In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 18 THOMAS AQUINAS, GERARD BRADLEY, AND THE DEATH PENALTY In 1970 Germain Grisez published a paper criticizing St. Thomas’s view of the legitimacy of capital punishment.1 That Grisez found Thomas’s doctrine in this matter unacceptable is not surprising, since, as he made clear there, Grisez rejected Thomas’s fundamental conception of political society and indeed, the absolute primacy of the common good.2 Grisez taught that no one, not even the political authority, could ever licitly intend the death of a human being. Gerard Bradley, in a paper for a Grisez Festschrift,3 argues that Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical letter Evangelium vitae (EV), tends to agree with Grisez. In so doing Bradley recalls some of the contentions of Grisez in his criticism of Thomas. My aim here is to review passages of Thomas on capital punishment to show the shortcomings of the Bradley criticism. Bradley begins with a very flawed contention. He first cites a statement from the papal encyclical Veritatis splendor (VS) to the effect that if something is intrinsically bad, no one has the right to do it, no matter whether one is a leader of the world or poorest of the poor. The quoted passage runs: ‘‘When it is a matter of the moral norms prohibiting intrinsic evil, there are no privileges or exceptions for anyone. It makes no difference whether one is the master of the world or the ‘poorest of the poor’ on the face of the earth. Before the demands of morality we are all absolutely equal.’’4 He then makes this into the view that ‘‘this universal applicability of the exceptionless norms establishes the moral equality of all persons.’’ Finally, in the same act of interpretation, he speaks of a denial by VS and EV of ‘‘the divisibility of morality into ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms.’’  Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Bradley, and the Death Penalty  Now, the statement he quotes has no tendency to deny a distinction between public and private realms. One could say that capital punishment is a morally virtuous act, an act of justice, but one that is licitly performable only by a person in the appropriate public office. For a private person to decide that a criminal should be executed and accordingly to carry out the execution is not identifiable, as to moral species, with the aforementioned act of justice. It is rather a sin of unjust homicide. It remains quite true that no person, whether occupying public office or not, has the right to perform an act of unjust homicide. And this is what the VS statement quoted says. It does not deny that there are acts that only a person in public office can justly perform. It is ironic that Bradley begins with VS, which bases its case for the existence of intrinsically evil acts on the doctrine, ‘‘borne out by the insightful analysis, still valid today, made by St. Thomas,’’ that the moral act is to be judged in terms of its object.5 Thomas’s own example of a fundamental distinction between two species of moral act, the one good because of its object, the other bad because of its object, is the distinction between ‘‘killing a human being in order to preserve justice’’ (good) and ‘‘killing a human being in order to satisfy anger’’ (bad).6 Bradley says, in the same connection: ‘‘By declaring the basic human goods (the backbone of the exceptionless norms) absolutely immune from direct attack, Catholic social teaching insures that no one may rightly be made an instrument of the purposes of another—not of the Cabinet, the ‘community’ or the ‘great man.’’’7 We see that ‘‘Catholic social teaching’’ is being swept into the system of analysis of the Grisez school. But it is not true, on the basis of the cited passages, that no one may be made an instrument of the community. If that were so, it would be impossible to require someone to defend his country. Furthermore, there is every reason to ‘‘use’’ the criminal for the benefit of the community, precisely by punishing him or her. It is clear that Bradley, in reading the papal documents, is adhering to the Grisez line of thinking that sets aside the primacy of the common good. Grisez’s own doctrine of sinless killing of human beings is based on Thomas’s doctrine of legitimate self-defense by a private person. Thomas held that although the private person is...

Share