Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law

by Joseph Rickaby

Reading.—St. Thos., 2a 2æ, q. 40, art. 1.

SECTION X.—Of the Scope and Aim of Civil Government.

1. I beseech the pious reader not to be shocked and scandalised by the conclusions of this section. He will find them in the end a valuable support to theology. The most religious mind can have no difficulty in allowing that cookery, as such, is a business of this world only: that you retain your cook, not to save your soul, but to prepare palatable and wholesome nourishment for your body; that honesty, sobriety, and good temper are officially requisite qualifications, simply inasmuch as the contrary vices would be the plague of your kitchen and the spoiling of your dinner. In a Catholic house the soup on a Friday is made without meat. That restriction is observed, not as a point of culinary art, but because, whereas eternal salvation is the main end of life, and cookery a subordinate end, the latter must be so prosecuted as not to interfere with the former. She who uses ingredients forbidden by the Church, is the worse Christian, but she may be the better cook. Now, to compare a great thing with a little, the State equally with the kitchen is a creation of this world,—there are no nationalities, nor kitchen-ranges either, beyond the grave. Civil government is a secular concern. The scope and aim intrinsic to it, and attainable by its own proper forces, is a certain temporal good. Suarez (De Legibus, III., xi., 7) sets forth that good to be,—"the natural happiness of the perfect human community, whereof the civil legislature has the care, and the happiness of individuals as they are members of such of a community, that they may live therein peaceably and justly, and with a sufficiency of goods for the preservation and comfort of their bodily life, and with so much moral rectitude as is necessary for this external peace and happiness of the commonwealth and the continued preservation of human nature."

2. The intrinsic scope and aim of civil government is the good of the citizens as citizens. That, we have to show, is not any good of the world to come; nor again the full measure of good requisite for individual well-being in this world. The good of the citizens as such is that which they enjoy in common in their social and political capacity: namely, security, wealth, liberty, commerce, the arts of life, arms, glory, empire, sanitation, and the like, all which goods, of their own nature, reach not beyond this world. True, a certain measure of moral rectitude also is maintained in common, but only "so much as is necessary for the external peace and happiness of the commonwealth," not that rectitude of the whole man which is required in view of the world to come. (Ethics, c. x., n. 4 [3], p. 182.) The intrinsic aim of the State, then, falls short of the next life. Neither does it cover the entire good of the individual even for this life. The good of the State, and of each citizen as a citizen, which it is the purpose of civil government to procure, is a mere grand outline, within which every man has to fill in for himself the little square of his own personal perfection and happiness. Happiness, as we have seen, lies essentially in inward acts. The conditions of these acts, outward tranquillity and order, are the statesman's care: the acts themselves must be elicited by each individual from his own heart. Happiness also depends greatly on domestic life, the details of which, at least when they stop short of wife-beating, come not within the cognisance of the civil power. It remains, as we have said, that the scope and aim of the State, within its own sphere and the compass of its own powers, is the temporal prosperity of the body politic, and the prosperity of its members as they are its members and citizens, but not absolutely as they are men. We cannot repeat too often the saying of St. Thomas: "Man is not ordained to the political commonwealth to the full extent of all that he is and has." (1a 2æ, q. 21, art. 4, ad 3.)

3. From this view it appears that the end for which the State exists is indeed an important and necessary good, but it is not all in all to man, not his perfect and final happiness. To guide man to that is the office of the Christian Church in the present order of Providence. Cook and statesman must so go about the proper ends of their several offices, as not to stand in the way of the Church, compassing as she does that supreme end to which all other ends are subordinate. This limitation they are bound to observe, not as cook and statesman, but as men and Christians. A perfectly Christian State, as Christian, has a twofold duty. First, it has a positive duty, at the request of the Church, to follow up ecclesiastical laws with corresponding civil enactments, e.g., laws against criminous clerks and excommunicates. On this spiritual ground, being beyond its jurisdiction, the State must be careful not to forestall but to second the precept of spiritual authority. It is no business of the State, as such, to punish a purely religious offence. The second duty of a Christian State, and a more urgent duty even than the former, is the negative one of making no civil enactment to the prejudice of the Church: e.g., not to subject clerics to the law of conscription. Useful as their arms might be for the defence of the country, the State must forego that utility for the sake of a higher end.

4. In the order of pure nature, which is the order of philosophy, there is of course no Church. Still there would be, as we have seen (c. i., s. i., n. 8, p. 197), erected on the same lines as the civil power, and working side by side with it, a religious power competent to prescribe and conduct divine worship. This power the State would be bound to abet and support, both positively and negatively; something in the same manner, but not to the same degree, as the Christian State is bound to abet the Church. The supreme direction of the natural religious power would conveniently be vested in the person of the Civil Ruler. Thus the Roman Emperor was also Chief Pontiff.

5. How in the mere natural, as distinguished from the Christian order, the provinces of marriage and education should be divided between the civil and the religious power, is perhaps not a very profitable enquiry. The only use of it is a polemic use in arguing with men of no Christianity. Among all men of any religion, marriage has ever been regarded as one of those occasions of life that bring man into special relation with God, and therefore into some dependence on God's ministers. Education, again, has a religious element, to be superintended by the religious power. Education has a secular element also, the general superintendence of which cannot be denied to the State. Though children are facts of the domestic order, and the care and formation of them belongs primarily to their parents, yet if the parents neglect their charge, the State can claim the right of intervention ab abusu. It certainly is within the province of the State to prevent any parent from launching upon the world a brood of young barbarians, ready to disturb the peace of civil society. The practical issue is, who are barbarians and what is understood by peace. The Emperor Decius probably considered every Christian child an enemy of the Pax Romana. But the misapplication of a maxim does not derogate from its truth. It also belongs to the State to see that no parent behaves like a Cyclops ([Greek: kyklopikos], Ar., Eth., X., ix., 13) in his family, ordering his children, not to their good, as a father is bound to do, but to his own tyrannical caprice. For instruction, as distinguished from education, it is the parent's duty to provide his child with so much of it as is necessary, in the state of society wherein his lot is cast, to enable the child to make his way in the world according to the condition of his father. In many walks of life one might as well be short of a finger as not know how to read and write. Where ignorance is such a disadvantage, the parent is not allowed to let his child grow up ignorant. There, if he neglects to have him taught, the State may step in with compulsory schooling. Compulsory schooling for all indiscriminately, and that up to a high standard, is quite another matter.

Readings.—Suarez, De Legibus, III., xi.; ib., IV., ii., nn. 3, 4: St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 93, art. 3, ad 3; ib., q. 96, art. 2; ib., q. 98, art. 1, in corp.;ib., q. 99, art. 3, in corp.; ib., q. 100, art. 2, in corp.

SECTION XI.—Of Law and Liberty.

1. The student of Natural Law does not share the vulgar prejudice against civil law and lawyers. He knows it for a precept of the Natural Law, that there should be a State set up, and that this State should proceed to positive legislation. This legislation partly coincides with Natural Law in urging the practice of that limited measure of morality, which is necessary for the State to do its office and to be at all. (s. x., n. 2, p. 355.) This partial enforcement of the Law of Nature is the main work of the criminal law of the State. But State legislation goes beyond the Natural Law, and in the nature of things must go beyond it. Natural Law leaves a thousand conflicting rights undetermined, which in the interest of society, to save quarrels, must be determined one way or another.