ABSTRACT
Aquinas argues that public authority alone may intentionally kill the guilty but never the innocent. Departing radically from this Thomistic principle, defenses of abortion and euthanasia request that public authority permit individuals to kill innocents on private authority. Indeed, when these defenses claim that abortion and euthanasia are “rights” they make no request of public authority at all but assert a right to kill on private authority alongside the public authority to kill.1 Though this chapter discusses (and wonders at) Catholic pressures on Thomas’ second article, it comes as no surprise that liberalism wants to see the dismantling of the privilege of public authority. The heart of liberal theory is the dissolution of the hierarchical relationship between ruler and ruled. Modern liberalism aims to make each individual simultaneously ruler and ruled.2 What more profound way to do this is there than to grant individuals the private authority of intentional killing and thereby make them equal, or even superior, to the state? Russell Hittinger’s response to liberalism is that political order cannot endure when authority to kill passes from public to private.3 Is this convincing? From abortion to dehydration of very sick patients, homicide permitted on private authority is common throughout the Western world and yet political order remains.
