¹ Servais Pinckaers OP, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble OP (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 400. Pinckaers goes on to say, ‘In the physical or animal world, nature, whatever its variations, determines the movements it produces in their entirety. Spiritual nature, on the other hand, is such that the inclinations proceeding from it, far from opposing its freedom by setting limits on it, cause and increase its freedom as a source, providing it with principles of truth and goodness…. [W]e are free not in spite of our natural inclinations but because of them’ (401–2).

² In Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), John Finnis offers a helpful account (and defense) of the Church’s changes. For approaches to these issues from the perspective of revisionist Catholic ethics, see John T. Noonan, Jr., A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); and Richard M. Gula, S.S., What Are They Saying about Moral Norms? (New York: Paulist, 1982).

³ For Karl Rahner SJ’s view that ‘human nature’ is ever-changing (ultimately because, for Rahner, ‘human nature’ means simply the expression of ever-evolving human spirit), see for instance his 1970 essay ‘Basic Observations on the Subject of Changeable and Unchangeable Factors in the Church,’ in his Theological Investigations, vol. 14: Ecclesiology, Questions in the Church, the Church in the World, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1976), 15; and see also Rahner, The Shape of the Church to Come, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Seabury, 1974). For positivist perspectives that deny the existence of human nature, see Owen Anderson, in The Natural Moral Law: The Good After Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 39.

⁴ For further discussion of this and other matters, see my Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

⁵ On this point, see Jean-Rémi Lanavère, ‘Pour quelles raisons la loi naturelle est-elle naturelle? La naturalité de la loi naturelle chez Thomas d’Aquin’, Revue Thomiste 122 (2022): 71–88; F. Russell Hittinger, ‘Yves R. Simon on Natural Law and Practical Reason’, in Hittinger, On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law, ed. Scott J. Roniger (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2024), 201–24. Lanavère directs attention to Summa theologiae I-II, q. 10, a. 1, where Aquinas explains that a thing ‘is said to be natural to a thing which befits it in respect of its substance…. Wherefore, taking nature in this sense, it is necessary that the principle of whatever belongs to a thing, be a natural principle’ (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province; Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981). As Lanavère comments, ‘The difference between acting per naturam and acting per rationem et voluntatem… is surmounted in the case of humans, who act, as regards the principles of their action, per naturem, and, as regards the realization of these actions, per rationem et voluntatem’ (‘Pour quelles raisons la loi naturelle est-elle naturelle?,’ 77).

⁶ Anderson, The Natural Moral Law, 31.

⁷ See the discussion of these verses in Mark Giszczak, Wisdom of Solomon (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), 89–90. See also John 1 and further passages in the Wisdom literature, including Proverbs 8 and Sirach 24. For commentary, see Ben Witherington, III, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994); Witherington, John’s Wisdom: A Commentary on the Fourth Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1995); and Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom and Creation: The Theology of Wisdom Literature (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994).

⁸ See Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004); J. Scott Turner, The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jacob Berkowitz, The Stardust Revolution: The New Story of Our Origin in the Stars (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012); and Peter Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Tyson and Goldsmith remark with awe, ‘Like the microscopic strands of DNA that predetermine the identity of a macroscopic species and the unique properties of its members, the modern look and feel of the cosmos was writ in the fabric of its earliest moments and carried relentlessly through time and space’ (Origins, 143).

⁹ Wojciech Golubiewski, Aquinas on Imitation of Nature: Source of Principles of Moral Action (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2022), 120.

¹⁰ I-II, q. 91, a. 1.

¹¹ See Jean-Pierre Torrell OP, ‘Dieu conduit toutes choses vers leur fin: Providence et gouvernement divin chez Thomas d’Aquin’, in Ende und Vollendung. Eschatologische Perspektiven im Mittelalter, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Martin Pickavé (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), 561–94.

¹² I-II, q. 91, a. 2.

¹³ I-II, q. 91, a. 2, ad 3.

¹⁴ For further discussion, see Joseph Collins OP, ‘God’s Eternal Law’, The Thomist 23 (1960): 497–532.

¹⁵ I-II, q. 93, a. 1. On the divine ideas more broadly, see Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008); and the first chapter of my Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017).

¹⁶ I-II, q. 93, a. 1 and ad 1. For elaboration of this point, see Stephen L. Brock, ‘The Primacy of the Common Good and the Foundations of Natural Law in St. Thomas’, in Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, ed. Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 234–55.

