Two Moral Theologians*

Vermeersch’s treatise on lying is interesting and learned. The greater part of it is devoted to telling us what other people have thought. With one exception, I’ll not be referring to this. Vermeersch** makes clear from the first that his intention, or what he thinks is his intention, is to defend the classical absolute condemnation of lying. Thus he in particular rejects the view that lying is to be condemned because of the social harms involved in or resulting from it. ‘An act which of its nature corrupts the one instrument of social communication, which hinders human commerce, nay tends to the overthrow of human society’*** does seem to contain a grave disorder: but in saying this we ought not to forget that lying as such - i.e. just any lie, whatever further characteristics it has - is not eo ipso a grave sin. Besides, the deduction from consequences is extrinsic, and ineffective for the condemnation of all lying; for there are lies which can be socially useful. ‘So (the argument) proves too much intensively, and less than it should extensively.’**** Note that we must draw a distinction between saying that a lie as such is always wrong, and saying that it is as such always a very seriously wicked act.

His own condemnation of lying compares it to contraception as an unnatural act. Speech is the one means of communication among human beings. Mankind should form a unity; being material, they haven’t the advantage of angels, each severally possessing its whole nature: no, human nature is divided among indefinitely many individuals and can never exist as an actual whole, because there can always be more men. So men have got to be brought to a sort of unity and made as it were into one whole man by ‘caritativa communicatio’. Original sin, however, and its consequences prevent this; though our nature inclines us to mutual communication as is shown both in the native simplicity of a child and in the shame of being detected in a lie by the person you are lying to.

What he wants, he explains, is to show that the ‘order of mutual communication’ is inviolable for the human race. It follows that a man cannot honestly subordinate that order to himself, but ought to fear (I suppose he means reverence) it as part of the essential order in preserving which he is preserved; or by the preservation of which he is obliged. (I am uncertain how to translate ‘quo servando tenetur’).

Having got that far, he reminds us that the badness of lying, as a kind of act, is light. The ‘order of speech’ gets its necessity from its relation to the ‘order of charity’, but speech has other functions too, besides social communication. Again, as man is a contingent being and the truth of which he deprives other men by lying is only the truth of his own mind, to know which is very little essential for others, a lie leaves the order of charity towards others substantially intact. Lying will only be deadly from extra circumstances either of hatred or of some obligation of telling, which it violates.

There isn’t always evil when the order of something to its end is violated - else we’d sin in eating eggs. There is sin in the violation of an order (ordo) to which we are subordinate. But, to repeat, grave sin isn’t the particular violation of just any ordo, but of the essential ordo to which that particular one relates. The ordo of speech is a particular one, which relates to charity. And so it comes about that although a lie is contrary to the ordo of speech, still it isn’t against, but only outside (praeter) the order of charity. That is to say, it allows that order to be substantially intact. In short, you are violating charity by lying to someone, not by any old lie, but only by a lie out of hatred or a lie where there is something you have an obligation to tell him. This is so, according to Vermeersch, in spite of the fact that the point of speech is ‘caritative communication’ and that because of this lying is always wrong. His conclusion seems admirable but his thinking here is a bit odd. If the order of speech is inviolable because and only because speech relates to the ‘order of charity’, how is it that that doesn’t show, not merely that lying is always wrong, but that it is always a violation of the ‘order of charity’? Or if it is not always a violation of the ‘order of charity’, how does its relation to the order of charity manage to show that it is always wrong? To repeat, I am not disputing his conclusion that lying is always wrong but not always mortally sinful. I am only criticising the reasons he offers for his conclusion.

