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Because Telling Another Person They’re Just Wrong Usually Isn’t Helpful

From what I hear, there was a presidential election recently. I’ve also heard that it highlighted (again) some fundamental differences about moral issues that divide the citizenry. Just in case those things are true, and even if they’re not, I thought it would be good to briefly outline a procedure for discussing moral issues with people with whom you might disagree. What I’m about to describe is not a moral theory per se but a way to open and continue a conversation about disputed moral issues.

Let’s start with a basic point of moral philosophy: Good is to be pursued and done, and evil is to be avoided. It’s a really simple statement once you think about it for a minute, and I find that there is hardly ever any dissent about it. Most everyone agrees that we ought to do good and avoid evil.

Careful readers will, of course, note two things about this statement that aren’t straightforwardly clear. First, doesn’t this statement fail to distinguish between “ought” and “is”? Second, what do you mean by “good” and “evil”?

On the first point, the answer is “sort of,” and I’ve been careful to formulate it—actually, I’ve borrowed the formulation from Aquinas—as I have in order to avoid making a commitment about whether you can get an ought from an is. For one, I think that in our everyday conversations about morality, this point isn’t really important. For another, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to not draw a sharp distinction between ought and is. The verb “to be” in Aquinas’s formulation, for example, is stated as a gerund, which suggests that what goodness is means that one oughtto pursue it. But even here, I’ve gone further afield than is usually necessary. In my experience, most people just understand the statement to be true.

Detail of The School of Athens by Raffaello Sa...

Detail of The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1509, showing Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the second point, aye, there’s the rub. What things do you think are good? What things do you think are evil? These questions will raise some hearty disputes, but the disputes that arise from them are important ones. If we are talking to someone with whom we disagree, we should expect disagreement. There may not be a silver bullet way of persuading our interlocutors that they’re wrong, but we cannot lose sight of the point that we must understand what precisely we agree and disagree about.

Here’s a good exercise related to this point (perhaps you can do it in the combox): Set down a short list of kinds of things you think are basically good. Try to keep your list as short as you can, but not too short. It’s not helpful to be Plato in this case. His list of things that are basically good consists of one item: the good itself. Well, thanks, Plato. In like manner, it’s also not helpful, for present purposes, to put down “God.” You’re looking for things that fall between the specificity of “the smell of pizza baking in a wood-fired oven” and the generality of “the good itself.” A traditional list would include some of the following: life, knowledge, friendship, aesthetic experience, and maybe a few others. Really try to keep your list to a manageable size, and don’t simply let it trail off with an “etcetera.” I’ll just mention that one thing that’s often disputed—should it go on the list or not?—is pleasure. Some people treat it as a basic good; others don’t. We should all think about whether it is or not, but not right now.

Suppose you have life on your list. At this point you can go back to the first point—that good is to be pursued and done, and evil avoided—and see how it comes out now that you’ve given it some content: Life is to be pursued and done, and death avoided. You can see that it makes sense to say that life is to be pursued, but what about saying that life is to be done? It’s best to reword that in something like the following way: life-preserving (or life-promoting) actions are to be done. And death-promoting or -dealing actions are to be avoided. Similarly for friendship: Friendship is to be pursued, friendship-promoting and -preserving actions are to be done, and actions that go against or undermine friendship are to be avoided.

From these examples, you might anticipate some complications, and you’d be right. Continue reading →

Thomas Says: Scandal, It’s So Special

This is the third in my intermittent series on Aquinas on the topic of scandal, which is covered in question 43 of the second part of the second part of his Summa Theologiae. In the first two posts I covered the main contours of his thinking on the issue. First, scandal is defined as “something less rightly said or done that occasions spiritual downfall.” Second, there are two aspects of scandal: active and passive. Active scandal occurs when a person sins (or even has a strong appearance of sinning) and thereby causes another to sin. Passive scandal occurs when a person is enticed to commit a sin after observing the actions of another—regardless of whether those actions are sinful. The upshot of this is that there can be cases of active without passive scandal, or passive without active scandal.

