All of us certainly know people who would claim that they had a good intention, even if their action went wrong in the end. This claim (having a good intention) they might use as an excuse or more, they might even think that the intention is the main, or maybe the only category that matters in the moral consideration. However, on the other hand, there is classical Catholic teaching about the intrinsically evil acts, which are evil “per se and in themselves,”¹ regardless of the intentions of their agents. As John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, a. 80, § 1, attests, they “are always seriously wrong by reason of their object.” What does St. Thomas Aquinas² say about the role of intention in our acting?

In this article we will proceed in two stages. In the first part we will present Aquinas’s thinking about the intention within the scope of the human acting process. We will start with metaphysical grounds of a notion of intention, which denotes in St. Thomas’s moral teaching always the end either simpliciter, or as acquired by particular means.³ In the second part we will look at the double effect doctrine. Why so? Some theologians try to see the double effect doctrine as a magic solution to avoid the interdiction of absolute negative precepts of the natural law. Particularly in Summa theologiae,⁴ II-II, q. 64, a. 7, St. Thomas introduces an act having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside intention. The latter could be properly called just chosen, rather than intended. We will see what it precisely means for a moral consideration.

1 METAPHYSICAL GROUNDING: THE END INTENDED AS GOOD

Aristotle begins his Ethics with the statement: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason, the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.”⁵ For Aquinas, the first principle of practical reason is that “the good is to be done and pursued.”⁶ He argues that “the good is what all things desire.”⁷ And he refers to Pseudo-Dionysius who claims that “all things (…) desire the Beautiful and Good.”⁸ This proposition does not mean that something is good simply because it is desired but rather the other way around; something is desired because it is good. A cause is manifested through its effects. A man knows something and recognizes its goodness through its effects. And a thing’s recognized goodness draws the appetite. The good is the end of the appetite.⁹

All things, whether they know it or not, have a tendency toward an end. Since the nature of the good is such that it is desired, and so has the aspect of an end, it is obvious that the good has a close relation to an end.¹⁰ So, in this sense, all things desire good because all things have an end. However, there is not one specific good that all things desire. For example, the good for humans is often different from those of non-rational animals. Everything desires the good that is proper to its nature.¹¹

There is no question that intellectual agents act for the sake of an end, because they think ahead of time in their intellects of the things which they achieve through action; and their action stems from such preconception.¹²

Aquinas says that every action is undertaken with a view to some end and that end has the character of the good. The good here has a perfective meaning. It fulfills the agent.¹³ If an agent does not have a desired object, the desire can compel him to pursue it. An action has as its end a good that the agent seeks. The faculty proper to human beings which pursues the good on a universal level is the will. This is how in human actions a moral good appears. But if every action has a purpose or an end, and every end is good, it might appear that every action must be good.

How, then, in this light, can bad actions exist? In order to answer this question, Aquinas follows Aristotle and distinguishes between a real and an apparent good. A real good is something a man pursues as something perfective or fulfilling and that really would perfect or fulfill him if he gained it. An apparent good, by contrast, is an end pursued as something perfective or fulfilling but, once obtained, does not actually perfect or fulfill its agent.¹⁴ All men, simply by acting, pursue formally the same end: the good. Sometimes these actions are such that they truly perfect the agent and sometimes they are falsely thought to perfect the agent. Therefore, Aquinas writes: “Those who sin turn from that in which their last end really consists: but they do not turn away from the intention of the last end, which intention they mistakenly seek in other things.”¹⁵

Evil exists as non-intended.¹⁶ By this is not meant that nobody has bad intentions per se, but, rather, evil happens as a fault in the cause or in a matter which the cause is acting upon. That is why the evil is always pursued only by the reason of good, at least apparent goodness. What any agent pursues is always a good for him as he finds it good, but it can be bad for somebody else. For example, it is evil for an antelope to be eaten by a lion, but the lion pursues the antelope because it is the lion’s proper good. Because every contingent being moves toward an end, teleological order pervades all being.