He proceeds to deal with the case where it is justified or positively required not to tell someone something when he is asking you about it. Here Vermeersch is highly critical of the idea of restrictio mentalis, which I take would be wrongly translated ‘mental reservation’ though that is the only familiar English expression in this context. I take it that ‘restrictio mentalis’ means ‘a mental restriction’ e.g. to one sense of an ambiguous expression. His criticism of this idea is partly good, and it is worth noting, as he notes, that it is a relatively modern idea. It is the idea that in order not to be lying - i.e. producing speech contrary to your own mind - you restrict your meaning to that meaning of the ambiguous expression in which it is true. This is an idea infected by the notion of an act of meaning, the notion that you have to be thinking about meaning something in order to be meaning it and not the other thing. Whereas I would suppose that you only had to think, if at all, ‘well, it’s true in that sense, anyway’ and the question at issue is whether the fact that you hope and intend that the hearer will take it in the sense in which it is false means that you are telling a lie.

However it is not my business here to defend the position actually in question but to point to the very singular device of Vermeersch in reaching the conclusion that you aren’t lying. His first observation is the obvious one that not all speech is assertion. This is not because speech may be questions, orders, complaints, and so on. No, his point is that speech may have the form of assertion but not be assertion because for example it is uttered by an actor on a stage or because it is a joke. No one will say the actor or story-teller is lying, says Vermeersch. True enough, and something like that is true about jokes. He now makes the most amazing assertions himself, which alas are not jokes. If someone is asked whether she has committed adultery, and she says no, what this means is not the assertion that she hasn’t, it means: Either I haven’t, or I don’t want to admit it. And so generally for unwelcome interrogations. Now how much is there in this? Take a criminal trial. It may be a formality that you plead not guilty; so much so that if you refuse to plead, a plea of not guilty is automatically entered by the court. That, it can reasonably be argued puts an interpretation on your plea of not guilty when you do make it though you think you know you are guilty. This I think we can accept. But that generally if you are being questioned by someone who is persecuting you, you can say that something is the case which is not and that not be a lie, not because of the ambiguity but because you aren’t asserting it, but rather saying ‘Either it is the case or I don’t want to say it is not’ - this is much more nonsense than some of the contentions of the mental restrictioners were.

Now this influential piece by Vermeersch has an interesting family resemblance to the presently very influential book by Bruno Schüller, Die Begründung sittlicher Urteile.*****

When I began to read Schüller’s book I was amazed. I knew it was influential; I did not see how it could be regarded as anything but ridiculous. This was because of the way it begins. To put briefly what Schüller spends a lot of ink on: he has noticed that the ten commandments are not statements, but commandments. He produces a word ‘Paränese’, which he first explains as covering orders and prohibitions and warnings and encouragements. Well and good: it may be useful to have such a word. In English we are used to discussing ‘imperatives’ which I suppose covers much the same ground, though an imperative is also used for advice. But Schüller has a rhetorical reason for introducing an unfamiliar word; he wishes to characterise the ‘paraenetic’ in a way which shall be very directive for moral philosophy.

The fact that a commandment is not a statement but a command or prohibition is confused in his mind, it seems, with a non-fact, namely that it has no non-tautological content. So, skipping the first two commandments, he expounds: ‘Keep holy the Sabbath day; rest on it’. ‘Sabbath day’ he says may very well mean ‘rest day’ and that would mean ‘day on which you ought to rest’. So the commandment means ‘Rest on the day on which you ought to rest’. That is tautological. The remaining commandments get the same treatment. ‘Honour your father and mother’. Well, what does ‘father and mother’ mean? Not what you might think: it means ‘Respektpersonen’ i.e. ‘people you ought to respect’. ‘Thou shall not kill’ he tells us, means ‘Thou shall not kill wrongfully’. For, he says, people who know Hebrew will tell us that the Hebrew word translated ‘kill’ means ‘wrongful killing’ or ‘murder’. One understands that they are a bit short of rabbis in Germany these days; but I fear Schüller didn’t even try to consult any rabbis. My own experience is that if you ask a Jew who knows Hebrew well, he will tell you that the word is not the ordinary word for killing; you’d use another word for killing in war and another for the work of a butcher. (I have not had the idea - till just now - of seeing whether a word for killing is used in connection with what the ‘avenger of blood’ might do, or which word is used for what you had done, if you had killed someone accidentally and you had to flee to one of the cities of refuge to escape the avenger of blood.) What I was told was that the word used in the commandment covers what in England we call manslaughter as well as what we call murder. That this shows it means ‘wrongful killing’, may be maintained by some people but is surely false. An executioner who knowingly executed his own father would thereby be guilty of wrongful killing but not of either murder or manslaughter.[1] So ‘wrongful killing’ is wider ‘extensive’, as Vermeersch would say, than ‘murder’ or ‘murder-and-manslaughter’.