In the third article of his question on scandal, Thomas raises the question of whether scandal is a special sin. A strange question, until you understand what he means by “special.” He’s not asking whether it is unique. By asking whether scandal is a special sin, he’s asking whether it is a specific kind of sin—like murder, theft, gossip, which are all opposed to some specific kind of virtue or good. As he mentions in the first objection to his claim that scandal is a special sin, scandal is defined as something less rightly said or done, but that applies to every sin. So, it would seem that scandal is not a special sin.

Thomas’s first point is that the idea that scandal is a special sin is supported by scripture, specifically, Romans 14:15: “If, because of thy meat, thy brother be grieved, thou walkest not now according to charity.” Hence, scandal is specifically opposed to charity (love).

Beyond this point, however, Thomas makes distinctions (as is his wont). First, passive scandal is not a special sin, because you might fall into any kind of sin through the words or actions of others. Second, some kinds of active scandal are special. In particular, accidental active scandal is not a special sin because someone who commits such a sin does not intend to lead others astray. But direct active scandal is a special sin because a person intends to draw others into sin through his own sinful words or actions—or at least through words or actions have the appearance of sinfulness. To summarize: all scandal is sinful, but only direct active scandal is specially opposed to charity.

Here’s an example from everybody’s favorite recent topic: Newt Gingrich. Was (from what we can tell) Gingrich guilty of the sin of scandal in committing adultery with Callista? Clearly, Gingrich’s actions were “something less rightly done,” so they qualify as active scandal if they occasioned the spiritual downfall of someone else. And, to be clear, “occasion spiritual downfall” means “encourage toward sin.” Notice that scandal does not mean that Gingrich caused someone else to sin; it only means that his actions encouraged others toward any kind of sin (lust, adultery, covetousness, hatred, etc.). We can’t know whether anyone else was encouraged to sin by Gingrich’s actions, but I’d say that, with the number of people who know about it, it’s likely that someone was led to sin after hearing about Gingrich’s infidelity. Perhaps a warning to those in the limelight.

Thomas Says: So Scandalous It’s a Sin

In the first post in this series on Aquinas’s account of scandal, we saw that Aquinas defines scandal as “something less rightly said or done that occasions spiritual downfall” and that he distinguishes between active and passive scandal. In this post, I want to cover his argument that scandal is a sin. Of course, we always have to keep in mind the distinction between active and passive scandal, so the question to answer is twofold: Is active scandal sinful? Is passive scandal sinful? But even these aren’t adequately formulated. We should ask instead: Is active scandal always sinful? Is passive scandal always sinful?

The answer to both questions is yes.

The reason the first answer is affirmative is that the person who causes scandal either does so in virtue of sinning or of doing something that only has the appearance of sin. Thomas says that anyone who does something that only has the appearance of sin is guilty of active scandal (and has thus, ironically, really sinned) because actions that have the appearance of sin “should always be left undone out of that love for our neighbor which binds each one to be solicitous for his neighbor’s spiritual welfare.”

Now, it’s true that a person’s good deed might be the occasion for someone else’s downfall. Suppose, for example, that I perform a manfully courageous deed that arouses jealousy and resentment in others who might hold their manhoods cheap. I have done nothing wrong even though my action has become the occasion for another’s downfall. But here we have a case of passive scandal without active scandal, not a case of an active scandal that is not sinful.

The reason the second answer is affirmative is that passive scandal means that someone has acceded to his own spiritual downfall. Someone who is scandalized in this sense has always sinned. (It’s important to remember that Aquinas is not using the current sense of “scandal.” The pious grandmother who says she was scandalized by seeing the girls wearing their skirts up to here is not saying that she sinned.)

Lastly, it’s encouraging (in some way) to see that bad hermeneutics has been with us since at least the thirteenth century. It’s nothing new. In the first objection to Thomas’s claim, he summarizes the following (unsound) argument:

(1) All sin is voluntary.
(2) Jesus says, “It must needs be that scandals come” (i.e., Scandal is necessary).
(3) What is voluntary cannot be necessary.
(4) So, scandal cannot be a sin.

I won’t get into Thomas’s response to this argument, but it’s interesting that he provides not one but three possible interpretations of Jesus’s words that are consistent with his position. On this point, he isn’t concerned to establish a single true interpretation but to simply show that there are interpretations that are reasonable and (importantly) consistent with his account of scandal.

