Introduction

The previous lectures have dealt with some of the more important attempts in the classical world to make rational sense of the traditional ethical beliefs and moral norms. The general approach has been to suppose that there is an end at which all men aim – that’s taken as uncontroversial by almost everyone – and to accept that the virtues are the appropriate means to achieve that aim, and to try to make that case. In some cases it appeared that the balance could not be got quite right; some took the view that the virtues or Virtue was fundamental and the connection to any reasonable concept of eudaimonia was sacrificed; in other case the reverse was true, and a eudaimonia was proposed that left no real room for the justification of the virtues.

This particular approach to ethics began to give way to a new approach that was seen in the Stoics and Augustine of drawing upon concepts of Law, though they are both careful to relate their new interpretations of moral life to the old idea of eudaemonia. Aquinas, whom we’ll be considering in this lecture, is another exemplar of this new approach. At this stage it’s still not appropriate to describe the virtue approach, or the eudaimonistic approach, as being secondary or unimportant, because Aquinas very closely follows the Aristotelian arguments to derive a set of virtues that will result in happiness. The difference between the pagan and the Christian philosophers boils down to the belief on the part of the Christians that they have revealed knowledge (not available to the pagans) about what would make men really happy. Augustine and Aquinas differ in the ways that they justify this claim, but that difference doesn’t need to concern us now. In this lecture we’ll look at what Aquinas had to say about Law and how it comes in various kinds, and how it is related to Man and the society of men.

Thomas Aquinas lived between 1225 and 1274 AD. He was born to a noble family in Roccasecca near Naples , but became member of the Dominican order of the Catholic Church. He wrote a vast amount of stuff, but we’ll be almost entirely concerned with what he says in his most important work, the Summa Theologiae, the title of which just means something like ‘Chief Points of Theology.’ This, more than any other work, earned him the eventual respect of the rulers of the Church. He was made a saint in 1323. His teachings are taken as authoritative for the Catholics (or at least they were until the Vatican II reforms. I understand he’s fallen out of favour a little.) He is also known as the Angelic or Universal Teacher.

Between him and Augustine (354-430) were 800 years: most of them very bad. During that period there were great changes all over the continent of Europe in all areas: including social, political, economic, and cultural. When Aquinas talks about the law and society, he has in mind quite a different society from the Greek city states or the Roman Empire . Aquinas lived in what we now call the High Middle Ages, and in order to understand what he thought he was doing it helps to know what that means.

Background

The last time we looked the Roman Empire was on the verge of collapse, with barbarian, mostly Germanic people pushing at the frontier. Rome itself had been sacked in 410 AD. Eventually the border in the West collapsed completely and those barbarians began to establish kingdoms in the areas that had previously been Roman provinces. At first the barbarians did little more than wander about inside the Empire’s Western part continuing their looting and pillaging – the temptations of a weak, wealthy victim were just too great for anything else to be appealing. But, eventually, the barbarians began to settle down, and a new civilisation began to form. By about 900AD to 1000AD a respectable civilisation (though nothing to compare with Greece or Rome ) had once again arisen on European soil. This civilisation had a generally feudal form and would last for about 500 years. This is the time of kings and queens, knights on horseback, Crusades, monasteries and cathedrals.

The Manorial System

With the collapse of Rome , and the irruption of the barbarians, urban life was almost entirely destroyed in the West. Urban life requires an extensive infrastructure to support it and that simply no longer existed. For the most part people lived hard lives out in the country as peasant farmers, quite cut off from most of humanity. For most of this period, throughout most of Western Europe the standard form of community was the manor system, in which a few farms or villages huddled around a manor house where a lord lived to whom they were beholden and who would protect them from outsiders. The farmlands were generally surrounded by wastelands: forests and mountains and swamps where people could not go safely. These manorial settlements were like the cells of the mediaeval body politic. They were connected by bad roads and there were only limited inter-village contacts for weekly markets or yearly trade fairs. For most people the horizons of life barely extended as far as they could see on a fine day.

Feudalism

They say that in the Middle Ages society was divided into three classes: those who guarded, those who prayed, and those who worked. The peasants were the ones who worked. Their lives were in the hands of the Lord of the manor to a great extent. He controlled the officers of the village and its courts. He had a right to their labour, money, and service. They could not leave the village to improve themselves without his say so. Nor could they marry outside the manor. The lord of the manor was one of the leaders of ‘those who guarded.’ But that lord was not independent: he was himself the servant of a greater lord, and they were bound to each other by mutual obligations of service, just as the lord was also (theoretically) bound to his villagers.