The commandments against stealing, false witness and adultery, get the same sort of treatment.

We are given a general thesis about ‘ethical exhortation, or Paränese’. (Schüller confines his application of Paränese to the ethical.) The general thesis is: ‘An important indication (for such sentences) is that if, contrary to their own intention, they are construed as propositions communicating knowledge, they assume the form of tautologies or empty formulae’. Of course he sees to it that they do so, by reinterpreting them.

The reason why I was so amazed at these proceedings was that I could not understand how people could be snowed by such writing. What suppression of what they knew could make them accept that ‘father and mother’ doesn’t mean father and mother? How could they suppose that that commandment which contains the week in it: ‘Six days shall thou labour and do all that thou hast to do’, as it enjoins rest on the seventh day - that this, if transformed into a ‘You ought to’ proposition, would come out as a tautology? - It is true, as Schüller remarks, that a commandment against adultery could not be given to people who had no institution of marriage; equally a commandment against theft presupposes some custom of property. It is true then that disapproval of theft and adultery is also to some degree presupposed. I learned from a Jewish surgeon that the traditional vital application of ‘Honour your father and mother’ was: not to leave them to die by the wayside in the desert travel of the children of Israel. Schüller thinks that anything he calls ‘paraenetic’ conforms to an already totally and utterly unquestioningly received morality. Well he can restrict his term like that if he likes; it is then not open to him to assume that the ten commandments were what he called ‘paraenetic’. This sliding in of something which, given the way in which a term has been introduced, may very well not be so, is I fear characteristic.

Reading the rest of the book I perceived why, having somehow swallowed or skipped this first chapter, people might be impressed. The book is learned especially in Anglo-American moral philosophy. However, the purpose of the first chapter becomes clear: it provides a very fundamental defence against a protest: But we know that certain things are required, certain others wrong. We know some of these from the commandments.

As I said, there is a curious resemblance to Vermeersch. Remember Vermeersch’s innocent and obvious observation that not all that has the grammatical form of assertion is assertion. (I put it in my terms, but it is clearly what he means from the example of the actors in a stage play.) Well and good. From that he slides to saying that you haven’t asserted that you have not committed adultery if you say you have not when your husband asks or accuses you: that ‘the amiable Saint Francis’, when he said ‘The man hasn’t passed this way’ was actually saying ‘Either the man hasn’t passed this way or if he has I don’t want to betray him’.****** Our two moral theologians both play Humpty Dumpty with words and both use well known facts, which do make their topic more difficult than a naïf person would think, to justify themselves. There the similarity ends: Vermeersch thinks he is strictly maintaining a strict doctrine; Schüller’s bent is to make hay of any strict doctrine.

Schüller’s book is also quite interesting reading. But you do have to be watchful. He writes as if there were only two possibilities when there are evidently, or likely to be, more. About lying, for example. If you must preserve a secret, are asked a question about it and ‘silence will betray’; well then - to betray the secret is excluded; so you must either lie or if you think you must not lie you must give an answer which is an answer but which doesn’t betray; in giving it you use a restrictive concept of lying so that what you say, by that concept, doesn’t count as a lie. Schüller’s comment is that the restriction imposed on the concept of lying brings the people who are supposedly ‘deontological’ as near as makes no odds to what he calls a ‘teleological’ view. If I am to translate this, it seems to mean (a) that they think what you do here is justified by the good result of not betraying the secret, and (b) that the alleged purpose - not to lie - is a put-up job. But the effort to give an account of how you can give an answer and yet avoid a lie seems to distinguish such a person from a ‘teleologist’, if the latter judges one should be willing to lie for a good purpose.