Thomas Says: So Scandalous!

Because you can never have too much Aquinas, I’ve decided to reboot my blogging here with another series on the thought of the Angelic Doctor. The first topic in the series was Thomas’s thoughts on killing. For no particular reason, this time I’ll take up the topic of scandal.

We often hear about various scandals in the news. Right now, if you search for “scandal” in Google News, you get about 22,000 hits. In this context one reads articles about Herman Cain or Penn State or at least scans headlines such as “Solyndra Scandal”  or “Judge Rejects Arguments for Separate Trials in Alabama Bingo Scandal.”

Christians also encounter a slightly different use of “scandal” in their local congregations when one congregant is offended by the actions of another. In such cases, one is apt to recall, if one was raised on the King James, Paul’s admonition from Romans 14:21: “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.” Paul’s use of “stumbleth”—he was a good Elizabethan, after all—here never fails to raise questions about what it means to make another stumble. These are the kinds of questions Thomas wants to provide clarity about. (By the way, if you weren’t raised on the King James, then you probably don’t recall the uses of “offended” and “made weak” because it wasn’t in your Bible. The critical text just has the Greek for “stumbleth,” “proskoptei.” Thomas states (in the “I answer that” section to article 1) that in the Vulgate, Jerome is simply explaining the possible meanings of the Greek “skandalon” by adding the other two words.)

Thomas is, unsurprisingly, concerned more with the latter kinds of scandal than with the contemporary, thinned-out notion expressed in news headlines. Being a good thinker, Thomas starts the section on scandal (which is question forty-three of the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologica) by stating what kind of thing he’s talking about and giving a clear definition of what he is talking about. In the first place, scandal is a vice that is contrary to “beneficence,” which is simply doing good to someone. Beneficence is an act of charity (love), and so scandal is contrary to love. People characterized by love of God and neighbor do not scandalize others. This means that they are not the occasion for scandal, which is “something less rightly said or done that occasions spiritual downfall.”

Now, the main question that most of us have about this sense of  “scandal” is whether a person who causes another to stumble has done something wrong, perhaps even sinned. Thomas, like the good philosopher-theologian he is, says, “It depends.” And then he makes a distinction. (If I ever write a book about Aquinas, that will be the title: And Then He Makes a Distinction.)

The distinction he makes is between active and passive scandal. First, active scandal = an action that is sinful in itself that also leads (or could lead) another person into sin. A person who commits active scandal always sins. Not all sinful actions lead others into sin as well, but those that do are scandalous in addition to whatever other kind of sin they are (lustful, greedy, hateful, etc.).

Secondly, passive scandal = an action in which a person succumbs to a spiritual downfall. This is done by a person who “stumbleth.” It’s important to realize that by “passive,” Thomas does not mean that a person is not responsible for sinning. Quite the opposite. Sin can only come about through an act of the will. A person cannot be forced to sin. Any sin involves a choice on the part of the sinner to sin.

This distinction between active and passive scandal does not mean that they always go together. It is possible for there to be active scandal without passive (e.g., if I do something sinful in public, but no one chooses to sin after seeing it), passive without active (e.g., if I do something good, which becomes an occasion for you to envy me), or active and passive together (e.g., I sin, and you choose to sin (in part) because you witnessed my action).

On the question of “eating meat offered to idols,” Thomas says that “since it has a certain appearance of evil, and a semblance of worshipping the idol, it might occasion another man’s spiritual downfall.” Notice how careful he is in wording this: “a certain appearance,” “a semblance,” “might occasion.” But this careful wording is not to excuse someone who might eat meat offered to idols. Thomas doesn’t say this explicitly, but he seems to hold that someone who ate meat offered to idols was guilty of active scandal even if no one was thereby guilty of passive scandal. Why? Because a person is guilty of active scandal by doing either something sinful or something that appears to be sinful. In the next article, Thomas will explain more why giving the appearance of sinning is sufficient to count as scandal, and therefore sin.

We should note that eating meat offered to idols has the appearance of sin because it is closely connected with the worship of idols, which is sinful. Thomas, and the apostle Paul by extension, is not discussing situations in which a person does something morally neutral (or good) only to have another succumb to passive scandal. No. In order to qualify as an act of active scandal, a person must do something that is either a sin or closely connected with something sinful.

