Pints With Aquinas - Can a Christian Kill? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: October 28, 2023

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Hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines of the Quinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about killing. Why? Well, in the 5th commandment we read, Thou shalt not kill. And yet, in the Church's scriptures, tradition, and magisterial teaching, we find various justifications or defenses for things which look a lot like killing. So for instance, self-defense or capital punishment or just war. All of those seem to be killing and yet the church defends those practices. How is that? Right? So how are we going to understand killing and what is the basis upon which these other things don't fall afoul of the commitment. Let's go ahead and look at it. Here we go. Okay, let's go ahead and start with the example of self-defense and then on the

basis of that we can make brief application to capital punishment and to just war. So here's the scene. Let's say that you are living in a city and that you're coming home late. Let's say it's like 10pm. But you live in a part of the city which is kind of off the beaten track. Not a lot of foot traffic. Not a lot of fellow inhabitants. And let's say that you recently suffered a foot injury and had surgery and you're in a walking boot so you're doing your best to kind of hobble home and

Let's say that you recently went back to college to get a degree in anthropology and that you were presenting on Bronze Age Like war instruments or weapons so you have your like diorama with scaled versions of You know Spears and clubs. Okay, there you go, perfect. Now, let's say that from across the street you see somebody kind of coming at you and then that person announces, I'm going to kill you and the person is wielding what looks to be a large sword or knife. It's unclear, it's dark. And you say to that person, stop, don't do that.

You make your best effort to hobble away, but it happens that the assailant is very fast. And in addition to being really fast, is dead set on accomplishing his or her purpose. All right, so you call out to anyone in the nearby vicinity, but Ghost Town USA, no dice, and even if there were people in the vicinity, you're not sure that they could get to you in time. So the question is what do you do? Now it seemed from a certain perspective you're like I don't

want to kill anybody because that's against the law. Now strictly speaking the commandment it seems concerns murder which would be the killing of an innocent person but in this instance your assailant, your attacker, is not innocent. He has lethal intent. Now let's say for instance that you might say to yourself, I simply couldn't do it. I simply couldn't kill. And let's say that in the circumstances you also have some terrible illness and you're due to die within the next month.

You have no dependence and you're completely content to die and go to your god and you're due to die within the next month, you have no dependence, and you're completely content to die and go to your God, and you see it as a providential sign because you dreamt about it the last night. Okay, you know, like, you don't have to defend yourself. You don't have to kill. But let's say by contrast that you are ready to rock, and you have a big family, and you're looking forward to getting home to them, and you love them a lot, and you want to love them a lot for the rest of their lives until such time as you go to God. And you don't just want to be like the victim of whatever reality gets sent in your direction. Mind you, you want to work within the bounds of God's providence, but yeah, you don't want to be like trapped by every kind of moral situation which might make you feel bad. You think in this instance like, no, I can do something.

And thinking that, you would be right. This teaching is based on what is called the order of love. So St. Augustine teaches this in clear fashion. St. Thomas picks up on it and repeats it in the Summa Theologiae and his treatise on charity. The basic idea of which is we are responsible for those with whom we are in most perfect union. So we are more responsible for those with whom we are in closer union than for those with whom we are in less close union. So we are meant to love those people. That's like the intention of this as order of love. So like God is most near to us and most

intimate union with us because he's more near to us than we are to ourselves. So like God is most near to us and most intimate union with us because he's more near to us than we are to ourselves. So we owe him greatest love. But then unity is the principle of union and we experience a kind of unity in our own person on the basis of which we can be in union with others. So we're next most responsible for loving ourselves and then others besides. And when it comes to those others we talk about like family and friends and colleagues, members of your parish community and then people you know less well and on down the line. And you're responsible for loving those goods which are higher in principle fashion.

So you're more responsible for taking care of your soul than the soul of another and then your body and then the body of another. So in this case you have a greater responsibility to protect your bodily life and to provide for those whom you love, who depend upon you, than to protect the bodily life of your attacker. So you can defend yourself and in defending yourself you can repulse an unjust aggressor by the exercise of proportionate force. And that might mean doing injury, right? That might mean maiming or mutilating.

It might even mean killing in your kind of the act itself. What your intention is, is, you know, ideally is, is to repulse, right? To, to push back the attacker. You're not intending to murder. You're not intending to kill. Right. But there's a recognition that you're going to have to deploy enough force for this thing to matter. And you might only get one shot at it. And even lethal force

can be justified or rationalized in the process. So the basic idea is you are not asked to do the impossible. You are not put in a situation of moral compromise from which you cannot extricate yourself. Nor are you meant to perform Mental gymnastics to convince yourself that everything is ducky Obviously there's gonna be like serious psychological and emotional fallout from the act if you were to kill another human being but provided you try to exercise proportionate force to repulse an unjust aggressor and While your heart is beating, you know through your throat and your mind is just filled with the fog of war, then that's something which can be reconciled to the cross of Christ. Now this teaching is later concretized as what is called double effect theory. So St. Thomas wrote in the 13th century, the big text on

this is So Summa Theologiae Secunda Secundae, so Summa Theologiae, Secunda Secundae, question 64, article 7. And then a few hundred years later, there's a commentator on St. Thomas who describes kind of four rules, as it were, or four principles of a double effect theory on the basis of this text. He says, you know, you're going to have two effects, double effect, two effects from the action. You're going to save your life, you're going to end the life of the other.

