Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law Part 12

5. By this explanation, resting on St. Thomas--in opposition to Cardinal de Lugo (_De Just. et Jure_. 10, 149) and others, who allow killing in self-defence to be the actual means chosen, and therefore directly willed--we save four grand positions in Moral Science:

(a) The axiom, that _it is never lawful directly to take the life of an innocent man_. For the person who perishes by occasion of your defending yourself, may be innocent _formally_, and even _materially_ also.

(b) Likewise the axiom, that _it is never lawful for a private individual to kill any one whatever_. We say, from a technical standpoint, that he does not _kill_ but _arrests the onset of_ the aggressor.

(c) We are in hearty accord with the positive law of all civilized countries, which views with extreme suspicion all deaths said to be done in self-defence, the law being jealous of the blood of its citizens, and reserving the shedding thereof to itself. We teach that only by process of law can a man ever be directly slain, his death made a means of, and the person, who strikes him, really willing and seeking, exactly speaking, to kill him.

(d) The initial error is revealed of a theory that we shall have to combat at length hereafter, the theory of Hobbes and Locke, that the power of the State is the mere agglomeration of the powers of the individuals who compose it. It appears by our explanation that the individual has no power strictly to take life in any case, or ever to kill directly, as the State does when it executes a criminal.

As a fifth point gained, we may mention the efficacious argument afforded, as will presently be shown, against the acceptance of a duel under any conceivable circ.u.mstances, a thesis otherwise not easy to establish by reason.

6. In view of the question of the origin of civil government, we must carefully collect the differences between self-defence and punishment.

Death occasioned in self-defence is _indirect_: death inflicted as punishment is _direct_. Punishment is an act of _authority_, of _distributive justice_, which lies from ruler to subject (_Ethics_, c.

v., s. ix., n. 4, p. 104): self-defence is of equal against equal.

Punishment is _medicinal_ to him who suffers it, or _deterrent_ on behalf of the community, or _retributive_ in the way of vengeance.

(_Ethics_, c. ix., s. iii., n. 4.) Self-defence is not on behalf of the community, still less for the good of the aggressor, but for the good of him who practises it and for the preservation of his right: neither is it retributive and retrospective, as vengeance is, but simply prospective and preventive of a harm immediately imminent.

Finally, the right to punish abides day and night: but the right of self-defence holds only while instant aggression is threatened.

7. These two diverse ideas of _self-defence_ and _vengeance_ were confounded by the Greeks under the one verb [Greek: amunesthai]. They are confounded by Mill, _On Utility_, in the fifth chapter where he speaks (p. 77) of the "instinct of self-defence," which nine lines below he converts into "the natural feeling of retaliation or vengeance." It is a common but a grave mistake, and the parent of much bad philosophy.

_Reading_.--St. Thos., 2a 2ae, q. 64, art. 7.

SECTION III.--_Of Suicide_.

1. By suicide we shall here understand the _direct compa.s.sing of one's own death_, which is an act never lawful. There is no difficulty in seeing the unlawfulness of suicide for ordinary cases. The world could not go on, if men were to kill themselves upon every slight disappointment. But neither are they likely so to do. It is the hard cases, where men are apt to lay violent hands on themselves, that put the moralist on his mettle to restrain them by reasons. Why should not the solitary invalid destroy himself, he whose life has become a hopeless torture, and whose death none would mourn? Why should not a voluntary death be sought as an escape from temptation and from imminent sin? Why should not the first victims of a dire contagion acquiesce in being slaughtered like cattle? Or if it be deemed perilous to commit the departure from life to each one's private whim and fancy, why not have the thing licensed under certificate of three clergymen and four doctors, who could testify that it is done on good grounds?

2. To all these questions there is one good answer returned by Paley on the principle of General Consequences. (_Ethics_, c. x., n. 3, p.

178.)

"The true question of this argument is no other than this: May every man who chooses to destroy his life, innocently do so? Limit and distinguish the subject as you can, it will come at last to this question. For, shall we say that we are then at liberty to commit suicide, when we find our continuance in life becomes useless to mankind? Any one who pleases, may make himself useless; and melancholy minds are p.r.o.ne to think themselves useless when they really are not so.... In like manner, whatever other rule you a.s.sign, it will ultimately bring us to an indiscriminate toleration of suicide, in all cases in which there is danger of its being committed. It remains, therefore, to enquire what would be the effect of such a toleration: evidently, the loss of many lives to the community, of which some might be useful or important; the affliction of many families, and the consternation of all: for mankind must live in continual alarm for the fate of their friends, when every disgust which is powerful enough to tempt men to suicide, shall be deemed sufficient to justify it."

(_Moral Philosophy_, bk. iv., c. iii.)

