Section — Marc, Institutiones Morales
§ 1. On the Killing of an Innocent Person in General
The killing of an innocent person, by reason of imputability, is either voluntary directly or indirectly, or involuntary or casual.
Indirect killing supposes an action licit in itself, from which, beyond the intention, by accident, death follows. Casual killing supposes the action to be in itself rarely dangerous, and proportionate diligence to have been used. If the action is frequently dangerous and killing follows from it, it can no longer be said that casual killing is present, although some diligence was observed.
- Principles. I. Direct killing of an innocent person is never licit, unless from the special permission of God. For since the dominion of life belongs to God alone, such killing is intrinsically evil, and is prohibited by divine law (Exod., 23, 7): Thou shalt not kill the innocent and just. Cf. III, 393.
Hence: 1. It is not licit to kill hostages lethally wounded, nor any other dying persons, lest they suffer longer; nor rabid persons, lest they harm others, when they can otherwise be restrained from harming.
It is not licit to kill an innocent person in order to satisfy a tyrant demanding his death under penalty of the overthrow of a city, and this even if the innocent person should consent to his own death; because he does not have dominion over his own life. Nevertheless, more probably, he can be compelled to hand himself over to the tyrant for the public good; and, if he is unwilling, even to be handed over as guilty, since from charity and legal justice he is held to expose his life for the republic (cf. n. 483). H. Ap., VIII, 21.
Physicians, midwives, guardians of infants and of the sick sin gravely if from their grave negligence they either do not impede their death, or cause or accelerate it.1 Likewise, if from gravely culpable ignorance they furnish harmful things to the sick.
It is not licit for those sailing, tossed at sea and escaping from shipwreck in a skiff, in order to lighten the skiff, which otherwise they fear is about to sink, to cast into the sea any except those who, descending last into the skiff, are the cause why it is about to sink (Konings, n. 473, 6).
(1) It escapes no one that a great quantity of narcotic is sometimes injected for this reason, that the life of the sick person may be shortened. Cf. Linz. Quart. Schr., 1937, Pastoralfr. v. Rett. See what will be said n. 761 concerning abuse of morphine.
- II. Indirect killing of an innocent person is licit, the things to be posited for indirect voluntary having been posited. It is licit to posit a cause about to have immediately two effects, one good and the other evil, intending only the good and permitting the evil, provided there is present a sufficient reason proportioned to the evil effect about to follow (cf. n. 315). See III, 398, 1.
Hence: 1. If someone sitting on a horse cannot avoid assassins unless he flees through a narrow road where a child is found about to be crushed, he can pass, provided the child is baptized. 2. In war it is licit to direct war machines toward a besieged city, even if innocent persons are foreseen as about to perish. Cf. the case in the periodical Linz. Quart. Schr., 1898, p. 94. 3. It is licit to baptize with cold water a child soon about to perish, although from this his death is accelerated (VI, 106).
- III. Casual killing of an innocent person is not a sin. The reason is that such homicide is involuntary.
Hence: 1. A cleric is excused from homicide and does not become irregular who by chance should kill a man while applying himself to the hunting of wild beasts, otherwise prohibited to him, if he used due diligence. 2. But they are guilty of homicide who strike a pregnant woman with the heel, or terrify her, from which abortion happens; parents suffocating an infant in bed; men slaughtering a man by casting stones with a sling for the sake of playing. 3. He is guilty of homicide who posits an action of itself and commonly dangerous, from which death frequently follows; for homicide of this kind is voluntary in the cause, as we said above. Cf. III, 398.
Corollary. From these things it is understood why the operation which is named PUNCTURE OF THE HEART must be reprobated. Indeed the intention of those who demand it arises from compassion; they fear lest one who is believed dead be buried alive. But is not such a mode of acting true homicide of an innocent person, in the case in which life has not yet entirely departed? Therefore to demand this operation absolutely, in every event, is directly to intend evil. Nevertheless the physician would not sin if he performed this puncture after he had known from undoubted signs that death had truly occurred. Noldin, II, n. 339; Linz. Quart. Schr., vol. 54 (1901), p. 122.