"Man by sinning withdraws from the order of reason, and thereby falls from human dignity, so far as that consists in man being naturally free and existent for his own sake [autocentric]; and falls in a manner into the state of servitude proper to beasts, according to that of the Psalm (xlviii. 15): Man when he was in honour did not understand: he hath matched himself with senseless beasts and become like unto them; and Proverbs xi. 29: The fool shall serve the wise. And therefore, though to kill a man, while he abides in his native dignity, be a thing of itself evil, yet to kill a man who is a sinner may be good, as to kill a beast. For worse is an evil man than a beast, and more noxious, as the Philosopher says." (2a 2æ, q. 64, art. 2, ad 3.)
Hence observe:—(1) That a Utilitarian who denies free will, as many of that school do, stands at some loss whence to show cause why even an innocent man may not be done to death for reasons of State, e.g., as a sanitary precaution.
(2) That the State must come to a conclusion about inward dispositions by presumption from overt acts, arguing serious moral guilt before proceeding to capital punishment. To this extent the State is remotely a judge of sin. But it does not punish sin retributively as sin, nor even medicinally. It punishes the violation of its own laws, to deter future offenders. (Ethics, c. ix., s. iii., nn. 4-6, pp. 171-174.)
Readings.—St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 64, art. 2, 3; 2a 2æ, q. 108, art. 3.
SECTION IX.—Of War.
1. War, a science by itself, has no interest for the philosopher except as an instance on a grand scale of self-defence. When the theory of self-defence has been mastered (c. ii. s. ii., p. 208), little further remains to be said about war. In a State, the self-defence of citizen against citizen is confined to the moment of immediate physical aggression. But in a region where the State is powerless and practically non-existent, self-defence assumes a far greater amplitude. (S. ii., n, 2, p. 309.) When the Highland chief lifted the cattle of the Lowland farmer, and the King of Scotland lay unconcerned and unable to intervene, feasting at Holyrood, or fighting on the English border, then, if there were a fair hope of recovering the booty without a disproportionate effusion of blood, the farmer did right to arm his people, march after the robber, and fight him for the stolen oxen, as the gallant Baron of Bradwardine would fain have done. (Waverley, c. xv.) Here is the right of self-defence in its full development, including the right of private war. But in a private individual this is an undesirable, rank, and luxuriant growth; and when the individual comes to live, as it should be his aim to live, in a well-organized State, the growth is pruned and cut down: he may then defend himself for the instant when the State cannot defend him; but after the wrong is done, he must hold his hand, and quietly apply to the State to procure him restitution and redress. But there is no State of States, no King of Kings, upon earth; therefore, when of two independent States the one has wronged, or is about to wrong the other, and will not desist nor make amends, nothing is left for it; Nature has made no other provision, but they must fight. They must fall back upon the steel and the shotted gun, the ratio ultima regum.
2. The Lowland farmer above mentioned might be spoken of as punishing the Highland robber, chastising his insolence, and the like. This is popular phraseology, but it is not accurate. Punishment, an act of vindictive justice, is from superior to inferior. (Ethics, c. v., s. ix., n. 4, p. 104.) War, like other self-defence, is between equals. War is indeed an act of authority, of the authority of each belligerent State over its own subjects, but not of one belligerent over the other. We are not here considering the case of putting down a rebellion: rebels are not properly belligerents, and have no belligerent rights.
3. The study of Civil and Canon Law flourished in the Middle Ages, while moral science, which is the study of the Natural Law, was still in its infancy. No wonder that the mediaeval jurists occasionally formulated maxims, which can only be squared with the principles of Natural Law by an exceeding amount of interpretation,—which are in fact much better dropped, quoted though they sometimes be by moralists of repute. One such maxim is this, that a wrong-doer becomes the subject of the injured party by reason of the offence. Admit this, and you can hardly keep clear of Locke's doctrine of the origin of civil power, (s. ii., per totum, p. 307; cf. Suarez, De Caritate, d. xiii., s. iv., nn. 5, 6).
4. We have only to repeat about war what we said of self-defence, that all the killing that takes place in it is incidental, or indirect. The cannon that you see in Woolwich Arsenal, the powder and torpedoes, have for their end what St. Thomas (De Potentia, q. 7, art. 2, ad 10) declares to be the end and object of the soldier, "to upset the foe," to put him hors de combat. This is accomplished in such rough and ready fashion, as the business admits of; by means attended with incidental results of extremest horror. But no sooner has the bayonet thrust or the bullet laid the soldier low, and converted him into a non-combatant, than the ambulance men are forward to see that he shall not die. If indeed even in the dust he continues to be aggressive, like the wounded Arabs at Tel-el-Kebir, he must be quieted and repressed a second time. Probably he will not escape with life from a second repression: still, speaking with philosophic precision, we must say that "to quiet, not to kill him," is, or should be, the precise and formal object of the will of his slayer in war. St. Thomas indeed (2a 2æ, q. 64, art. 7, in corp.) seems to allow the soldier fighting against the enemy to mean to kill his man. But by enemy in this passage we should probably understand rebel. The soldier spoken of is the instrument of the feudal lord bringing back to duty his rebellious vassal. In the Middle Ages, till the end of the fifteenth century, the notion of independent nations scarcely found place.
In war, as all cases of self-defence, the killing is indirect. In capital punishment, on the other hand, the killing is direct: it being chosen as a deterrent means, that the offender be "hanged by the neck" till he is "dead, dead, dead." This disposes of the error, that capital punishment is an act of self-defence on the part of the State against evildoers. We may observe finally that by the right of the sword, and by that alone, not in self-defence, not in war, but by the hand of public justice raised against a guilty subject, can human life ever be taken directly.