That in an actual situation there may be possibilities not mentioned, like feigning a faint or a fit of madness, making a distracting joke or producing some other red herring, is a feature of discussions of this topic, of Schüller’s no less than others’. That if you can see no possibility except to give some information you must not give, or to lie, you will do better to lie than, say, to betray the unjustly persecuted fugitive - this is sufficiently obvious but does not get mentioned. The most that is mentioned is that you may not be clever enough, which is unfair. For the discussions are all about how to avoid any sin at all. But the truth is: you might not be good enough to do that.

Schüller explains or accepts a defining contrast between what he calls ‘deontologists’ and what he calls ‘teleologists’: a ‘teleologist’ thinks that actions are to be judged only by their consequences, or their tendency to produce good or bad consequences; and a ‘deontologist’ (of the more savage sort) thinks that some actions are wrong (or right and obligatory) no matter what the consequences. The milder sort of ‘deontologist’ thinks that all actions are to be judged always partly, but not always only by their consequences. Schüller maintains that ‘teleological’ ethics is the right Catholic sort.

The terminology is not invented by Schüller, though it is strange to me, who have quite different meanings for these terms. However, accepting them for the sake of proceeding, I can say: there is a crucial difference between moral philosophers according as they think or do not think that some kinds of actions one should not do - not for any advantage to be gained or evil to be avoided.

Now lying is one of the candidates. This makes the discussion of it rather interesting.

I said one should lie about the thing rather that give the fugitive away. How come? Isn’t that doing something bad for the sake of avoiding an evil? - namely the evil of the fugitive being caught? This must be what incites Schüller to say that the devices invented to show what would not be a lie come as near as anything to teleology. Aren’t we going by consequences?

People may easily be incited to say that the devices invented to show that something would not be a lie come as near as you like to saying ‘Lie for the good purpose, or to avoid the evil, and I’ll tell you a way of muddling your mind into thinking it isn’t a lie’. Now aren’t we just going by consequences here?

No, and the point is important. If it is absolutely clear that someone can’t be persuaded to avoid wrongdoing altogether in some matter, it is good to persuade him to commit some lesser sin than what he is minded to do. If you cannot see any alternative to committing one sin or another, you act better if you chose the lesser sin. And you may not have time or cleverness to find out a better possibility. To betray the fugitive, we will suppose, is a gravely wicked thing to do. Telling the pursuers he is there is betraying him. So in this case telling that truth is a wicked act - more than telling the lie that he is not there. But suppose that somebody else threatened that he would give the fugitive away unless you told some lie? That case would be different. If you are a consequentialist, you are likely to say you should tell that lie just as much as the other one. But I didn’t say you should tell the other one, only that you should do it rather than commit an act of betrayal by what you tell the pursuers. If you are a consequentialist you will hold that you are responsible for all the consequences of your acts and omissions and therefore that you are responsible for the capture of the fugitive if he was caught because you refused to tell the lie demanded by the person who betrayed him - just as much as if you betrayed him.