The Church

In parallel with the manorial system and the castles of the lords, medieval social geography included the system of monasteries and cathedrals where we find the third of the great classes: ‘those who prayed.’ After the fall of Rome the Church, whose organization had begun before the fall, which continued to use Latin as its language of business, and in whose monasteries the old texts were sometimes preserved, was the only link to the older and better world of learning and high culture: and even that was pretty tenuous.

The Church structure was just as highly hierarchical as the feudal system, but unlike anything in the secular world the hierarchy was Europe-wide, and it was all centred on the Pope in Rome . The Church formed an independent infrastructure of power and influence that extended over all of Europe . Nothing quite like this has been seen in any other civilisation. One of the themes of Mediaeval history is the contest between the two powers: the Emperors and kings who stood at the pinnacle of the feudal system versus the Pope and his bishops who ran the Catholic (‘universal’) Church. Because of their learning, because the Church was everywhere, and because of the spiritual claims that the church made, the church came to exercise a good deal of temporal power. According to Church theory, the rulers of Europe held their power only by the consent of the Church, which was a theory that had annoyed the rulers ever since Pope Gregory in 800 had insisted upon his right to place the crown upon the head of Charlemagne, when he claimed to be refounding the old Roman Empire – now improved and Holy. The church had it in its power to stand between the ruler and God – or between the ruler’s subjects and God – and to compel submission. There are celebrated instances of this in the 12^th century: Henry II of England was flogged naked for killing Thomas Becket, and The Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV stood bare-headed in the snow for three days outside the fortress of Canossa , to beg forgiveness for his part in the kidnapping of the Pope. Moreover, the Church claimed the right to run a parallel legal system to deal with crimes against their spiritual laws. Canon Law then dealt with many things that we now tend to think of as being the proper concern of Civil law.

The Schizophrenic Culture

This conflict was not just a political conflict; the new civilisation was radically schizophrenic: it operated according to norms derived from two quite distinct and (one would have thought) incompatible sources. In the first place, the system of feudalism was the political expression of a warrior culture that had developed from the warrior culture of the early barbarian hordes and their early kingdoms. The ethical and cultural norms derived from that source were similar to those that had prevailed in the similar circumstances of the Greek Dark Ages of 2000 years earlier: men were again much concerned with honour, fame, revenge, courage, and pride. And, in addition, virtues like loyalty also featured as key elements of the feudal system. But this system of norms was also slightly improved by some new elements derived from the second source: the culturally and politically powerful Christian faith. We’re already familiar, in very general terms, with the ethos of Christianity: love, humility, etc.

In uneasy combination these gave rise to the system of courteous behaviour known as chivalry. It’s unfortunate that chivalry, as the code of a warrior class, never found a real philosophical champion – but the outlines of the system can be easily determined from the literature of the time, such as the romances of King Arthur, or the Song of Roland or the Romance of the Rose, or the stories of the Paladins of Charlemagne. Although philosophical ethics derives almost entirely from the Christian source, because only the clergy were literate and had an interest in writing down their claims and justifying them intellectually, nevertheless, chivalry continues to exert an influence as another layer in our cultural heritage, and one which is surprisingly close to the surface. For example, we say that one doesn’t kick a man when he’s down, that one should stand up for the weak against the strong, and that women and children should be the first on the lifeboats. We think this is normal, but it’s not. It’s not normal in most cultures around the world today, and it certainly wasn’t normal amongst the Greeks and Romans: they would have found the ideas of chivalry quite alien.

Law

So this is the culture in which Thomas Aquinas operated: hierarchical, rigid, divided, with the distribution of power contested by the secular and the temporal through the medium of competing claims of law. In this context Aquinas’ concentration on the law and its various forms is hardly to be wondered at. Of course, as I’ve said before, this is not an entirely new thing. It is part of a general trend in Western ethical thought that can be traced back to the classical period but was certainly accelerated by the normative cast of Christian thought. We’ve seen, for example, that the Stoics adopted the analogy of a law to explain how things had their natural functions or their normative modes of behaviour. There was a law about how flutes are to be treated and what flutes can do, and more importantly there was a law about what people could do and how they could be trated – and finally this law was extended into a universal Law (with a capital ‘L’) that covered all of Nature – that was the Natural Law. In Augustine, that notion of the Law – which could be determined by rational thought – joined with the notion, partially derived from Jewish religious ethics, that the Universal Law was something explicitly handed down by God – which required some special assistance by God to make it properly known. Revelation was God’s assistance rendered on behalf of all mankind, and through the ‘Gift of Grace’ he could render assistance to each person suffering in this life. In Aquinas’s time the idea of Universal Law also received a boost with the purely accidental discovery in Southern Italy (Amalfi) of the Pandects of Justinian. These were lawbooks from the Eastern Roman Empire (still surviving incidentally) whose organization was an inspiration to the jurisprudents of the time.