Things that know their end are ordered to the end in the same way as things which do not know it, though the ones that do know their end are moved toward it through themselves, while those that do not know it incline to their end, as directed by another being (…). However, things that know their end are always ordered to the good as an end, for the will, which is the appetite for a foreknown end, inclines toward something only if it has the rational character of a good, which is its object. So, also, the things which do not know their end are ordered to a good as an end. Therefore, the end of all things is a good.¹⁷

St. Thomas states two characteristics of the end: It is sought and desired by things which have not yet attained the end; and it is loved by the things that already participate in it.¹⁸ Both features belong to the act of being. On the metaphysical level one identifies a connection between the notions of “good” and “being”. Even though good and being are distinct concepts,¹⁹ St. Thomas interprets the good in a transcendental sense by referring to its convertibility with being and that it is among the first conceptions of the human intellect. Every being as being is good. And because the good implies the ratio of being, the good and the being must be convertible.²⁰ Aquinas also applies this transcendental perspective to the goodness of human actions:

That which has nothing of being or goodness, could not be said to be either evil or good. But since this same fullness of being is of the very essence of good, if a thing be lacking in its due fullness of being, it is not said to be good simply, but in a certain respect, inasmuch as it is a being; although it can be called a being simply, and a non-being in a certain respect (…). We must therefore say that every action has goodness, in so far as it has being; whereas it is lacking in goodness, in so far as it is lacking in something that is due to its fulness of being; and thus, it is said to be evil.²¹

In the Neoplatonist tradition, represented especially by Dionysius the Areopagite, good is also characterized as being diffusive of itself, thus linking goodness to efficient causality. Responding to this matter Aquinas claims that: “Goodness is described as self-diffusive in the sense that an end is said to move.”²² He therefore reinterprets the self-diffusiveness of goodness primarily in relation, to final causality rather than efficient causality.²³ Good moves the agent to act and every agent acts for the sake of the good.²⁴

2 THE PLACE AND VALUE OF INTENTION WITHIN A HUMAN ACTION

In logic by the term first intention, we designate the object in its intelligibility. By second intention we mean something that can be known only by an act of reflection, i.e., abstract concepts as such.²⁵ Within morals, Aquinas claims intention to be an act of the will.²⁶ The Dictionnaire de philosophie et de théologie thomistes specifies that moral intention is a movement of the will towards a particular end which an agent gives to himself by performing a moral act.²⁷ It presupposes knowledge and is essentially of the end. Human acts, precisely as human (and therefore moral) proceed from reason and the will. They are performed consequently by a choice that follows from knowledge. The order of intentions corresponds to the order of ends, while the end is the first in the order of intention and the last in the order of execution. The achievement of a certain end is explicitly aimed at by the selection of the appropriate means. This is called a choice (electio).²⁸

The choice is a selection among the various possible means to the end. That is why it is formally associated with the intellect because it orders one to act. However, materially it is an act of the will. Thus, both intention and choice are movements of the will. The difference between them is that choice is ordered to the means for achieving the end whereas the intention refers to the end prior to determination of the means, and also to the end as acquired by the means.²⁹ When a choice has been made about a certain matter, a follow-up command of the intellect (imperium)³⁰ may direct the agent to execute the choice. For example, a student decides to leave his home at 9 A.M. in order to attend a lecture, and then at 9 A.M. his intellect directs the will to execute the previously made decision. For this reason, the intention is the cause of choosing an action, which is why the choice of the means is “intended” only in an analogous sense.³¹

Now, how is it possible that Aquinas, who claims that the morality of a human action is primarily derived from its object and that “an action has its species from its object,”³² can also state that: “moral acts take their species according to what is intended, and not according to what is beside the intention, since this is accidental”³³? Is it the object or the intention that gives the species to a moral act? There are several modern and contemporary theologians who (some of them based on ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 7, or another similar assertion of St. Thomas³⁴) emphasize the importance of intention for moral consideration against the physical and causal structure of a human action.³⁵

For the answer we must see the immediate context of the quoted statement. ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 7 considers an act of self-defense, or, more precisely, it asks if it is lawful to kill somebody in legitimate self-defense.³⁶ Aquinas says that killing an assailant “is not unlawful” provided it proceeds “from a good intention,” which is to keep everything “in being, as far as possible,” and the action is not “out of proportion to the end,” which means here that the agent does not use “more than necessary violence.”³⁷ In a case like this one where the action is simple and per se ordered to its end (when it is not a complex act), the species of the object is derived from the end to which it is ordered. The species of the object itself then specifies more the act within its essential moral species. And so, in the situation where the object is naturally ordered to the end, the action receives its moral species from the intention (the intended end). The object in this case is verbatim “besides the intention” (praeter intentionem) in the sense that it is not identical with the end even if the species of the object is contained within that of the end. St. Thomas shows that a natural and a moral species of an action are related only per accidens:

