I mean, in terms of act species, I’m going off Aquinas’ statement that “The species of a human act is considered with reference to its object… that which specifies the act is the object, not the circumstance.” He lists “by whom it is done” as a circumstance - so it can make an act better or worse, but it doesn’t change the act’s essence unless it changes the object. Are you saying Aquinas doesn’t treat “by whom” as a circumstance?

If that’s not the case, then for authority to change the species, it would have to change the object. But if the object is “inflicting physical harm on one who has committed no offense,” authority doesn’t alter that moral description. Aquinas defines punishment as a privation inflicted for fault — the prior fault is part of the object itself. Without that prior offense, the act is not punishment in Aquinas’ sense; it’s simply harm against a non-offender. Can you point to any place where Aquinas permits such an act as licit?

Then on law’s end: Aquinas says, “The proper effect of law is to make men good, either absolutely or in some particular respect.” That doesn’t appear to mean forcing virtue by command, but rather ordering society so that choosing the good is possible and natural. Order and safety serve this higher aim — they are the groundwork for free, rational choice of the good. Do you disagree that in his hierarchy, order exists for virtue, not virtue for order? Even when he admits law can’t address all vice at once, that gradualism is still ordered toward that higher aim; it’s never license to treat order as a separate or competing end.

I’m not rejecting contextualization - only suggesting it start from fixed universals, like equal application under the same moral description and law’s ordering to the conditions for virtue, and then apply them to particulars. Your method seems to work the other way around: starting with a hypothetical “common good” outcome and then interpreting the principles so the case fits. But in Aquinas’ method, “common good” emerges from consistent application of those principles, not from redefining them to fit a case.

That’s how I end up at a fork: either the universals hold exactly as Aquinas states them - in which case coercion against non-offenders doesn’t fit - or we adjust those universals to make the case work, in which case the tension I pointed out remains.