In later posts, I’ll take up the rest of the article on scandal and apply it to a number of related contemporary issues such as drinking alcohol, dressing modestly, and so forth.

One Boring Book for College

After the recommendations of books like A Severe Mercy, Resident Aliens, and Lord of the Rings, I’m afraid my recommended reading will sound flat-out boring. It certainly is no respecter of Mr. Anderson’s criteria for a book to be read in your leisure. The title of the book is as straightforward as the book is boring, and the length and subtle pomposity of the subtitle is a soft warning that, if you want to buy this book, you should be sure to get a used copy that’s at least 75 percent off the list price. To top it off, the author doesn’t have a memorable name like “Tolkien,” “Hauerwas,” or “Vanauken.” It’s one of those boring names that when Googled returns hits for at least a hundred different people of the same name.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if Matt paid me to recommend his book. He did not.

The book I recommend to new college students is Study Is Hard Work: The Most Accessible and Lucid Text Available on Acquiring and Keeping Study Skills Through a Lifetime, by William Armstrong.

Apart from the helpful hints on how to study better, I think the central message to take away from the book is partially stated in the title: study is hard work. The other half of the message follows from that: for an undergraduate education, learning is more about your moral commitment to learning than it is about your intellectual ability.

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I often tell my students that if they’re not going to study hard, they might as well drop out of college and start working at Trader Joe’s. After four years of working as many hours as they can at Joe’s, they’ll have started a good career in a good (from what I can tell) company. After four years of half-studying at even a cheap college, they’ll have a degree—that tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of other people also have. And many of their fellow students will have studied harder and be better placed to get a job or graduate school position than they are. Most of them will also have a good amount of debt from student loans.

Like almost any other book, this book won’t change a person’s life. If a student isn’t working hard, this book probably won’t get them to work hard. But if you’re a parent, grandparent, mentor, or pastor of a college student who’s not working as hard as he is able to, please sit down with them and give them a wake-up speech. If the student wakes up and realizes the need to work hard, this book can help him develop the tools he needs to live up to his potential.

Socrates, Remy, and the Solitary Contemplation of Beauty

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is shown to be very strange. In an episode related by Alcibiades, Socrates is said to have stood all day and night in an army camp—with the other soldiers lying down watching him—considering something. (Near the beginning of the Symposium, Socrates seems to have a similar kind of experience.) And at the end of the Symposium, Plato portrays Socrates as the only one at the party to be awake at its end. Having stayed awake all night, he leaves the party and goes about his daily business until he goes home in the evening. Both of these episodes reveal a kind of strangeness about Socrates.

These two episodes are in my mind related to the Pixar film Ratatouille and, in particular, to the character of Remy. At the end of his most successful evening as a chef Remy has a choice to make: will he go home with Linguini or will he go home with his father and brother? He does neither.

Under the narration of Ego reading his glowing review of his previous night’s dining experience—which narration is really a statement of Brad Bird’s working philosophy—the animation shows Remy ascending to a rooftop in Paris and remaining there until the sunrise. Because of the significance of Ego’s narration, I never really paid attention to Remy’s silent ascent until a few months ago when a friend pointed it out to me: “I don’t like the sequence; it’s too over-the-top,” she said. I’ve been thinking about whether that’s true ever since.

It seems completely appropriate that Remy does not go to live with Linguini. He can work with Linguini, but he cannot live with him. Linguini does not even know Remy’s name. He only refers to him as “little chef,” which is simply a job description. And the film suggests that Linguini and Colette will go on to share a life together. Remy’s presence in their shared home life would be odd.

At first glance, it also seems appropriate that Remy does not go back to live with his father and brother and the other rats. Remy is too exceptional to be part of the pack. It’s true that at the very end of the film after Remy has been reconciled to his father, Remy is shown making food to be served to his rodent friends and family. Their tastes in food have obviously been elevated, literally and not literally. They are now eating on top of a restaurant instead of underground, and they seem to be eating food that isn’t literally garbage. But this doesn’t mean that he lives with his fellow rats.