So how then do you ensure, or how then do you safeguard that the act come off well? That is to say, virtuously and not viciously. Well, you have to intend the good end, right? Saving of your life. And the means that you intend, you have to intend that they be good or neutral means. So you can't do evil that good may come. Furthermore, you don't intend the good end through the evil means. Okay, so it can't be the case that the only way to save your life is by murdering the individual.

So if you were to say like after the fact, let's say that the individual didn't die, you wouldn't be like bummer, you know, you'd be like, thanks be to God. Okay, so it's not as if you're just trying to get the good end, but through the bad end and without the bad end you can't get the good end. And then the last is that there be proportionate reason or proportionate cause. You're not just flying off the handle, you're not just exercising lethal force at the drop of a hat, right? It's only when called for. So this would be a basic sketch of how one might kill legitimately, not to say like we're justifying legitimate killing, but this is the type of moral theory according to which

the church foresees instances of killing that are just. Now this can be applied to both capital punishment and just war, and just I'll say a brief word on both. When we kind of zoom out to capital punishment, we're talking about the life not just of an individual or you know the life of one and another or yeah you get it we're talking about the life of the polity or the life of you know the community and so in this instance you know you have people who are charged with the care of the community depending upon the political regime it might be one or two or several or hundreds, and their responsibility

is to promote the common good, right, and to defend the common good from potential threats or yeah, threats, whatever, we'll call it that. So this common good is, it's a network of relationships and it's that network of relationships which conduces to the tranquility of order, to the upbuilding of virtue in the citizenry, right? And even to their participation in higher common goods like that of the church.

But let's say that somebody steps out of these relationships of justice and starts to wreak havoc on the polity or on the community. And they do unspeakable crimes which not only, you know, ruin the lives or end the lives of others, but deeply, deeply wound the common good or imperil the common good such that others no longer have the space in which to flourish. And this tranquility of order and the kind of virtuous life of the citizenry begins to come apart. In that instance, right, those who are charged with care of the community in willing the good of

the citizenry might will the death of one of its members. And the analogy that's often used to describe this phenomenon is like the amputation of a diseased limb, or the amputation of a diseased member. The idea being like, okay, you got a wound, and it's gangrenous, and if you don't cut it out or cut it off then it will infect the entire body. So yeah there's a sense here that the political community, I mean the polity of the community has a certain integrity. Those charged with its care, you know legitimately, those charged with its care have the responsibility to safeguard

that and to promote that in so far as they can. And this might mean exercising lethal force against those who imperil it or destroy it. And then just war would be to zoom out further into the relationship between two polities or communities in which you have one which is an unjust aggressor and it's again imperiling the integrity of that other community or polity. It's imperiling specifically their common good. And so the one that is attacked, that is seeking to defend itself,

can then prosecute a just war. And whenever St. Thomas talks about the moral life, he says that in order for a moral act to be good, all of its parts need to be good. And when he talks about the parts of a moral act, to speak somewhat crassly, he'll talk about the object, which is like the thing that you're doing, the end, the reason for which, and then the circumstances, and we all know what that word means. And he'll say that in order for the thing to be good, they all have to be in place. But if one of them is out of place, or if one of

them is, you know, out of whack, then that could really undermine the whole moral act. So in the case of a just war, you need to have a good object, right? So it needs to be the defense of the political community. Or excuse me, the object in this case would be like prosecuting of a just war, that is to say, repelling an unjust aggressor. And then a good end, which is not to like expand your lands, or to, you know, sack whatever neighboring city and plunder its riches, but to reinstate the borders of your nation and to secure peace and

tranquility within and the circumstances need to be good. That is to say, you know, like your your political regime will have rules for the declaration of war and its prosecution, you know, you think about has to go through Congress and the Geneva convent, you know, whatever. So all of these things are pertinent to the consideration. So yeah, it has to have a good object, a good end and good circumstances. And within those settings, you can repulse the aggressor, defend your nation by the proper

authority in a way that comports with the known standards for such a thing in your time and place. So yeah, this helps us to understand the church's teaching on killing, how it differs from the church's prohibition of murder of the innocent, and how we as individuals can be clear thinkers about the church's moral life and clear practitioners of it. Not that we're looking for opportunities to kill, but so that we know that we're never in a position where we're trapped, where we cannot commit, excuse me, where we must commit

an evil or cannot perform the good because, you know, whatever the Lord permits to befall He's always going to provide through it or out of it some good. So yeah, that's what I wanted to share. Okay, I hope this is helpful for you. This is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell and get sweet updates as further videos come forth. Also I contribute to a podcast called God's Planning and it's great and I think you might

like it. So check it out. And then I wrote a book about prudence and the book is called prudence so you might check it out. Prudence. Yeah that's all I got so know my prayers for you please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.