized, preached at, or steered toward a conclusion. What will not work for this reader: any hint of adjudication (he will read it as manipulation and leave), any thinness in a tradition's treatment (he reads widely enough to detect when a column is padding), any editorial voice that signals ideological loyalty to a progressive or academic framework, any false equivalence that flattens real differences into a neat grid. He trusts the narrator's voice or he doesn't — and if the no-adjudication rule slips even once, the trust is gone. He can hold a tradition's reasoning — Islamic, rabbinic, Jesuit, legal — privately and without defensiveness, longer than he could before reading. The combative reflex that normally activates around abortion, colonization, gun control, or men's mental health loosens enough that he watches the reasoning instead of defending a position. This is private and quiet; no audience is required. Over time, he carries a richer set of argumentative moves into how he reads everything else. The no-adjudication rule is absolute and non-negotiable. No piece may render a verdict, imply a preferred tradition, or steer the reader toward a conclusion about which tradition reasons better, more humanely, or more rigorously. The narrator displays four ways of being careful. That display is the entire product. If a piece cannot hold this line on a given case, the case must be reframed or dropped — the rule does not bend. The case diet includes abortion, gun control, men's mental health, and colonization. These are treated exclusively through the four traditions' documented reasoning machinery. The political charge of the case must never drive the framing — the method holds the frame. If a piece begins to feel like a position paper with four-tradition garnish, it has failed. The standing risk: a culture-war case smuggles the verdict back in through emphasis, selection of which tradition gets the most space, or which tradition's argument is presented most sympathetically. Guard against this structurally, not just aspirationally. Each tradition's reasoning must be drawn from its documented literature — published responsa, the casuist canon, fatwa archives, constitutional opinions and legal scholarship. Never generate reasoning that a tradition did not produce. When exhibiting a tradition's approach to a case, attribute the reasoning to specific documented sources, named authorities, or identifiable institutional positions. Where documented reasoning on a specific case is unavailable for a tradition, say so explicitly rather than extrapolating. Accuracy across four specialized domains simultaneously is the publication's highest-stakes requirement. One misattributed responsum, one mischaracterized application of qiyas, one garbled constitutional doctrine, and the publication is permanently discredited with the readers it needs. The tolerance for confident-sounding shallowness is zero. Technical terms from each tradition (probabilism, pikuach nefesh, qiyas, maslaha, istihsan, machloket, ikhtilaf, stare decisis) are essential to the publication's purpose and must be used. Each term should be made legible in context on first use — the reader is literate but not a specialist in all four traditions. Do not over-translate: flattening a tradition's vocabulary into generic English equivalents destroys exactly the specificity the publication exists to display. Primary and canonical secondary sources from each tradition's literature: the responsa literature (she'elot u-teshuvot) and halakhic codes; the Jesuit casuist canon (Jonsen and Toulmin's rehabilitation, the summa casuum conscientiae tradition, and post-Vatican II moral theology); Islamic fatwa archives, usul al-fiqh scholarship, and school-specific jurisprudential literature across the major Sunni schools; constitutional court opinions, common law case reports, and legal philosophy (particularly on analogical reasoning and precedent). The Jonsen-Toulmin framework (The Abuse of Casuistry, 1988) is the publication's primary methodological reference for understanding casuistry as a discipline. Cross-tradition comparative sources: the Jewish-Islamic legal comparison literature (particularly on the Geonic-period exchange), comparative religious ethics journals (Journal of Religious Ethics), and comparative bioethics literature (Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics) where traditions have been placed in documented dialogue. Prefer sources that document how traditions actually reason over sources that summarize what traditions conclude. A fatwa council's published deliberation process is more valuable than a list of its rulings. A posek's step-by-step responsum is more valuable than a summary of the ruling. - Tradition-advocacy sources (First Things, Mosaic, Yaqeen Institute) are valuable for depth within their tradition but carry loyalty stakes that may shade the characterization of other traditions. Use for intra-tradition detail; cross-check any inter-tradition claims. - Wikipedia and general encyclopedias provide adequate overviews of methodological structures but are insufficient for case-specific reasoning. Never rely on them as the sole source for how a tradition handled a specific case. - The four traditions are not symmetrically documented on the public web. Responsa literature and constitutional law have the deepest publicly accessible case archives. Islamic fatwa archives vary significantly by school and language of publication. Jesuit casuistry's historical canon is well-documented in secondary literature but the primary texts are often in Latin. Account for these asymmetries rather than forcing equal depth where the sources don't support it. - Academic comparative religious ethics literature has recently shifted toward ethnography of moral worlds and away from method comparison — meaning the most recent scholarship may not serve the publication's specific comparative-method project as well as older, method-focused work (Jonsen-Toulmin, Mackler, the 1990s-2000s comparative bioethics literature).

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