- Is goodness and malice first in the act of the will, or in the external action?
- Does the whole goodness or malice of the external action depend on the goodness of the will?
- Are the goodness and malice of the interior act the same as those of the external action?
- Does the external action add any goodness or malice to that of the interior act?
- Do the consequences of an external action increase its goodness or malice?
- Can one and the same external action be both good and evil?
"It is because the contemporary alternatives seem so one-sided and are not more evidently solutions to the problems which Thomas faced, and partly solved, that we return to him and to the tradition of theology and philosophy in which his Summa Theologiae appears: theology as the science of the first principle and this as the total knowledge of reality in its unity." -- Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself (Oxford University Press, 1987), p.159.