¹⁷ I-II, q. 91, a. 2.

¹⁸ Golubiewski, Aquinas on Imitation of Nature, 145. With respect to this comparison between human natural inclinations and the inclinations of non-rational things, see also Stephen L. Brock, Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 29–42. See also Lanavère, ‘Pour quelles raisons la loi naturelle est-elle naturelle?’, 79, on the lex indita.

¹⁹ I-II, q. 92, a. 1. In The Perfection of Desire: Habit, Reason, and Virtue in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2018), Jean Porter defines virtue as follows: ‘According to Aquinas, a virtue is simply a good habit of a specific faculty, good in the unrestricted sense of being desirable or praiseworthy without qualification (I-II 55.4). As such, it is a perfection, in the sense of being a full and appropriate development of a human faculty. Like all habits, the virtues are defined by the kinds of actions that they characteristically produce, which Aquinas identifies as the object of the virtue (I-II 54.2, 60.1; cf. II-II 23.4). Thus, for example, the object of acquired temperance is consumption in accordance with the needs of the body’ (47–48; cf. 63). If human nature had no law (no wise ordering to the human good), it could have no virtuous embodiment of that wise ordering either. See also Daniel J. Daly, ‘From Nature to Second Nature: The Relationship of the Natural Law and the Acquired Virtues in the Summa Theologiae,’ Angelicum 88 (2011): 693–715; Dominic Farrell LC, The Ends of the Moral Virtues and the First Principles of Practical Reason in Thomas Aquinas (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 2012); Russell Hittinger, ‘After MacIntyre: Natural Law Theory, Virtue Ethics, and Eudaimonia’, International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989): 449–61; and Angela M. McKay, ‘Synderesis, Law, and Virtue’, in The Normativity of the Natural: Human Goods, Human Virtues, and Human Flourishing, ed. Mark J. Cherry (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 33–44.

²⁰ I-II, q. 93, a. 1, ad 2. For discussion, see Gilles Emery OP, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

²¹ I, q. 34, a. 3.

²² I, q. 103, a. 4. For further discussion of the divine government, see François Daguet, Théologie du dessein divin chez Thomas d’Aquin. Finis omnium Ecclesia (Paris: Vrin, 2003).

²³ I, q. 103, a. 4.

²⁴ I, q. 103, a. 4.

²⁵ I, q. 103, a. 6.

²⁶ I, q. 103, a. 7.

²⁷ I, q. 91, a. 3.

²⁸ I, q. 91, a. 3. For Aquinas’s hylomorphic account of human nature, see Jason T. Eberl, The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). See also the intriguing studies by James Dominic Rooney OP, Material Objects in Confucian and Aristotelian Metaphysics: The Inevitability of Hylomorphism (London: Bloomsbury, 2022); and Sebastian Morello, The World Is God’s Icon: Creator and Creation in the Platonic Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2020).

²⁹ On God and natural law, see Lawrence Dewan OP, ‘St. Thomas, Natural Law, and Universal Ethics’, Nova et Vetera 9 (2011): 737–62, especially 742–55. See also International Theological Commission, ‘In Search of a Universal Ethic’, §§62–63; Fulvio Di Blasi, God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002). At the same time, as James Jacobs avers, for Aquinas ‘[r]ecognition of God as the creator of the world, providentially governing it, and making redemption of human beings possible is not a condition for the grasp of natural law’ – though I think it makes affirming the existence of natural law and living out its precepts much easier. See Jacobs, ‘Natural Law in Medieval Jewish Philosophy’, in Traditions of Natural Law in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Dominic Farrell, L.C. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023), 25–48, at 45.

³⁰ Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 403. See also Edward Feser, ‘Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good’, in his Neo-Scholastic Essays (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 297–320; as well as his ‘Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide’, Philosophia Christi 12 (2010): 142–59. Drawing upon Aquinas and Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), Feser argues, ‘What is true of animals in general is true of human beings. Like non-rational animals, we have various ends to which we are directed by nature, and these determine what is good for us’ (‘Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good,’ 301). In this vein, see also Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999).

³¹ See Brock, ‘Natural Law, the Understanding of Principles, and the Universal Good’, 687–89.