Aquinas’s view of Law begins with a general declaration about what law is. He says it is:

an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.[1]

And there are a couple of points that immediately need to be made here. In the first place, it is essential to the nature of Law that it is directed at the common good, which, I suppose must mean the good of the community for which the laws are promulgated. (It wouldn’t be OK to make laws for a small minority which would be bad for that community but good for everyone else, for example.) Moreover, this gives some force to the notion of a community basis for sovereignty, since any ruler who is in breach of this obligation is not making ‘laws’ but simply making demands upon those in his power, and this will certainly have consequences for whether one is obliged to obey those commands – and possibly upon the legitimacy of the ruler who is making those demands. We can see from this that Aquinas would certainly reject the claim, made by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic for example, that what is good is just what is in the interest of the stronger.

A second point that needs to be made is that laws are specifically an ‘ordinance of reason.’ This means that laws have to have a point. There has to be a reason for why the laws are to be promulgated; laws are a means to an end and the means and end have to be connected by reason. In fact, 

Eternal Law

Since Aquinas is a Christian, he holds that God is the benevolent creator of the world. God rules the world, and does so according to rational principles. God has a rational plan for the world, which is to say, a plan to achieve God’s aims with respect to the world – and we know that God has plans with respect to the world because we know that God is rational and wouldn’t do anything without a reason. ‘God Himself considered in that act by which in His wisdom He so orders all events within the universe that the end for which it was created may be realized’[2] is Providence . This plan that ‘so orders events’ Aquinas identifies with “Eternal Law”.

Granted that the world is ruled by divine Providence … it is evident that the whole community of the universe is governed by God’s mind … Since God’s mind does not conceive in time, but has an eternal concept … it follows that this law should be called eternal. Through his wisdom God is the founder of the universe of things and … in relation to them he is like an artist with regard to the things he makes … [Also] he is the governor of all acts and notions to be found in each and every creature. And so, as being the principle through which the universe is created, divine wisdom means act, or exemplar, or idea, and likewise it also means law, as moving all things to their due ends. Accordingly the Eternal Law is nothing other than the exemplar of divine wisdom as directing the motions and acts of everything.[3]

Non-rational creatures – animals, plants, inanimate objects – “obey” the Eternal Law blindly. They are determined by it. If a stone thrown in the air describes a parabola and falls to earth, it does so because of God’s design of the world. That is, it does so because of the Eternal Law of God. It doesn’t “obey” these laws, strictly speaking, but its path through space is determined by them.

Natural Law

We, however, are not like rocks. Just like the Stoics, Aquinas acknowledges that there is a fundamental differnece between humans and everything non-human; and that difference is that we are rational creatures, which means, according to Aquinas, that we have free will and can make up our own minds about how we will act. Because we have free will, our behaviour is not determined by God’s Eternal Law in the way that a stone’s path through space is. Instead, we experience God’s Eternal Law as normative: as a demand telling us how we ought to behave, not how we inevitably will behave. Aquinas’s key philosophical claim is that God’s Eternal Law is both descriptive (for non-rational nature) and normative (for rational nature: us and any other rational creatures, e.g. angels). When he speaks of this law in its normative aspect, Aquinas refers to “Natural Law”. Natural Law, therefore, consists in principles that we should respect because they are “natural”: they are part of God’s providential organization of the world.

Let’s just go back for a second to make some points a bit clearer. We’ve seen this idea of normativity in several places, and it is one of the most problematic ideas in philosophy. Think of it this way: Descriptive laws are laws describing how things do in fact behave. We’re very familiar with these sorts of ‘laws’ from modern Science – in fact we tend to identify this sort of thing with Science, but that’s another matter. A law like ‘A moving object will continue to move in a straight line unless acted upon by some Force’ is a descriptive law. It tells you that if you have a rock and you throw it it will move in a straight line unless acted on by Gravity, or friction forces, or something. And this will always be the case. (Confusingly enough, it’s only these that we generally think of when we talk about natural laws today – so influenced are we by the cultural triumph of Science.) Normative laws, on the other hand, are laws that set out how people ought to behave. They are also called just ‘norms.’ We’re very familiar with this sort of thing too: we see it in traffic laws or the criminal code. A law like ‘Do not steal’ is a normative law, or a norm, and it’s pretty clear that it’s not the sort of thing that describes what happens. In fact it may not even have the same grammatical form. Descriptive laws tend to be hypothetical statements – ‘if this is the case then this will follow’, whereas norms tend to be imperatives – ‘do this!’

