§ I. On the Killing of an Innocent Person in General

I say. It is never licit directly to kill an innocent person, whether by private or by public authority. The reason is both because the killing of an innocent person is an action injurious to the rights of God, who alone has supreme dominion over life, and accordingly intrinsically evil; and because it is injurious to the right which the innocent person has to life; and because it is positively prohibited by God himself; for it is said, Exod. xxiii, 7: "The innocent and just person you shall not kill." But this does not prevent that sometimes an action of itself good or indifferent can be posited, from which the death of an innocent person follows beyond the intention, according to those things which were said concerning the indirectly voluntary in the treatise on human acts, nn. 8 and 9.

You Will Ask. Is it licit for the state to render an innocent man or woman sterile, either by performing vasectomy on a man or ovariotomy on a woman, precisely so that offspring may not be born?

Response. Negatively, because it is not licit to mutilate innocent persons even for saving the state: just as it is not licit for an individual to render himself sterile precisely for this end, that offspring may not be born, so neither is it licit for the state. Because this would be to rule subjects despotically and thus to invert the natural end of the state. The commonwealth cannot convert the life of its members to its own utility and consume it for the sake of its own utility, because citizens are not ordered for the commonwealth, but the commonwealth is ordered for citizens and for their utility and good. Namely, the subject is not a slave: the former is governed politically for the utility of the subject; the latter despotically for the utility of the master. Thus Lugo, disp. 10, 77, 104. Again: "it is licit for no one to violate with impunity the dignity of man, of which God himself disposes with great reverence." Leo XIII, Rerum Nov. Now to the dignity of man certainly belongs the generative power. Indeed not only is it not licit for the state to act thus, but on the contrary, for the protection of bodily goods, the state itself is bound by its own force; and it is necessary to rescue the wretched from the savagery of men. "Rights indeed, in whomever they are, are to be preserved sacredly, and that each one may hold his own, public authority ought to provide, by warding off and avenging injuries. Except that in protecting the rights of private persons, regard must especially be had for the weak and the needy." Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum. No law of men can take away from man the natural and primordial right of marriage or circumscribe in any manner whatsoever the principal cause of nuptials established in the beginning by the authority of God. "Increase and multiply" (Gen. i, 28). Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum. But those who wish this law to be enacted surely circumscribe that cause. Thus St. Thomas, 2-2, q. 104, a. 5: "Now man is bound to obey man in those things which are to be done outwardly through the body; in which, however, according to those things which pertain to the nature of the body, man is not bound to obey man, but only God, because all men are equal by nature; for example, in those things which pertain to the sustenance of the body and the generation of offspring." All such laws are unjust.

You Will Resolve. - 1st. It is not licit to kill those lethally wounded, nor any other dying persons, lest they suffer longer; because, according to the known saying, evils are not to be done to obtain a good.

2nd. It is not licit to kill an innocent person in order to satisfy a tyrant demanding his death, even under penalty of the overthrow of a city, and even if he himself consented to his own death: because he cannot properly consent, since he does not have dominion over his own life. Yet more probably he could be compelled to hand himself over to the tyrant for the public good, and probably, if he refused, even be handed over. - Cf. St. Alphonsus, n. 393.

3rd. It is not licit to kill envoys or hostages, even if the enemies who sent them have not kept the pledge given, and have unjustly killed the hostages or envoys sent to them; because they are innocent. - Cf. St. Alphonsus, ibid.