Now I am not quite clear to what extent Schüller is a consequentialist. He sometimes I think forgets the totality of opinion involved in defining the ‘teleologist’ - a ‘teleologist’ thinks all acts are determined in their moral character by their consequences or tendency to produce certain consequences. The latter phrase may suggest kinds of act as what are being considered. In general, the people who are ‘deontologists’ think there are some kinds of act such that acts of that kind are wicked regardless of consequences in a particular case. As a ‘teleologist’ is one who holds the view that contradicts this, he thinks there are not any such kinds of act. This would seem to lead to his thinking that if any particular act is wicked, it is not as being of such and such a kind. Now Schüller objects to attacks by ‘deontologists’ on ‘teleologists’ which run like this: ‘Am I to defraud someone because I could do better things with the money I owe him, than by giving it him? If you go by consequences only, justice and fairness go overboard’. With what justification, asks Schüller, are justice and fairness not to be counted among the consequences of your act? Well, he certainly is given to taking rather unimpressive statements of opposing positions. However, this is a very interesting one. If you do pay what you owe, justice is satisfied as far as that transaction is concerned. So that’s part of the consequences. And it may outweigh the advantage of what you might have done with the money. What if it doesn’t? Well, it’s not clear that you intend the permanent defrauding of the other party, so if some really serious need for the money here and now makes you say ‘Sorry, can’t pay you today’, justice isn’t flouted, its demands are merely postponed and will that be objectionable? - Well what we want is not such a case - it is a poor case to put forward. We want a case where the consequences of a lie, or of an intentional adultery, or of deliberately killing a baby, are held by a ‘teleologist’ to justify the action, i.e. to make it out to have been a good action in spite of its having those characters. Why I put in lying as an example ought to be clear from what I have said in the matter of betraying the fugitive. We ought not to take a case where one of the things would at any rate be less bad to do than any alternative you can think of. ‘Such’, you may say, ‘can always be imagined.’ But no; it would be too fanciful to think out e.g. a case where you are irresistibly tempted either to commit adultery or to murder someone, so you choose the adultery as the lesser sin. You can only introduce cases plausibly if you construct a set-up such that this action will have such-and-such consequences and refusing to do it will mean those consequences don’t occur. Let the consequences be greatly desirable, the to-be-expected alternative dreadful and miserable. Is the weight of the badness of the act something to put into the calculus of the total value or disvalue of the consequences - as Schüller in effect says justice and fairness would be?

Moore argued that everyone has to be a consequentialist - has to accept his analysis of rightness and wrongness of action - who has a moral view at all. For, he says, your action must have consequences, and if you say: they don’t matter, such-and-such an action is wrong, what you have to mean is that the sum of their value is never such as to outweigh the sum of disvalue when this includes the intrinsic evil of the act. Moore says that anyone who thinks of ethics at all must think this, and in this way he accommodates to his own general theory the views of those who say e.g. ‘Deliberately procuring abortion is wrong; whatever the consequences, you must not do that’.

If Moore were right, then the difference between a ‘deontologist’ and a ‘teleologist’ would be ill-expressed by contrasting the views so labelled: it would be a matter of including or not including the value or disvalue of consequences. Or, more seriously, the difference might be between people who think that the disvalue of an intrinsically wrong act is eo ipso so great that it could not be outweighed, and those who think that no kind of act is in that sense intrinsically wrong. As Schüller does seem to think there is a serious difference, and that the right ethic is ‘teleological’, it follows that he is among those who do not think any kind of action intrinsically wrong and so irredeemable by, say, the spirit in which, or the further purposes for which, you do it. In fact, it is quite clear that he is among such thinkers.

His thesis that traditional Catholic morality is ‘teleological’ is a startling impudence.

Comparing Vermeersch and Schüller, I have found a certain likeness between them in that they both play Humpty Dumpty with words. They do this, in the example I have cited, for different purposes: Schüller to anaesthetise his readers against the effect of knowing the ten commandments, Vermeersch to justify lying in response to unwelcome interrogation. As he thinks he is maintaining a strict classical doctrine that lying is always wrong, he may seem rather to contrast with Schüller who does not desire even an appearance of holding any absolutist positions like that. However, as I hope to have shown, the absolutism is something of a self deception on Vermeersch’s part.