Now, I said that the idea of normativity is a tricky one, but by that I didn’t really mean that it’s tricky to make the distinction between normative and descriptive laws. That, I think, you can come to understand pretty quickly. No, the tricky thing is trying to understand what words like ‘ought’ are actually saying without getting into nasty circular series of definitions. ‘I ought to do X’ means ‘I’m obliged to do X’, means that ‘it’s a law that X is to be done’ and ‘to be a law is to say what ought to be’, and so on. There seems to be no way to break out of this little circle of related terms to get obligations from the simple scientific facts of the universe. This is a point that Hume made and that has been a central problem for ethicists for the last 300 years – especially for those who have a purely materialistic view of the universe. How can any description of the universe in terms of physical particles and forces and energies ever yield statements about what ought to be the case? (Incidentally, simply saying that there’s a God and we’re obliged to do what God tells us he wants us to do doesn’t help at all. We still wouldn’t know how obligation arises or how it relates to the world + God as it actually exists.)

a.                   Natural Inclinations

But that’s not to the point at the moment. What we need to know now is how we can figure out the content of Natural Law. It’s all very well to say that this Natural Law is what tells us what we ought to do, and to know that what we ought to do is to act according to the Providential Will of God, but that doesn’t immediately tell us, for example, whether or not we should tell ‘white lies’. Suppose some monk friend of Aquinas’s was to ask him ‘does this robe make me look fat?’ How would he use the notion of Natural Law to tell him what he ought to do? How is he to discover what is in God’s mind for us all and how that relates to this particular question? You’ll notice that we’re once again faced with the sort of problem that faced the Stoics when they tried to make us bound to obey the will of Nature/Zeus. The solution that Aquinas came up with may strike some of you as also reminiscent of the Stoic philosophy. You may recall that the moral development that leads one to Virtue – the final state of knowledge of Nature – was driven by a faculty of ‘affinity’. In Aquinas’s version, because we are made by God according to natural law and because God wants us to have the capacity for good, God has made us with natural inclinations which are reliable indications of the content of Natural Law. Natural inclinations will naturally incline us to the pursuit of the end that God has designed for us. What’s more, it is partly by studying these inclinations that we can come to know God’s plan for us. In this way, those elements that aren’t specifically delivered to us by revelation can be discovered by the use of reason.

All these inclinations, as I say, are intended (by God) to direct us to the final end he projects for us. The basic principle is “Desire the good and avoid evil”. The complete obviousness and blandness of this principle supports Aquinas’s claim that it is fundamental. It is hard to imagine what else could be done with Good and Evil but to seek the one and avoid the other, and, similarly, nothing that we should seek or avoid could possibly be described as other than the Good or the Evil. The command is almost tautological (except that commands can’t be tautologies.) What we need to do next is work out what is evil and what is good. Then we need to work out how we should seek good and how we should avoid evil.

This is where Aquinas’s Natural Law theory gets a little complicated. First, let us turn our attention to the good things we are supposed to seek. Aquinas gives this list: life, procreation, knowledge, society, and reasonable conduct. He thinks that we know immediately, by inclination, that these count as good and are things to be sought out. You’ll recall that the Stoics had a similar division of desirable objects for the first two levels of their five-step path to perfection. Those things can be determined to be desirable with no application of reason at all. Just the basic unreasoned act of judgement ‘this is good’ when faced with the opportunity to get one of these things is sufficient. From this sort of judgement we can then determine a law. This, of course, is something that we do as reasoning creatures – but, again, the judgement itself is no a result of reason. So if we find that we judge that we should seek to breed then we can derive a natural law for this inclination to the effect that ‘It is right to marry and have children.’

b.                   Precepts

So far, so good. But in what ways are we supposed pursue these goods? Should we do just anything to stay alive, or save the life of another, to obtain knowledge, to procreate, or to become friends with another? Obviously not. By examining our actions, their goals and their circumstances we can distinguish between proper and improper or defective ways of trying to obtain goods. For example, to seek friendship with someone because they are rich and influential is to fail to show proper regard for the good of friendship: it is to treat friendship as a tool, something useful for your other purposes. Again, consider the possibility of saving a life by killing another person, an innocent bystander. This fails to show proper regard for the good of life: you intend to kill, so your action is directed against the value of life. This is a defective way of responding to the fundamental value of life.