A word in confirmation of Paley on the plan of the medico-clerical certificate. There would be doctors, and I fear clergymen too, who would get a name for giving these certificates easily: under their hand many a patient might be smothered by his attendants with or without his own consent. Many another wretch would consider, that if the learned and reverend gentlemen empowered to license his departure from life only felt what he had to endure, there would be no difficulty about the certificate: so he would depart on presumed leave. The whole effect would be to make men less tender of their own lives, and by consequence of those of others, to the vast unsettling of society.

3. An argument from general consequences, however, does not go down into the depths of things. There is always something morally crooked and inordinate in an action itself, the general consequences whereof are bad. It remains to point out the moral crookedness, inordination, and unreasonableness, that is intrinsic to the act of suicide, apart from its consequences. We find the inordination in this, that suicide is an act falling upon undue matter, being an act destructive of that which the agent has power over only to preserve. It is natural to every being, animate and inanimate, to the full extent of its ent.i.ty and power, to maintain itself, and to resist destruction as long as it can. This is the struggle for existence, one of the primary laws of nature. Man has intelligence and power over himself, that he may conduct his own struggle well and wisely. He may struggle more or less, as he sees expedient, looking to higher goods even than self-preservation in this mortal life: but he may not take that power of managing himself, which nature invests him with for his preservation, and use it to his own destruction. Should he do so, he perverts the natural order of his own being, and thereby sins.

(_Ethics_, c. vi., s. i., nn. 1-5, p. 109.)

4. It may be objected, that man is only bound to self-preservation so long as life is a blessing; that, when the scale of death far outweighs that of life in desirableness, it is cruelty to himself to preserve his life any longer, and a kindness to himself to destroy it; that in such a plight, accordingly, it is not unnatural for a man to put himself, not so much out of life as out of misery. To this argument it is sometimes answered that, whereas death is the greatest of evils, it is foolish and wicked to resort to dying as a refuge against any other calamity. But this answer proves too much. It would show that it is never lawful even to wish for death: whereas under many conditions, such as those now under consideration, death is a consummation devoutly to be wished, and may be most piously desired, as a gain and by comparison a good: as Ecclesiasticus says (x.x.x. 17): "Better is death than a bitter life, and everlasting rest than continual sickness." The truth seems to be, that there are many things highly good and desirable in themselves, which become evil when compa.s.sed in a particular way. The death of a great tyrant or persecutor may be a blessing to the universe, but his death by the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin is an intolerable evil. So is death, as the schoolmen say, _in facto esse_, and everlasting rest, better than a bitter life, but not death _in fieri_, when that means dying by your own hand. There the unnaturalness comes in and the irrationality. A mother, watching the death agony of her son, may piously wish it over: but it were an unmotherly act to lay her own hand on his mouth and smother him. To lay violent hands on oneself is abidingly cruel and unnatural, more so than if the suicide's own mother slew him.

5. But though a man may not use actual violence against his own person, may he not perhaps cease to preserve himself, abstain from food, as the Roman n.o.ble did, in the tortures of the gout, and by abstaining end them? I answer, a man's taking food periodically is as much part of his life as the coursing of the blood in his veins. It is doing himself no less violence to refuse food ready to hand, when he is starving, on purpose that he may starve, than to open a vein on purpose to bleed to death. This, when the food is readily accessible: the case is otherwise when it is not procurable except by extraordinary means.

6. Another consideration. To destroy a thing is the exclusive right of the owner and master of the same. If therefore man is his own master, in the sense that no one else can claim dominion over him, may he not accordingly destroy himself? The metaphysician will point out that _master_ denotes a relation, that every relation has two terms, that consequently a man cannot be his own master any more than he can be his own father; and that, not owning himself, he may not destroy himself. But, leaving this metaphysical argument for what it is worth, we observe that man has a Master, Owner, Proprietor, and Sovereign Lord, G.o.d Almighty. To take your own life is to usurp the dominion of G.o.d. It is wronging the Lord of life and death. But none is wronged against his will: G.o.d is willing that murderers should be hung, may He not also be willing that men in misery should hang themselves? To this query suffice it for the present to reply, that G.o.d governs us for our good; and that capital punishment makes for the good of the community, but never suicide. (c. viii., s. viii., n. 7, p. 349.)

7. It was the doctrine of Aristotle and the Greeks, that the citizen belongs to the State, and that therefore suicide was robbing the State and doing it a formal injury. But no modern State takes this view of its subjects. No modern mind would place suicide in the same category of crime with robbing the Exchequer.

8. The great deterrent against suicide, in cases where misery meets with recklessness, is the thought,

In that sleep of death what dreams may come!--

above all, the fear of being confronted with an angry G.o.d. Away from belief in G.o.d's judgments and a future state, our arguments against suicide may be good logic, but they make poor rhetoric for those who need them most. Men are wonderfully imitative in killing themselves.