³² See Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 408–12; and see Porter, The Perfection of Desire, 85–86: ‘The good to which Aquinas refers should not be understood in a purely formal way, as if men and women were naturally oriented towards goodness as an abstract category, or some kind of Good in General. Rather, men and women necessarily desire and seek the distinctively human good, that is to say, perfection [i.e., happiness] in accordance with the formal principles of human existence (I-II 1.7). What is more, they do so in a characteristically human way, through rational reflection, deliberation, and choice’.

³³ Feser, ‘Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good’, 301. Feser adds that ‘human beings, like everything else, have various ends the realization of which is good for them and the frustrating of which is bad, as a matter of objective fact. A rational intellect apprised of the facts will therefore perceive that it is good to realize these ends and bad to frustrate them. It follows, then, that a rational person will pursue the realization of these ends and avoid their frustration. In short, practical reason is directed by nature toward the pursuit of what the intellect perceives to be good; what is in fact good is the realization or fulfillment of the various potentials and ends inherent in human nature; and thus a correctly informed and rational person will perceive this and, accordingly, direct his actions towards the realization or fulfillment of those potentials and ends. In this sense, good action is just that which is “in accord with reason”’ (‘Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good’, 314).

³⁴ Brock, ‘Natural Law, the Understanding of Principles, and the Universal Good’, 693, 703.

³⁵ See Stephen L. Brock, The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Natural Law (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), 158–59.

³⁶ I, q. 103, a. 8, ad 1. Porter remarks that for Aquinas, ‘the will is always free to turn towards incomplete or vicious forms of life, because even these represent limited kinds of perfection, ways of developing and expressing one’s human capacities (I-II 78.1, II-II 25.7)’ (The Perfection of Desire, 136). However, vice frustrates the ends that are perfective of human nature and thereby stunts the vicious person. An inclination toward vice is not a natural inclination in Aquinas’s sense.

³⁷ Brock, The Light That Binds, 224.

³⁸ Porter discusses this in the context of synderesis (although she does not mention law): ‘Prudence is a habit of the practical intellect, which informs it in such a way as to facilitate sound, effective reasoning with respect to moral matters (II-II 47.2). The intellect informed by prudence takes its starting points from the first principles of practical reason, which are present to the intellect through the habitual knowledge of the first principles identified by the traditional term, synderesis (II-II 47.6 ad 3; cf. I 79.12). However, this in itself would not serve to distinguish prudence from any other kind of practical disposition, since all practical reasoning necessarily starts from the first principle of practical reasoning. In order to capture what is distinctive about prudence as a virtuous disposition, we need to add that it takes its starting points as these are specified through the formal ideals of the mean of the particular virtues, which set the ends towards which prudence is directed (II-II 47.6; cf. I-II 65.1)’ (The Perfection of Desire, 79).

³⁹ See Brock, The Light That Binds, 126.

⁴⁰ See also Steven A. Long, The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2006), 7: ‘Prior to any practical agency of the human subject, one must know the end which one then ensuingly comes to desire’. Long puts these words in italics. As Pinckaers says, ‘The good of a being lies in the perfection proper to its nature. Human good will be a good conformed to the human intellect, as grasped by our distinctive faculty’ (Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 418).

⁴¹ Brock, The Light That Binds, 128; see also Brock, ‘Natural Inclination and the Intelligibility of the Good in Thomistic Natural Law’, Vera Lex 6 (2005): 57–78. Pinckaers adopts a somewhat different position, suggesting that the natural inclination to self-preservation, for example, ‘first appears’ in us on ‘the physical plane’ and then is taken up by us on ‘the spiritual level’ (The Sources of Christian Ethics, 424). At the same time, Pinckaers emphasizes that the biological, animal, and rational natural inclinations in us ‘are joined together in a natural unity comparable to the unity of the members of the body…. The rational part encompasses the biological and psychical parts, giving them a new dimension and capacities’ (422). With respect to the natural inclination to self-preservation, Pinckaers holds that it is rationally the source of our care for the lives of others, and therefore it ‘is a certain participation in the love with which God loves himself in his own essence and in his works, causing him to will the conservation and perfection of all beings, loved by him’ (426). See also Steven Jensen’s argument in Knowing the Natural Law: From Precepts and Inclinations to Deriving Oughts (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015) that the will is the whole person’s inclination toward the whole good of the person. It follows that the non-rational natural inclinations toward procreation or self-preservation do not stand on their own, morally speaking. By contrast to Brock, Jensen holds that the will takes up non-rational natural inclinations as part of the good of the whole person. Jenson notes that his view does not entail that the will and (for example) the procreative inclination are in a call-and-response relationship, as though the good of the procreative inclination were independent. Jensen explains that the movement toward the human good is the movement of the whole person.