It is possible, however, that an act which is one in respect of its natural species, be ordained to several ends of the will: thus this act “to kill a man,” which is but one act in respect of its natural species, can be ordained, as to an end, to the safeguarding of justice, and to the satisfying of anger: the result being that there would be several acts in different species of morality.³⁸

The natural object (the natural species) “to kill somebody” forms a completely different moral species in the case of a legal execution, an act of self-defense or a murder of passion. And the difference is caused by the end of the act. Thus, the object does not give the fundamental moral character to a simple per se action, but rather the end. The object merely introduces a per accidens specification. For example, with regard to a certain trip (let’s say to Vienna), it is accidental to the journey whether it is done by airplane or train. But it is not accidental to the particular trip to Vienna that it be done by airplane.³⁹

Thus, the per se moral acts take their species from what is intended (the end) and not from what is outside of the intended end. The species derived from the object is in this case only an accidental modification to the most formal, defining, and including species that is brought by the end. However, this does not mean that what is praeter intentionem is accidental to the moral species of the action, because the simple intention of the end is distinct from the choice of the means. And it would be morally different if somebody came to Vienna by airplane or carried by four slaves, even if it is accidental to his intention to travel.

Here also comes the question about the role of intention in complex acts. Complex actions are composed of several simple acts, with one further ordered to another, namely the one more desired by the agent. The intention of the more desired act is binding on all of the acts together, but in the moral species of the single acts that the complex act comprises the most decisive would be the intention of each act with its object, per se ordered to its end. Different, then, is the case of several simple acts that happen without any reference to one another:

Thus, it is that many really different things, can be the objects of a single intention, insofar as the reason takes them as one: either because two things concur in the integrity of one whole, as a proper measure of heat and cold conduce to health; or because two things are included in one which may be intended. For instance, the acquiring of wine and clothing is included in wealth, as in something common to both; wherefore nothing hinders the man who intends to acquire wealth, from intending both the others.⁴⁰

In this instance we observe, besides the intentions of each simple act, a chief intention which is the identical and binding component for all of the simple acts coming together. The chief intention includes in a certain manner all of the partial intentions.

In conclusion, regarding the moral species of actions we must avoid any kind of angelism that emphasizes too much the role of intention in human acting,⁴¹ which gives it a different place in human actions than it really occupies.⁴² The substantial aspect of the act, the physical character of what is done, cannot be excluded. Otherwise, in order to change the nature of the object of one and the same act it would be enough just to change our description. St. Thomas teaches that the object, the circumstances, and the end all contribute to the integral nature of any act (to its goodness or badness); and that any defect, even in one of them, is sufficient to render this action evil.⁴³

3 INTRINSICALLY EVIL ACTS AND THE DOUBLE EFFECT PRINCIPLE

To avoid the negative moral absolutes in the question of the intrinsically evil acts, some theologian-casuists suggest applying the double effect doctrine in various complicated situations.⁴⁴ This means that under the four widely-known conditions, i.e.: 1) the act in itself is either morally good or indifferent; 2) its bad effect is not directly intended; 3) the bad effect is not a direct cause of the good one; and 4) the good effect is proportionate to the bad effect;⁴⁵ they legitimize even an intrinsically evil action. This doctrine originated from the explanation of ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 7 regarding the act of private defense.⁴⁶ Aquinas states here:

Nothing hinders one act from having two effects, only one of which is intended, while the other is beside the intention [praeter intentionem]. Now, moral acts take their species according to what is intended, and not according to what is beside the intention, since this is accidental as explained above. Accordingly, the act of self-defense may have two effects, one is the saving of one’s life, the other is the slaying of the aggressor.⁴⁷