So it is not clear where Remy lives. Does he live by himself? In one sense, that’s a secondary question because Remy is clearly most alive when he is making food in the restaurant kitchen. (This doesn’t mean that he “lives” with Linguini by working with him. I think Linguini doesn’t understand Remy well enough to live with him while Remy is “working.”) In another sense, though, it’s a question that cuts to the heart of the relation between the artist and society. Where do the great artists live? Can they be at home among regular folk? The film doesn’t answer this question, and I think that’s a bit of a let down. It dodges a hard question.

Return to the earlier criticism of the scene of Remy’s ascent: Is it really necessary? I suppose that depends on whether we understand what Remy is doing up there. Like Socrates in the army camp, Remy seems to be paying attention to something, but we don’t know what that is. And like Socrates after the symposium, Remy does not go directly home. He goes to a rooftop to wait for and watch the sunrise. One thing about that sunrise: It’s beautiful, and Remy seems to be content in the presence of an expansive, subtle beauty. Likewise, having read the Symposium we suspect that whatever it is that Socrates is contemplating, it’s beautiful.

For Plato, the contemplation of beauty is part of what makes life worth living. (Indeed, if some commentators are right, for Plato the contemplation of beauty is the whole of what makes life worth living.) Remy’s awareness of and sensitivity to the beauty of a sunrise over Paris is part of what separates him from everyone else in the film. This distinctive indicates that for Brad Bird (and for Plato) the contemplation of beauty at the highest level is a solitary experience. Both Plato and Bird depict their heroes alone, contemplating some thing—probably beauty itself. If the contemplation of beauty is something that can only be done alone, then there is no way to avoid the necessity of Remy’s solitary ascent. The scene that my friend wasn’t so sure about turns out to be a (perhaps melancholy) necessity.

Two things in closing. First, I don’t know if the Symposium presents Plato’s last word on the contemplation of beauty. There are passages in the Phaedrus that suggest that after death two lovers can, as Socrates say, become “winged together” (256d–e) in a life of shining bliss. Secondly, I don’t know if the Christian view of the contemplation of beauty is any different from the Symposium–Ratatouille account. Certainly there is an emphasis on corporate worship in Christian practice, but I don’t know whether that’s comparable to the contemplation of beauty. If it is, then perhaps there’s a way in which the contemplation of beauty is not solitary.

Thomas Says: A Recap on Killing

This is the last post in the Thomas Says series on killing. I want to summarize some points Thomas makes in this question of the Summa.

First, let’s note the obvious, which hasn’t been noted yet in this series: The question of killing falls under the heading of “Justice.” In particular, it is in the section dealing with vices causing “injury to a neighbor against his will . . . by deed.” There are other vices of injustice that cause injury through words, both in legal and nonlegal contexts. Murder is an act that violates justice, which means that the murderer has failed to act in a way that promotes in himself (and others) the virtue of dealing correctly with his fellow human beings. Thomas also says that an unjust act (or a character disposed toward injustice) is opposed to the right.

A few of the conversations in the comments raised important issues. I want to focus on a very important one that was left open. The question is whether there are ever good grounds for killing another human being. In article 6 Thomas says, “If we consider a man in himself, it is unlawful to kill any man, since in every man though he be sinful, we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him.” This sentence of this quotation seems to mean that if we consider a human being only as an individual, there are no grounds to ever kill anyone. This is because “we ought to love the nature which God has made.” I think “the nature which God has made” is an allusion to the nature of a human being as an image of God. Similarly, in article 3 Thomas says that “a man who has sinned is not by nature distinct from good men; hence a public authority is requisite in order to condemn him to death for the common good.”

But if a person still retains their nature even after committing murder, in what way can anyone be justified in killing that person? Thomas’s view is that a proper authority can put to death a murderer because the murderer does not retain the dignity of his nature. This seems clearest in article 2: “By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood” and “although it be evil in itself to kill a man so long as he preserve his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned.” The implication in the latter quotation is that one who has sinned has failed to preserve his dignity.