Let us return to another topic to show Vermeersch in his world-pleasing role. He discusses killing by a private person in self defence. He is admirable in his criticism of one who thinks to find the ‘principle of double effect’ in St. Thomas’s article on this subject (Summa theologiae 2a 2ae, q.64, a.7). St. Thomas thinks that even in self defence one may not kill on purpose: ‘Illicitum est quod homo intendat occidere ut se defendat’. How remarkable it would have been, Vermeersch remarks, if the principle of double effect had no force in the one passage of the Summa where St. Thomas was formally formulating it! - i.e. he is doing no such thing.

All the same, St. Thomas’ rigorous doctrine has its difficulties. If in a struggle on the edge of a cliff you push your assailant over the edge, it is reasonable to say you are intentionally exerting enough force to push him away from you, and so it may well be true that you didn’t intend his death. - But suppose you shoot him and that kills him? (Or, to make the point more strongly, you throw a hand grenade, which is all you’ve got to repel one who is advancing on you with a machine gun?) ‘How, several have asked’, says Vermeersch ‘is the killing of the aggressor not direct, not chosen as a means to saving yourself?’******* Here he makes a suggestion which is worth careful thought:

The unjust aggression itself morally alters the action of exploding (shooting) the gun. Without that present attack, the explosion (shooting) of the gun neither would nor could be anything but a direct killing. But now that aggression, persisting for some time, makes it fall under the conception of defence, and of a defence the intention of which is directed to saving yourself. This shows why actual (present) attack has to be stipulated among the conditions of bloody defence. For when the actual attack stops, the action would simply fall under the concept of killing for an end, perhaps a good end: but it isn’t permissible to do evil for the sake of good.********

If the main thing Vermeersch means by this passage is respectable, it can’t be that in such a case you are justified because you aren’t engaged in intentional direct killing. I would rather understand him as saying that an attack which makes your shooting fall under the concept (gives it the ratio) of immediate defence, is a counter-example to the prohibition of ‘direct’, i.e. intentional, killing. This is worthy of more exploration.

I fear, however, that he meant worse. As in the case of lying, he thought he was adhering to a classically rigorous principle. But look how he goes on (in small print):

But there is no lack of other examples in which an action, physically very clearly direct, is nevertheless held to be morally purely permissive, because it goes with another physical effectiveness, which alone is intended. Thus, as everybody admits, the burning of innocent people is merely being permitted by one ‘who burns innocents in a tower along with nocents... because by the intention of the agent the action only looks to the burning of the nocents, although here and now the burning of these cannot be separated from the burning of the others’; thus someone who transfixes a nocent by piercing an innocent placed between is judged neither to have intended nor to have chosen the killing of that innocent. In the same way the unjust attack here conferred a double immediate effectiveness on the explosion of the gun: one being the defence of the man being attacked, which alone is chosen and intended, the other the killing, which is only being permitted’.*********

This doctrine is introduced for the sake of an application to lying:

Someone who requires us to disclose a matter we have a right to keep secret is an unjust aggressor: materially or formally so, according as he is or is not conscious of his importunity. This makes no difference as it is all right to repel an attack with the same kind of defence, whether it is materially or formally blameworthy... In themselves, the words would be nothing but a signification of what is false. But the unjust attack of the other has the effect that they are at the same time a defence of oneself. Where they are so applied, the false signification is merely permitted.

Hence the fault of lying is absent in our case, for the same reason as the concept of homicide does not apply in the other.†

I would have to know more history than I do to say whether Vermeersch is sounding a new note. Certainly the earlier casuistry on the subject of lying seemed to me to have been inspired by a traditional concern that one not sin against the truth, which is what assertion is for. (For this last, see St. Anselm, De Veritate cap.II.) This concern appears in Vermeersch only as a concern that one as it were find a legal loophole to get out of a charge of lying. As for the matters he adduces as parallels, they seem sinister indeed. Perhaps they were already there in a tradition in which he writes. Whether this is so or not, there is a strong atmosphere of one using his quite powerful talents to go along with the world, to reassure and flatter it. This characteristic is raised to a higher degree in Schüller’s Die Begründung sittlicher Urteile.