Aquinas does not give us a neat theory about all the conditions under which we act wrongly. We can’t set out a list of all the rules or specify the Natural Law in complete detail. Nonetheless, we can observe many clear, general cases of the Natural Law and its demands upon us. It is always wrong to kill the innocent, to lie, to commit adultery, sodomy or blasphemy. These acts are universally wrong, according to Aquinas, because they invariably violate the dictates of Natural Law. Aquinas distinguishes these as primary precepts. He claims that these are derivations of the natural law that must always be true and demonstrably so to anyone who is able to understand the words in which the law is formulated. The claim that ‘killing innocent people is wrong’ for example is immediately seen to be true whenever we realise that the primary good of living in a society (‘loving one another’) is incompatible with the insecurity that would follow upon a failure to observe that law.

On the other hand, Aquinas admits that some of these primary goods might be met in a variety of ways. The idea that we should marry and have children satisfies one way of going forth and breeding, but it’s not the only way. In certain circumstances other laws might be appropriate. If we were intelligent fish, for example, the recommendation to marry would not apply. Much less speculatively, Aquinas derives the law that monogamy is to be enforced as a way of achieving the primary good of breeding; but he admits that in certain circumstances polygamy or polyandry might be the more appropriate way to go. All of these sorts of derived laws are therefore distinguished by him as secondary precepts. They are known through a process of reasoning from primary precepts which might.not be self-evident and certainly doesn’t result in a universal law, but only in a contingent law, one that is dependent on changeable circumstances. Contemporary applications of Natural Law theory of this kind are behind many condemnations of abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, embryonic stem-cell research, homosexuality, transexuality, pornography, masturbation. According to many Natural Law theorists, these are all defective ways of dealing with fundamental human goods – life (in the case of abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, embryonic stem-cell research) and procreation (in the case of homosexuality, transexuality, pornography, masturbation).

c.                    Critique

Of course, all of this natural law theory is still vulnerable to exactly the same criticism as was made of the natural law proposals of the Stoics and of Augustine. That is that the natural law theorist is confusing the descriptive and the normative aspects of law. You can’t go straight from a declaration that there is a natural law to describe how things actually are to a declaration that the natural law describes how things ought to be. The idea that Man is able to cheat descriptive natural law in his behaviour by an application of his own free will is rather like saying that he can deny the Law of Gravity in the same way.

Divine Law

One of the divisions of Law according to Aquinas that is usually skipped over pretty quickly – and I’m going to do that too – is the category of Divine Law. If you cast your mind back a few minutes you might recollect that when I was talking about inclinations I said that it is partly by studying these inclinations that we can come to know God’s plan for us. In this way, I said, those elements that aren’t specifically delivered to us by revelation can be discovered by the use of reason. Those elements that are specifically delivered to us by revelation, however, cannot be known by reason, and for them we have to simply follow the ritual laws as they are given to us in the Bible through the authority of God. You’ll recall that something like this was important for Augustine too, because it enabled him to distinguish his end from the ends to the pagans in his eudaimonistic theory of virtue. Aquinas has different reasons and you can find them in his Summa[4] too.

Positive Law

Natural Law contrasts with what Aquinas calls ‘Positive Law’. Positive law is the law enacted by societies. Some positive laws reflect natural law. For example, it is against natural law and against positive law in most societies to murder somebody. Some positive laws are conventional and not part of natural law. For example, it is against the positive laws of Australia to drive on the right hand side of the road. But there is no corresponding natural law against this practice. Finally, some natural laws are not part of properly constituted positive laws. This is to say that, positive law should not be in the business of making laws for all moral issues. For example, gluttony is against natural law, but it would be a mistake to make gluttony against the law (i.e. against society’s positive law). Aquinas accepts the criterion for law that is set forth in the Pandects of Justinian that I mentioned earlier; that “the end of human law is to be useful to man.”[5] Thus Aquinas recognises two main constraints on positive laws: the possibility of obedience and the possibility of enforcement. Positive laws should be clear, publicly known, and capable of general obedience. For example, a legal prohibition against lying is not something we could reasonably expect people to keep. By contrast, a prohibition against perjury (i.e. lying in legal courts) is something we reasonably expect people to obey. Positive laws should also be enforceable. For example, gluttony is against natural law, but it would be wrong and foolish to pass a law against gluttony, because this law would be unenforceable.  