The object of justified, lethal, private defense is in itself praeter intentionem in the sense that a homicide is not the end of the action.⁴⁸ The lethal means are chosen only because of their essential proportion to the act of defense and not because the killing would be absolutely or independently sought as the end. The agent would not act this way if he were not under attack. The homicide is either an accidental consequence of the situation where the lethal effect is not anticipated by the agent, or it is chosen (rather than intended) in the most alarming case when it would be materially included in the object that is per se ordered to the end of defense. The most defining and formal species of the act is derived from the end, which is defense; the species derived from the object is (with respect to the species of the whole act) merely an accidental specification (although of course it is not accidental with respect to this concrete act—just as it is accidental to a trip to Vienna as such that it be done by airplane, albeit it is not accidental to the concrete trip to Vienna that someone takes an airplane⁴⁹).

Thus, the per se order is the grounds of our whole analysis. In general, killing an assailant is to be avoided. But under the circumstances where no other means will achieve the end of defense and killing the assailant by its nature tends to stop the assailant’s attack, and because killing is not an evil act secundum se, but evil merely in the absence of the form required (as decided by a legitimate public authority or in case of the just defense)—for all these reasons together killing the assailant is per se ordered to the end of private defense. There is no contradiction in such an act, therefore the action is lawful if the agent “repels force with moderation [and…] does not exceed the limits of a blameless defense.”⁵⁰ The principle of double effect applied here is just a special case of the application of the teleological construction of a human action—the object being ordered towards the end, which constitutes the moral species. Therefore, the double effect principle may be applied only in accordance with this teleological structure to the particular and highly restricted category of acts. And the case of a lethal private defense does not seem to need any application of the doctrine of the double effect at all.⁵¹

To give some other similar but less grievous examples, we may mention a seafaring trader who throws out his goods into the sea to avoid the sinking of his ship during a heavy storm, or the case of amputation of an infected gangrenous limb. These “mixed voluntary” acts contain something normally repugnant to reason which would not be sought as an end in themselves. However, the act is accomplished because of its essential proportion to the end that is in this particular situation reasonable. These acts, and others of their kind, are not and cannot be intrinsically evil, which is the condition sine qua non. One cannot do moral evil that good may follow. In these cases, however, there is only a necessary physical evil (loss of goods and fortune in one case and patient’s limb in another) tolerated here as a means so that a good end (saving the ship and the lives of the sailors, or the patient’s life) may be assured, which is the only agent’s intention in the strict sense.⁵²

A different group of acts are those where the double effect principle plays an essential role in determining the moral character of an act. In particular, we are speaking of cases in which the object is the saving of lives of others by heroically sacrificing one’s own life. Examples of this kind are lying down on a live grenade to save one’s comrades, or the case of the mountaineer, who cuts the rope on which he is hanging in order to save the other climbers on the same rope from falling down as the only remaining snap-hook that holds them is about to dislodge. These actions are merely partial causes of the consequences which are foreseen but unintentional in itself. The agents in these cases are not committing suicide because the moral species of the action derived from its end is to save the lives of others. The actions are just a partial cause of death of their agents since there is another force (the explosion of the grenade, gravitation’s force) acting that is the principal cause of death. But the agents do not intend their death per se which is clear from the fact that if they miraculously survive (by falling onto a tree, or if the grenade does not explode), they will not kill themselves by any other means afterwards.

Are there two contradictory per se orders here? Morally, there is but one order with two effects: one intended as an end (saving lives) to which the object of the act is essentially ordered while the other effect is merely tolerated as it is, not wanted as such. And while the permission of physical harm is materially included in the moral object, the physical harm is not in these cases (unlike in the lethal private defense case) a means: for it is not the mountaineer’s death which lightens the load, or the soldier’s death that causes the protection of the troops—the agent in these cases might have accomplished the end and live (by some fortuitous miracle). The means ordered to the end is making the load on the rope lighter, or shielding others from grenade fragments by absorbing them, and not essentially dying. The agent’s death in these cases is (contrary to the deliberately lethal private defense) not a means, but rather just a foreseen and probable consequence.⁵³