* From the text of an unpublished and undated typescript with handwritten corrections by the author.

** Arthur Vermeersch SJ (1858-1936) distinguished Jesuit moral theologian and canonist; taught moral theology and canon law at the Jesuit Faculty of Theology in Louvain, Belgium, 1893-1918; Professor of Moral Theology, Gregorian University, Rome, 1918-1934.

*** A Vermeersch, ‘De mendacio et necessitatibus commercii humani’, in Gregorianum 1(1920), pp. 11-40, 425-74, at p. 30: ‘Actus enim qui natura sua corrumpat unicum socialis communicationis instrumentum, qui commercium humanum impediat, immo in eversione humanae societatis tendat, gravem inordinationem continere videtur.’

**** A Vermeersch, op.cit., p. 30: ‘Quare [argumentum] intensive nimis, extensive minus quam oportet probat.’

***** Bruno Schüller SJ, Die Begründung sittlicher Urteile. Typen ethischer Argumentation in der Moraltheologie (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1973; second edition 1980). Schüller is an influential German Jesuit moral theologian who advanced a ‘proportionalist’ (consequentialist) understanding of Christian ethics.

****** A Vermeersch, op.cit., p. 463. ‘Et amabilis S. Franciscus, dum vitam servare voluit hominis quem insectabantur, ut sine mendacio responderet: ‘Non hac transivit’, opus non habuit, manu manicam suam indicare vel pede locum designare cui insistebat; responsum de se hanc ambiguitatem ferebat: Vel non transit, vel non prodo hominem.’

******* A. Vermeersch, op.cit., p. 466: ‘Quo modo tunc, sic non nulli interrogant, occisio aggressoris non est directa, non est electa ut medium salutis propriae?’

******** loc.cit.: ‘Verum id attendendum est, actionem explodendi sclopetum ipsa iniusta aggressione moraliter mutari. Separata ab hac invasione praesenti, explosio sclopeti non foret nec esse posset nisi directa occisio. Nunc autem aggressio ista, quam diu perseverat, eidem rationem tribuit defensionis, et defensionis cuius intentio ad salutem propriam dirigitur. Hinc etiam probe perspicitur cur actualis aggressio inter condiciones cruentae defensionis ponenda sit. Cessante enim actuali aggressione, actio non haberet iam nisi rationem occisionis propter finem fortasse bonum: sed non licet facere mala ut eveniant bona.’

********* loc.cit.: ‘Ceterum non desunt alia exempla in quibus actio quae physice est manifestissime directa, moraliter tamen pro mere permissive habetur, quia concurrit cum alia physica efficientia quae sola intenditur. Sic, ut omnes fatentur, combustionem innocentium mere permittit, ‘qui comburit innocentes in turri simul cum nocentibus ... quia actio, ex intentione agentis, solum tendit ad comburendos nocentes, licet hic et nunc non posit combustio horum separari a combustione illorum’; sic, qui per innocentem interpositum transfigit nocentem, innocentis occisionem nec intendisse nec elegisse censetur. Non aliter hic aggressio iniusta explosioni sclopeti duplicem efficientiam immediatam tribuit: alteram hominem invasum defendendi, quae sola eligitur et intenditur, altera occidendi, quae sola permittitur.’

† op.cit. p.467: ‘Qui a nobis postulat revelationem rei quam ius nobis est secreto tegere, est iniustus aggressor: materialiter aut formaliter, prout importunitas suae est conscius vel non. Hoc ceterum non refert, cum eodem defensionis genere aggressionem formaliter et materialiter tantum culpandam repellere liceat ... Secundum se, verba ista non essent nisi significatio falsi. Iniusta alterius aggressio efficit ut sint simul propria defensio. Qua talia adhibentur falsa significatio mere permittitur. Quare, labes mendacii abest in nostra casu, simili prorsus ratione qua, in altero, ratio homicidii.’

1 I owe this observation to Dr. M. C. Geach.