Casuistry
Etymology
From Latin "casus," "case" or "occurrence," the same root behind the grammatical and legal senses of "case." It named a respectable branch of ethics that reasoned from established principles to concrete dilemmas of conscience. In the seventeenth century, attacks on Jesuit moral reasoning — Pascal’s especially — gave it the second, sneering sense of hair-splitting used to excuse the inexcusable.
noun · /KAZH-oo-uh-stree/
The application of general moral rules to particular cases, often with the implication of clever but specious reasoning.
What it names
The fine-grained work of judging a hard case on its specifics — and, in its pejorative sense, the slide from careful distinction into self-serving loophole-hunting.
Example
The memo was a masterpiece of casuistry, finding a way to call the layoffs a growth investment.
Related idea
Casuistry works case by case from the bottom up; a dogma imposes a fixed answer from the top down, refusing the very particulars casuistry lives on.