This loss of dignity must be connected with the fact that the murderer harms the common good. For it is only in connection with considerations about the common good that Thomas thinks anyone is ever justified in putting another human being to death. He says, “the slaying of a sinner becomes lawful in relation to the common good, which is corrupted by sin.” In Thomas’s thought the maintenance of the dignity of one’s nature is connected with the goodness of commonwealth. The connection depends on his conception of what makes the common good good. The common good is good in part because the individuals composing it are good. In article 6 Thomas says that “the life of righteous men preserves and forwards the common good, since they are the chief part of the community.” I cannot maintain my dignity and go against the common good. Once I go against the common good, I lose my dignity. (As one commenter pointed out, we should be careful to understand what Thomas means by “common good.” His understanding of the common good is too large to be explained here, but suffice it to say that he is not a communist or crypto-communist.)

Here are links to all the posts in this series:

Killing Plants and Animals

Killing Sinners

Why You Can’t Kill Sinners

Why Clerics Can’t Kill Sinners

Suicide

Killing the Innocent

Killing in Self-Defense, part 1 and part 2

Accidental Killing

Thomas Says: What Happens if, Whoops, I Killed You?

This is the second-to-last post summarizing the position on killing laid out by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa. In the concluding post I will pull together a number of points about his position on killing. In this post I will discuss the last question in the Summa’s article on killing: “Whether one is guilty of murder through killing someone by chance?”

As in other questions (e.g., article 6 on whether it’s lawful to kill the innocent), the answer to this question isn’t as significant as the reasoning that supports it. Of course Thomas says that accidental killing is not the same as murder. Why?

The main idea is that sin is a moral evil, which means that a sin is an act that is not in accord with right reason and eternal law—“not in accord with” signifies lack or privation or deficiency, which is the essence of evil, and “right reason and eternal law” indicate that the evil is moral in nature, as opposed to physical or metaphysical. (For more on these distinctions, see Thomas’s Quaestiones disputatae e malo (Disputed Questions on Evil); Regan has a good translation.) As a morally bad thing—note that Thomas includes the notion of offense against God in his definition of “moral”—a sin essentially involves a failure to follow right reason and the law of God. And as a morally bad act, a sin essentially involves a voluntary choice to disobey right reason and the law of God.

To summarize: In order for an action to be sinful, it must be a voluntary choice to go against right reason and the law of God.

Thus, an accidental killing is not murder because it is not a voluntary choice. As Thomas quotes from Aristotle: “chance is a cause that acts beside one’s intention.” So killing someone by chance (or accidentally) is by definition beside one’s intention, and as we’ve seen throughout this question on killing, especially in the article on self-defense, it is one’s intention that makes the (moral) difference. I think it’s clear, but it should be said anyway, that the outcome of an accidental killing is still bad, even though the person who caused the accidental death has not done a morally evil act.

I hope what has been said so far is clear because Thomas is about to make things a little more complicated. Or, I should say, Thomas isn’t making things more complicated; he just recognizes that things aren’t always this simple.

Here’s the complication. Thomas says, “Nevertheless it happens that what is not actually and directly voluntary and intended, is voluntary and intended accidentally, according as that which removes an obstacle is called an accidental cause. Wherefore he who does not remove something whence homicide results whereas he ought to remove it, is in a sense guilty of voluntary homicide.”

For the Latinists among us, I should note that Thomas’s Latin in these two sentences is a bit unclear. In particular, it’s not clear how to understand the words “removens prohibens” in the first sentence: “Contingit tamen id quod non est actu et per se volitum vel intentum, esse per accidens volitum et intentum, secundum quod causa per accidens dicitur removens prohibens.” The gist of the passage seems to be that accidental intention happens when someone removes something they ought not to, that is, something that is prohibited for one to remove. But in the next sentence Thomas says that if someone does not remove something they should remove and homicide results, the person who did not remove what should have been removed is in a sense guilty of murder. What I think Thomas means is that if you remove an obstacle to someone’s death that you ought not have removed, then you are “in a sense” guilty of murder.

Thomas Says: Why You Can (And Should) Kill in Self-Defense, Part 2

In this post, I want to conclude my summary and discussion of Thomas’s reasoning about killing in self-defense by examining the objections to his position that he considers and his replies to those objections. (The first post is here; the article in the Summa is here.)