Moral Problems

So much, then, for Aquinas’s thoughts on Law. Now we’re going to look at a couple of special topics in Aquinas’s moral philosophy; but we’re not going to talk about how they’re connected to the Law or Virtue or Final Ends concerns of Aquinas – that connection will be fairly obvious anyway. We’re interested in the doctrines he has derived rather than their derivation at this point. We need to look at these because they’ve had quite an effect upon the range of actions that are felt to be allowed, and how we could go about justifying them. The two that I’m thinking of are the Doctrine of Double Effect, and Just War Theory.

Doctrine of Double Effect

We’ll start with the so-called Doctrine of Double Effect. Here is a problem. According to Natural Law theory it is absolutely wrong to kill another human being, even if killing the person would save other lives. The life of one cannot morally be sacrificed for the lives of others. However, what about self-defense? Say I am attacked by someone, and the only way for me to defend myself is to kill the attacker. Does Aquinas say that it is wrong for me to defend myself? No. He has a way out, called the “Doctrine of Double Effect”. He writes:

Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention. … Accordingly, the act of self-defense may have two effects: one, the saving of one’s life; the other, the slaying of the aggressor.

 …

Therefore, this act, since one’s intention is to save one’s own life, is not unlawful, seeing that it is natural to everything to keep itself in being as far as possible. … And yet, though proceeding from a good intention, an act may be rendered unlawful if it be out of proportion to the end. Wherefore, if a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful, whereas, if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful.[1] Summa Theoligica (II-II, Qu. 64, Art.7.)

This basic idea, that it is permissible to do something with a morally bad effect as long as this effect is not your intention, has been refined and developed over the centuries. Here is a more contemporary version of the doctrine, from Joseph Mangan[2]:

A person may licitly perform an action that he foresees will produce a good effect and a bad effect provided that four conditions are verified at one and the same time:

1.                    that the action in itself from its very object be good or at least indifferent;

2.                    that the good effect and not the evil effect be intended;

3.                    that the good effect be not produced by means of the evil effect;

4.                    that there be a proportionately grave reason for permitting the evil effect.

These modern versions make self-defense tricky. I can’t save myself by shooting my assailant, because shooting dead another is a directly bad effect, violating condition 1. But I could, perhaps, strike my assailant hard enough to knock him out, foreseeing that the strike could well also kill him.

Here are two other examples of the doctrine of double effect in action.[3]

1.                    The terror bomber aims to bring about civilian deaths in order to weaken the resolve of the enemy: when his bombs kill civilians this is a consequence that he intends. The strategic bomber aims at military targets while foreseeing that bombing such targets will cause civilian deaths. When his bombs kill civilians this is a foreseen but unintended consequence of his actions. Even if it is equally certain that the two bombers will cause the same number of civilian deaths, terror bombing is impermissible while strategic bombing is permissible.

2.                    A doctor who intends to hasten the death of a terminally ill patient by injecting a large dose of morphine would act impermissibly because he intends to bring about the patient's death. However, a doctor who intended to relieve the patient's pain with that same dose and merely foresaw the hastening of the patient's death would act permissibly.

Just War

The other topic that Aquinas has been credited with developing into an important focus of ethical inquiry is the Theory of the Just War – the war that it is morally proper to wage. Now, it might be thought that War is impossible for Christians because their rules say that they’re not supposed to kill: the tablet says “Thou shalt not kill” which seems pretty explicit. How then is it possible for the Christians to go to war? And this is no theoretical topic – the Pope had recently (1095) called upon the people of Europe to go to war to recover the Holy places from the heathen Moslems (in the crusades that began in 1096 and continued for a couple of hundred years. There are various aspects of the waging of war that can be identified as morally relevant.

jus ad bellum. When is it right to go to war?

jus in bello . What should be the rules of engagement in War?

jus post bellum . What is the right way to end a war? How should victors behave?

a.                    jus ad bellum: Aquinas’s Version

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged.

Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault.

Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.[4]

b.                   jus ad bellum: A Modern Version

1.        A just war must be declared by a legitimate authority.

2.        A just war must be declared and prosecuted with the right intention.  (In defence of one’s country; to redress a grave wrong; to rescue a threatened people.)

3.        There must be a strong probability of success.

4.        The good obtained must be proportional to the harm done.

5.        War must be a last resort (i.e. reasonable peaceful means of address must be exhausted).