Once the practice is come in vogue, it becomes a rage, an epidemic.

Atheism and Materialism form the best _nidus_ for the contagion of suicide. It is a shrewd remark of Madame de Stael: "Though there are crimes of a darker hue than suicide, yet there is none other by which man seems so entirely to renounce the protection of G.o.d."

_Readings_.--Ar., _Eth_., III., vii., 13; _ib_., V., xi., nn. 1-3; St.

Thos., 2a 2ae, q. 64, art. 5; St. Aug., _De Civitate Dei_, i., cc. 26, 27; Paley, _Mor_. _Phil_., bk. iv., c. iii.

SECTION IV.--_Of Duelling_.

1. A duel may be defined: A meeting of two parties by private agreement to fight with weapons in themselves deadly. The meeting must be _by agreement_: a chance meeting of Montagues and Capulets, where the parties improvise a fight on the spot is not a duel. The agreement must be _private_; anything arranged by public authority, as the encounter of David with Goliath, that in the legend of the Horatii and Curiatii, or the _wager of battle_ in the Middle Ages is not a duel.

It is enough that the weapons be _in themselves deadly_, as swords or pistols, though there be an express stipulation not to kill: but a pre-arranged encounter with fists, with foils with b.u.t.tons on, or even perhaps with crab-sticks, is not a duel.

2. The hard case in duelling is the case of him who receives the challenge. Let us make the case as hard as possible. In a certain army, every challenge sent to an officer is reported to a Court of Honour. If the Court decide that it ought to be accepted, accept the officer must, or lose his commission and all hope of military distinction. In this army, say, there is an officer of high promise who is believed to object to duels on conscientious grounds. An enemy pretends to have been insulted, and challenges him, on purpose to see him refuse and have to go down into the ranks, his career spoilt. The Court of Honour rules that the duel must come off. Of this very case, Reiffenstuel, a canonist of repute, about the year 1700, writes:

"The answer is, ... that they who in such cases are so necessitated and constrained to offer, or accept, a duel, as that unless they offered, or accepted it, they would be held cowardly, craven, mean, and unfit to bear office in the army, and consequently would be deprived of the office that they actually enjoy, and support themselves and their family by, or would for ever forfeit all hope of promotion, otherwise their due and desert,--these I say in such a case are free from all fault and penalty, whether they offer or accept a duel." (In lib. v. decret., t.i.t. 14, nn. 30, 31.)

The author protests in his Preface that he wishes his opinions "all and each to be subject to the judgment, censure, and correction of the Holy Catholic Church." The opinion above quoted was condemned, word for word as it was uttered, by Pope Benedict XIV. in 1752.

Now for Reiffenstuel's reason. "The reason," he says, "is, because in such a case as is supposed the acceptance and offering of a duel is an absolutely necessary, and thereby a just and lawful, defence of your reputation, or goods of fortune, and, by equivalence, even of your life, against an unjust aggressor, who we suppose does you an injury, and thereby gives you no choice but to call him out, or calls you out, and accordingly a.s.sails you in words, &c. Hence, as for the needful defence of reputation, or of goods of fortune of great consequence, it is lawful, with the moderation of a blameless defence, to kill an unjust aggressor, so it will be also lawful to offer and accept a duel, and therein slay the other party." Reiffenstuel here evidently supposes that killing done in self-defence is _direct_. Those who agree with him on that point, proceed to draw differences between self-defence and accepting a challenge. Of course the two are not the same. The true difficulty for them lies in making out how the reasons which justify self-defence in their view of it, do not also justify the acceptance of a duel: how, if I may make another man's death a means to the preservation of my vital right, I may not as well make another man's risk of death and my own, which is all that a duel amounts to, also a _means_, none other being at hand, to the preserving of my no less vital right. This grave objection does not touch us. We have denied that killing in self-defence is direct. On the lines of that denial we meet Reiffenstuel's argument simply as follows.

3. In self-defence, the aggressor is slain _indirectly_. In a duel, not indeed the death itself, or mutual slaughter of the combatants, is _directly_ willed, but the risk of mutual slaughter is directly willed. But we may not directly will the risk of that which we may not directly do. And the combatants may not directly do themselves or one another to death. Therefore they may not directly risk each his own and his antagonist's life. But this risk is of the essence of a duel.

Therefore duelling is essentially unlawful.