To review, Thomas’s position is that it is morally permissible to kill an assailant in self-defense, even when the assailed is not a public official or soldier, but only when it is necessary to preserve one’s life and only because the action that brings about the death of the assailant is a foreseen but unintended consequence of the action. In order to be morally licit, the lethal action taken in self-defense must not spring from an intention to kill the assailant; it can only spring from the intention to preserve one’s own life.

The first two objections Thomas considers attempt to put him at odds with Augustine. For Augustine says (in a letter) that “I do not agree with the opinion that one may kill a man lest one be killed by him.” And elsewhere (On Free Choice of the Will) an argument can be cobbled together for the same conclusion. Thus it appears that according to Augustine, Thomas is wrong.

Thomas’s reply is that in the letter in question (scroll down to section 5) Augustine does not contradict him because Augustine means only that “one may [not intend to] kill a man lest one be killed by him.” And this agrees with what Thomas has said: In defending my own life, I cannot intend to kill the assailant.

On the face of it, Thomas’s interpretation isn’t obvious to me. It’s true that a little later in the letter, Augustine says, “The precept, ‘Resist not evil,’ was given to prevent us from taking pleasure in revenge, in which the mind is gratified by the sufferings of others, but not to make us neglect the duty of restraining men from sin.” (This line of reasoning also summarizes Thomas’s reply to the fifth objection about a passage from Romans 12:19, which seems to prohibit self-defense.) The point Augustine makes suggests that the command to “resist not evil” is not given to prevent a man from acting with the intention of preserving his own life, but it doesn’t make that clear.

The second objection refers us to Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will. (The relevant section is 1.5, which is one source of the famous phrase “an unjust law is no law at all.”) Here Thomas’s interpretation is that what Augustine really means (again) is that it is ultimately unlawful to defend one’s life (with lethal force) for the wrong reason, namely, with the intention of killing the assailant. On this point all I can say (again) is that I have read the relevant section of On Free Choice of the Will a number of times, and it isn’t obvious to me that Thomas’s interpretation is correct. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of this text can defend Thomas. I cannot. (In the first place, which one of the characters is presenting Augustine’s position? “Augustine” or “Evodius” or both? In the second place, the position that seems to stand is that the positive (human) law permits lethal self-defense even though those acting so in self-defense will be subject to a divine law.)

The third objection (which raises a question I was curious about before reading this passage) has to do with whether a cleric is permitted to remain a cleric after killing another person in self-defense. Thomas’s answer is no. This is because the question of “irregularity” (not adhering to the rule (regula) of Holy Orders) is not only a matter of intention but also of act. (I think the same distinction is present in Old Testament law in the distinction between “being guilty” and “being unclean.” Both are bad, but only the first involves intention.) Note that Thomas does not say whether the cleric’s irregular status is partial or total, perpetual or temporal. These further clarifications probably depend on circumstances.

The fourth objection is useful for clarifying Thomas’s point about the double effect of the act of self-defense. The objection is that since no one is morally permitted to fornicate in order to save his or her life, and since murder is a more grievous sin than fornication, so no one is morally permitted to do commit a more grievous sin than fornication, namely, murder, in order to preserve one’s life.

Thomas’s reply is that “The act of fornication or adultery is not necessarily directed to the preservation of one’s own life, as is the act whence sometimes results the taking of a man’s life.” This point is clear enough, I think. The idea is that the act of fornication is not “necessarily directed” to saving one’s life. Suppose a male assailant promises not to harm his female victim if she consents to have sex with him (putting aside questions of the legitimacy of such “consent,” which surely is not consent in this case.) Thomas’s point is that it wouldn’t be morally permissible for the victim to consent to this because the act of sex is not necessarily directed to letting her go. That is, whether her life is preserved depends ultimately not upon whether she consents to have sex but on whether the assailant chooses to let her go. This is unlike an act of self-defense (say, punching or shooting) which does not depend on a further action (choice) in order to secure one’s own life. The act of shooting that is done with the intention of preserving one’s life is the very same act that causes the assailant to die. So Thomas’s point is that the difference in the grievousness between murder and fornication is not relevant here. What is relevant is the connection between an act and its effect(s).