⁴² Brock, ‘Natural Law, the Understanding of Principles, and Universal Good’, 679; cf. 683–84.

⁴³ Brock, The Light That Binds, 128. It is also the case, as Steven Long says (and as Brock likewise maintains), that ‘the teleological order is made effective… through the development of virtuous dispositions both moral and intellectual’ (Long, The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act, 88).

⁴⁴ II-II, q. 122, a. 1, obj. 1.

⁴⁵ Lawrence Dewan OP, ‘Jean Porter on Natural Law: Thomistic Notes’, The Thomist 66 (2002): 275–309, at 279.

⁴⁶ For discussion, see Porter, The Perfection of Desire, 107–10. She notes that for Albert the Great, ‘the basic moral precepts of the Decalogue are in some way self-evident’ (107). Porter argues that for Aquinas, ‘The intellect spontaneously grasps the first principle of practical reason as applied to relations to others, and then on that basis it derives the precepts of the Decalogue (I-II 100.3,5)’ (109).

⁴⁷ I-II, q. 100, a. 3.

⁴⁸ For further discussion, see Randall L. Smith, ‘What the Old Law reveals about the Natural Law According to Thomas Aquinas’, The Thomist 75 (2011): 95–139.

⁴⁹ I-II, q. 100, a. 1.

⁵⁰ For discussion of Jesus’ inclusion of the natural law in his promulgation of the New Law, see Scott J. Roniger, ‘Self-Knowledge, Friendship, and the Promulgation of the Natural Law’, Nova et Vetera 21 (2023): 287–334, at 332.

⁵¹ For the connection here with natural law, see Josef Fuchs SJ, Natural Law: A Theological Investigation, trans. Helmut Reckter SJ and John A. Dowling (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 33–37.

⁵² For further discussion of Romans 2 (including in the exegesis of the Church Fathers, as well as in the work of some contemporary scholars who deny it has natural law in view), see my ‘Christians and Natural Law’, in Anver Emon, Matthew Levering, and David Novak, Natural Law: A Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Trialogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 66–110. See also C. John Collins, ‘Echoes of Aristotle in Romans 2:14–15: Or, Maybe Abimelech Was Not So Bad After All’, Journal of Markets and Morality 13 (2010): 123–73.

⁵³ See my ‘Knowing What Is “Natural”: Thomas Aquinas and Luke Timothy Johnson on Romans 1-2’, Logos 12 (2009): 117–42. On biblical and theological grounds, I address contemporary Catholic theologians who are calling for the sacrament of marriage to include same-sex couples in my Engaging the Doctrine of the Sacraments (Elk Grove Village, IL: Word on Fire Academic, forthcoming); see, for the view that I oppose, Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler, Pope Francis, Marriage, and Same-Sex Civil Unions (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2024); and Bridget Burke Ravizza, The Sacrament of Same-Sex Marriage: An Inclusive Vision for the Catholic Church (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2024). For Aquinas on homosexual acts and on marriage, see my chapter on chastity in Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) and chapter 4 of my The Indissolubility of Marriage: Amoris Laetitia in Context (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2019).

⁵⁴ For further discussion, see Fuchs, Natural Law, 14–32.

⁵⁵ I-II, q. 94, a. 6.

⁵⁶ For an example of Catholic theology in support of abortion in a wide array of circumstances, see Emily Reimer-Barry’s Reproductive Justice and the Catholic Church: Advancing Pragmatic Solidarity with Pregnant Women (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2024). Reimer-Barry’s book receives back-cover praise from leading Catholic moral theologians such as Lisa Sowle Cahill, Cristina L. H. Traina, Hille Haker, and Todd Salzman. Reimer-Barry rejects ‘an abortion discourse rooted in moral absolutism’ and advocates for redescribing abortion not as killing as innocent human being but as ‘withdrawal of life support, return of potential life to God, tragic dilemma, and premoral disvalue’ (218). She argues that attention should focus on changing the ‘structural injustices’ that lead women to choose abortion (219), although the issue of sex outside the context of marriage – certainly a central root cause of abortion – does not receive serious attention in her book. She focuses instead on laudable things that, by and large, cannot easily be guaranteed: ‘good jobs and fair wages’ with good benefits and flexible hours; ‘safe housing and equal opportunities for home ownership’; ‘affordable nutrition’; ‘affordable and accessible health care’; ‘affordable childcare’; ‘just adoption and foster care programs’; ‘quality public education’; ‘increased supports for raising children with special needs’; ‘freedom from sexual and relationship violence’ (144). For marriage as an important part of Catholic Social Teaching (and social justice), see the final chapter of my Engaging the Doctrine of Marriage: Human Marriage as the Image and Sacrament of the Marriage of God and Creation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2020).