Here, as in the case of private defense and similar acts, the effectuated action cannot be evil in se, which would be the case if the mountaineer cuts off another climber against his will who is hanging below him, or if a soldier were to throw someone else on the live grenade. Why would these be evil in se and not heroical sacrifices as we have called the previous acts? Because these contain a violation of one’s will as an essential part of their moral species that is why they cannot be even good, not to say heroical. The similar is to be declared for the case wherein somebody kills himself for some idealistic purpose, or a suicide bomber kills his enemies. In these cases, the agent chooses his own death, which is materially implied in being part of the mechanism of destruction itself. His death is part of the essential causality wholly intended by him. Maybe he would also rejoice if he miraculously survived. But it does not change a moral species of his act since its object is in itself evil. That is why such an act is suicide properly speaking, and thus malum in se.⁵⁴

Therefore, the most important outcome of this analysis is that the double effect principle is not the solution for the moral performance of any intrinsically evil act as some theologians maintain.⁵⁵ The agent cannot act morally by committing such an action. In difficult situations it is possible to perform the action that would have a bad effect or consequence but only of a physical character. Secondly, we have observed that the double effect principle does not create any special category of cases. Rather even the situations in which we can apply the principle of double effect require the accurate identification of the act’s species, which involves the teleological order of acting: we must discern whether the object of the act is per se ordered to its end. If it is so, the determination of the action’s morality would be derived from the intended end, and the species derived from the object would just be its accidental specification.⁵⁶ For the double effect doctrine is not a completely different schema of interpretation of human action (four conditions of its application need to be viewed from the object-end structure of a human act) but rather the same one schema of consideration developed consistently by St. Thomas and applied to a certain kind of action.⁵⁷

CONCLUSION: INTRINSIC MORALITY OF HUMAN ACTS

The moral quality of an act depends essentially on two components: the object which materially includes the integral nature of the act, and the end of the action which, together with its relation to the object, constitute the formal aspect of the act. On these levels an act may be malum in se:

1) In the strict sense of the word, this is so because its object is defective and cannot be ordered to any due end, no matter what the intention of an agent may be. Thus, the act is intrinsically evil.⁵⁸ This is so in the case of lying, fornication, adultery, or murder. However, the physical object is not the same as the moral object of an act. Sometimes the physical and the moral objects might be of the same matter (for example, the case of lying). But in most of the cases they are different (or at least distinguishable).⁵⁹ In the act of killing somebody this constitutes particularly the physical object of the act. However, the moral object that includes the relation to the act’s end—and therefore the physical act of killing—is morally different in the case of murder, the death penalty, or self-defense. Only in the first case (murder) is the action intrinsically evil.

2) In an action it suffices that the desired end is bad in its nature, so that the whole act must be considered as such according to the principle “bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu.”⁶⁰ The deficiency is essential here. In addition, there is the fundamental relation of an act to reason,⁶¹ which means the ordering of the act that makes it desirable to the agent in terms of what gives suitable means in order to achieve the end sought.⁶² In some actions, however, there is a fundamental disorder between their object and their end because the object is not ordered to the desired end. Thus, this error is the cause of the evil inherent in these actions. This is principally found in the case of complex actions—such as playing the piano, which does not have of itself the capacity to transfer anybody from Paris to Vienna. The agent needs to employ the appropriate means (i.e., to buy a ticket and get to the airport to take a plane). Another example is stealing in order to give alms. The good end of the action cannot make the object of stealing good.⁶³

If the act is not good in itself it does not matter what the circumstances, further intentions, the personality, or the previous history of the agent may be. In both kinds of intrinsically evil acts the act is generically incompatible with the normative finality of a good life. However, one form of evil (namely physical one) may become an occasion of a greater good in another realm. For example, somebody who suffers terribly on a hospital bed (an objective evil) can experience a relational good when gathering his family members around him. He can also obtain a spiritual good while growing in his relationship with God. His disease remains the objective evil but becomes an opportunity for a good that might not exist otherwise. And so, from the philosophical (as well as the theological) point of view, good will always be stronger than evil.

JUDr. Ing. Peter Samuel Lovás, OP., STL.

Palacký University Olomouc

Sts. Cyril and Methodius Faculty of Theology

Department of Systematic Theology

Univerzitní 22

779 00 Olomouc, Czechia

Published in ACTA facultatis theologicae Universitatis Comenianae Bratislaviensis 19, no. 1 (2022): 39–56.

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