IV. Destruction is an act proper to a master alone. Man cannot be master of his own life; he can have dominion of things that are outside himself, distinguishable from himself, but not of the very existence of himself, which is not really distinguishable from himself. The definition of dominion supposes relation. The offices of master, father, magistrate, are relative conditions which suppose superiority over another person, not over oneself. Even God is not a superior over himself, although he has all perfection. For this reason a man cannot sell himself; he can sell only his labor.
God, who should have absolute dominion over all creatures, and who has, wills to confine these creatures to certain lines of action in keeping with the creature's nature. This is the law underlying even the moral law when it touches humanity; it is the eternal law coeternal with God's decree of creation, but not necessary as God is. When this law exists in the mind of God it is the eternal law; when it exists in the minds of creatures it is the natural law, governing the free acts of intellectual creatures. When the natural law becomes a motive to the human will, obliging but not forcing it, a law through knowledge within the consciousness of a man regulating his behavior, it is called the law of conscience.
Conscience is an act, a practical judgment on one's own action in some particular case. It testifies, accuses, excuses, restrains, urges. It is a rational faculty, not an emotional, sentimental power. Emotion blinds its judgments. Yet mere emotion, and that foolish deordination of emotion called sentimentality, are promptings which the ignorant mistake for conscience and obey. Conscience is the enlightened eye of the heart, not the vagary of any appetite that blunders into action. It must be educated; left to itself, it is guilty of all the perversions of the streets.
The natural law is immutable, not subject to recall by every rascal under the goad of the flesh. In morality what was, is; what was once right because reasonable, always will be right and reasonable. Since opposition to the natural law as applied to man is repugnant to human nature, no power can make opposition to that law licit. For the same reason this law is not subject to evolution. Truth in morality is eternal. What is ugly now was ugly a millennium ago; what was immoral yesterday was immoral in the sixth century. If our ancestors thought permissible what we know to be illicit, our ancestors were ignorant; the fact has not changed. It was as immoral to steal, lie, or murder in the day of Abraham as it is to-day.
The ultimate tendency of man is toward happiness, and, of course, happiness, or any other perfection, is impossible without existence; hence the instinctive recoil from the destruction of our life, which is the requisite condition for happiness. Even those that abnormally destroy their own life do so with horror for the destruction itself, and act thus unreasonably to escape evil, not to escape life; or they seek what they think will be a better life. We can do no other injury to a man so great as the depriving him of his life, for that deprivation destroys every right and possession he has. He can recover from all other evil, or hold his soul above every other evil, but death is the absolute conqueror. No matter how debased or how diseased a man's body may be, no one may dissociate that body from its soul, except in defence of individual or social life under peculiarly abnormal conditions; but even such defence is permissible only while the defender respects other human life and the social life, while he is innocent, has done no harm to society commensurate with the loss of his own life.
"The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."
Existence, no matter how sordid, is immeasurably better than non-existence, for non-existence is nothing; and when we consider eternal life after separation from the body, even as a probability, that raises existence to infinite possibilities above the void of non-existence. A human life, even in an Australian Bushman, in a tuberculous pauper, in the vilest criminal, is in itself so stupendously noble a thing that the whole universe exists for its upholding toward betterment. The raising of human life toward a higher condition has been the sole tendency of all the magnificent charity, sacrifice, patriotism, and heroism the best men and women of the world since time began have striven in. The necessary first cause itself is life, and life is by far the most sacred thing possible for the first cause to effect. Eternal life is the greatest reward of the just.
It is not permissible under any possible circumstance directly to kill an innocent human being. By killing directly is meant either (1) as an end desirable in itself, as when a man is killed for revenge; or (2) as a means to an end. By an innocent human being is meant a person who has not by any voluntary act of his own done harm commensurate with the loss of his own life.
To kill a human being is to destroy human nature, by separating the vital principle from the body; to destroy anything is to subordinate and sacrifice that thing absolutely to the purposes of the slayer; but (1) no one has a right so to subordinate another human being, because man and his life are solely under the dominion of God. If a man may not kill himself, as we proved above, because he is not master of his own life, he surely may not kill another to whom he is no more closely related as master than he is to himself. (2) No man has a right to subordinate another human being as is done in slaying him, because this other human being is a person, an intelligent nature, and consequently free, independent, referring its operations solely to itself as to their centre. This very freedom differentiates man from brutes and inanimate things. These are not independent; they are rightly possessed by man; but man may be possessed by no one except God. Even extrinsic human slavery is abhorrent to us as a corollary of the intrinsic freedom of man, which is absolute. This intrinsic freedom is such that we may not under any circumstances lawfully resign it to another's possession. This is one of the chief moral objections to oath-bound secret societies which exact blind obedience. All morality depends on that freedom, all peace in life, all civilization, and society itself.
The end of our struggles, toil, fortitude, temperance, thrift, is freedom,—freedom to do and to hold, freedom from the thraldom of vice and barbarity. The rational endeavor of every civilized nation is that it be free; and this means solely that every citizen thereof, from the highest to the lowest, is made secure in his rights as a human being. It intends that justice should prevail. Nearly all the unhappiness, crime, moral misery, and much of the physical misery in the world are due to a disregard for liberty, for the safeguarding of men in their inalienable rights. Give every man his bare rights as a man and all troubles of capital and labor, all race problems would cease, the prisons would be empty, war would be unknown. Our struggle toward justice, toward the protection of the rights of man, toward liberty, must go on, or anarchy and social destruction will ensue. Now, as there is nothing greater and nobler than liberty, the freedom of the sons of God to do what they have a right to do, and as every human being has a right to that liberty, so there is nothing baser than its contrary, the destruction of that liberty; and no destruction is so final as that of killing the man, no usurpation so abhorrent to human nature and all liberty. Abhorrence for such a destruction is the primal instinct of all human beings; even the irrational reflexes of our bodies react quickest in protecting us from that destruction.
Justice and order must prevail; that is a fundamental natural law to which all other laws are subordinate. Justice, moreover, is a moral equation, and whenever one right transcends another it must be superior to the right it holds in abeyance. The right an innocent human being has to his life, however, is so great that no other human right can be superior to it while he remains innocent. Subversion of this right by creatures is intrinsically evil, as blasphemy and perjury are evil, although not in exactly the same degree.
There are occasions upon which it is permissible to kill, indirectly, innocent persons. An effect is brought about indirectly when it is neither intended as an end for its own sake, nor chosen as means toward an end, but is attached as a circumstance to the end or the means. Means help to an end, circumstances often do not, although they may affect the morality of an act.
Suppose two swimmers, Peter and Paul, are trying to save Thomas, who dies in the water; as he dies Thomas grips Peter and Paul