4. Such is the clenched fist, so to speak, of our argument. Now to open it out, and prove in detail the several members. In self-defence, neither the death of the aggressor nor the risk of his death is directly willed, whereas the risk of death is directly willed in a duel, which difference entirely bars the argument from self-defence to duelling. For a duel is a means of recovering and preserving honour, which is effected by a display of fort.i.tude, which again consists in exposing yourself to the risk of being killed, and, as part of the bargain, of killing the other man. The risk to life is of the essence of a duel: it only attains its end--of establis.h.i.+ng a man's character for courage--by being dangerous to life. Fort.i.tude essentially consists in braving death. (_Ethics_, c. v., s. viii., n. 1, p. 94.) Deadly weapons, chosen because they are deadly and involve a risk of life in fighting with such arms, are the apt and express means for showing readiness to brave death. If the weapons were not deadly, there would be no point in the duel. As a matter of fact, where our definition of duel is verified, and weapons in themselves deadly are used, the encounter cannot be other than dangerous, especially between foes and where the blood is up. In the French army, where the regimental fencing-master stands by, sword in hand, ready to parry any too dangerous thrust, serious results still have occurred. If any man will have it that short smooth-bore pistols at forty paces in a fog are not to be counted dangerous weapons, all we can say is that MM.

Gambetta and De Fourton, the one being nearly blind, and the other having lost an eye, did not fight a duel. In a duel then the danger of being killed and of killing is _directly_ willed; it is the precise _means chosen_ to the end in view.

5. We have proved already that it is not lawful directly to procure one's own death, nor the death of another innocent man. If any one contends that his antagonist is not innocent, not even in a _political_ sense (c. ii., s. i., n. 2, p. 203), we must here a.s.sume against him, what we shall afterwards prove, that the guilty are not to be _directly_ put to death except by public authority. But what we may not directly bring about, we may not directly risk the occurrence of. As I may not throw myself down a cliff, so neither may I walk along the edge precisely for the chance of a fall. I may often walk there _with_ the chance of falling, but not _because_ of the chance.

It will be said that the English love of fox-hunting and Alpine climbing is largely owing to the element of danger present in those amus.e.m.e.nts. But it is not the danger pure and simple, that is chosen for amus.e.m.e.nt: it is the prospect of overcoming danger by skill. The same may be said of Blondin on the tight-rope: it was his skill, not his mere risk, that was admired. There are some risks that no skill can obviate, as those of Alpine avalanches. We may face a mountain slope where avalanches occur, but we must not hang about there because of the avalanches, making our amus.e.m.e.nt or bravado of the chance of being killed. That would be willing the risk of death _directly_, as it is willed in duelling.

_Readings_.--Paley, _Mor. Phil._, bk. iii., p. 2, c. ix.; St. Thos., 2a 2ae, q. 72, art. 3.

CHAPTER III.

OF SPEAKING THE TRUTH.

SECTION I.--_Of the Definition of a Lie_.

1. "Let none doubt," says St. Augustine, "that he lies, who utters what is false for the purpose of deceiving. Wherefore the utterance of what is false with a will to deceive is unquestionably a lie." The only question is, whether this definition does not contain more than is necessary to the thing defined. The objective falseness of what is said makes a _material_ falsehood: the will to utter what is false makes a _formal_ falsehood (_Ethics_, c. iii., s. ii., n. 7, p. 33): the will to create a false impression regards, not the falsehood itself, but the effect to follow from it. If a person says what is not true, but what he takes to be the truth, he tells indeed a material lie, but at the same time he puts forth no _human act_ (_Ethics_, c.

i., n. 2, p. 1) of lying. If on the other hand he says what he believes to be false, though it turns out true, he tells a formal lie, though not a material one, and moreover, he does a _human act_ of lying. But _human acts_ are the subject-matter of morality. The moralist therefore is content to define the _formal lie_: the _material_ aspect of the lie is irrelevant to his enquiry. A formal lie is saying what one believes not to be true, or promising what one intends not to perform: briefly, it is _speaking against one's mind_.

2. We shall show presently that to speak against one's mind is intrinsically, necessarily, and always evil. But when a thing is thus evil in itself, there is no need to bring into the definition of the act, from a moral point of view, the intention with which it is done.

There is no use in prying into ends, when the means taken is an unlawful means for any end. If a person blasphemes, we do not ask why he blasphemes: the intention is not part of the blasphemy: the utterance is a sin by itself. But if a person strikes, we ask why he strikes, to heal or to slay, in self-defence or in revenge. So, if speaking against one's mind is a thing indifferent and colourless in point of morality, and all depends on the intention with which we do it, so that we may speak against our minds to put another off, but not to deceive him, then certainly the intention to deceive must be imported into the definition of lying. But if, as we shall prove presently, the act of so speaking is by no means indifferent and colourless, but is fraught with an inordinateness all its own, then the intention may be left out of the question, the act is to be characterised on its own merits, and _speech against one's mind_ is the definition of a lie.