⁵⁷ I-II, q. 94, a. 4. For discussion, see Kevin L. Flannery SJ, ‘Determinacy in Natural Law’, Nova et Vetera 9 (2011): 763–73, arguing that Aquinas does not mean that the application of the primary precepts of natural law is ‘indeterminate’ in matters of detail. This is a crucial point, since many moral theologians today, including Porter and Traina, suggest that prudential complexity, in light of changing cultural norms and the diverse and contingent circumstances of life, swamps absolute moral norms or at least requires them to be derived consensually and provisionally (and therefore not as absolutes). See Jean Porter, ‘Does the Natural Law Provide a Universally Valid Morality?’ in Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and His Critics, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 53–95, at 58, 72, 86; Porter, Nature as Reason, 335–39; Cristina L. H. Traina, Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of Anathemas (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999). See also Cynthia S. W. Crysdale, ‘Revisioning Natural Law: From the Classicist Paradigm to Emergent Probability’, Theological Studies 56 (1995): 464–84.

⁵⁸ Brock, The Light That Binds, 223–24. Regarding the identity of ‘the wise’, see two essays by Lawrence J. Welch: ‘Christ, the Moral Law, and the Teaching Authority of the Magisterium’ and ‘Revelation, Natural Law, and Homosexual Unions’, in Welch, The Presence of Christ in the Church: Explorations in Theology (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2012), 47–61 and 209–37. For an attempt to inscribe homosexual unions with ‘natural law’ on the grounds that they contribute to human flourishing and pertain to human nature, see Stephen J. Pope, ‘Scientific and Natural Law Analyses of Homosexuality’, Journal of Religious Ethics 29 (2001): 89–126, which suggests that new insights from ‘molecular biology, behavior genetics, neuroanatomy, and psychopharmacology’, as well as experiential data from the proliferation of recognized same-sex unions, have changed our understanding of what is natural to human beings (89–90; cf. 101 for Pope’s awareness that for Aquinas, ‘what nature “teaches” is to be determined teleologically, and teleological processes do not function uniformly … but only “for the most part”’). Welch’s ‘Revelation, Natural Law, and Homosexual Unions’ responds to Pope’s essay. See also Jean Porter, Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 286–87, where she defends legalizing same-sex marriage and some forms of plural marriage; and Porter, ‘The Natural Law and Innovative Forms of Marriage: A Reconsideration’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 30 (2010): 79–97.

⁵⁹ Brock, The Light That Binds, 234. Regarding Brock’s book, I am drawing some material from my ‘Natural Law in Bénézet Bujo, Paulinus Odozor, and Stephen L. Brock’, in Continuing the Quest for a Morality Truly Christian, Truly African: The Achievement of Paulinus Odozor, C.S.Sp., ed. Maurice Agbaw-Ebai and Matthew Levering (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, forthcoming).

⁶⁰ Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 420. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Intractable Moral Disagreements’, in Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law, 1–52, at 23, where MacIntyre argues for absolute moral norms as ‘a precondition for shared rational enquiry’. As Jean Porter comments, ‘Aquinas unequivocally rules out some courses of actions that might conceivably be justified by a criterion of balancing and weighing harms; for example, he insists that killing the innocent can never be morally justified, even for the sake of the common good (II-II 64.6)’ (Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005], 274).

⁶¹ Finnis, Moral Absolutes, 11. Finnis adds, ‘There is never a case in which to adhere to a true specific moral absolute is thereby to “honor rules above values.” Rather, in adhering to the moral truth articulated by the “rule,” one honors the value, the person whose good in some fundamental respect one would be choosing to destroy, damage, or impede, by the act which the norm specifies as always to be excluded’ (11).

⁶² See François Daguet OP, ‘La nature politique chez saint Thomas d’Aquin’, Revue Thomiste 122 (2022): 211–29.

⁶³ For discussion of this psalm, see also Haines and Fulford, Natural Law, 61–64.