A Theodicy of Hell--Ch. 3 (I-II)

This is part of a series on the book A Theodicy of Hell by Charles Seymour. For the index page, go here.

Seymour covers "The Argument from Justice" in this chapter. The argument is as follows. Humans over their lifetime only commit a finite amount of wrongdoing. Hence, they are only deserving of a finite amount of punishment. An infinite amount of punishment would be wrong for only a finite amount of finitely wrong acts. Hence, an eternal view of hell is unjust.

Section II covers preliminary responses from Augustine and Aquinas.

Augustine (p. 38)

Augustine makes two main points:

1. The length of the punishment is not always equal to how long the wrong act took to commit. For example, a crime that only took a moment may take years of jail time to pay back the debt to society.
2. The government has the right to punish people in a 'permanent' fashion (through death or life imprisonment). Since these are justifiable, then God punishing sinners in a 'permanent' fashion could also be justifiable.

Augustine's first argument misses the point. The original argument from justice is not commenting on how long it takes to commit the act but the severity of it (that it is only finitely wrong). This argument also fails to prove eternal punishment is justifiable. While he proved that a crime that only takes a moment to commit can be paid back with years of punishment, he has not proven that therefore an infinite amount of punishment is justified. Hence, the argument from justice is unaffected.

His second point is more effective but still falls short. While we can sometimes punish people in a permanent fashion, these punishments are not truly eternal. Life imprisonment may last a long time but will eventually come to an end. It is still doubtful whether eternal punishment is just assuming Augustine's second argument.

Aquinas (p. 40)

Aquinas responds to criticisms of Augustine's second argument as follows. He argues the finite length of punishments like life imprisonment are only accidentally finite. If humans lived forever, then life imprisonment could go on forever and that would still be a just punishment. 

However, the assumption that an eternal punishment can be justified is exactly what is under dispute. Aquinas needs to provide an argument why this is so.

The Infinite Intention of Sin (p. 41)

Aquinas also argues that the fact that a sinner only sins a finite amount is due to his mortality. Given the opportunity, the sinner would sin forever.

However, Seymour notes that not all unrepentant sinners have the intention of sinning forever. For whatever reason, they may not be thinking about the future at all. Even granting that those that intend to sin forever deserve eternal punishment, this is only a subset of unrepentant sinners. The rest of the sinners would not deserve eternal hell.

Even for those who intend on sinning forever, it still does not imply that we should punish people eternally for this intent. Suppose someone wants to rob a bank and steal $100K but only gets away with $10K since he hears the cops are coming and cuts it short. Should he be punished for the $10K, $100K, or as if some intermediate amount was stolen?

It is also the case that some sinners may also intend to perform other good acts as long as they live. A thief may also intend on giving a portion of his money to the poor or feeding those in need. However, this would imply that a person who has both good and bad qualities would be entitled to an eternity of reward and punishment. Maybe the person would deserve a state that is neither great nor terrible? Maybe they deserve some reward and some punishment back to back for eternity? This is clearly difficult to square so the principle should be rejected.

This argument only works if there is a sinner who intends to sin constantly for eternity and not perform any commendable actions for eternity. Since this only justifies hell for an extremely unusual set of people, this does not justify an eternity of suffering for those who fail to repent.

 Symmetry Between Heaven and Hell

I covered this argument in this post. To restate the argument, Aquinas tries to use the argument from justice to show that it works against heaven as well. Aquinas argues that it is 'unfair' to send those who repent to heaven since they have only done a finite amount of good acts in their life. At most, they only deserve a finite amount of reward, not an infinite amount. However, it is fair to reward some with eternal heaven. As a result, the argument from justice fails.

This argument is easy enough to refute. One can agree that heaven is not owed to the good people but that doesn't make it unjust. If I find $20 on the ground and give it back to its owner, there wouldn't be anything unjust about the person giving me $40 to thank me for returning it. However, when one commits a wrong act, then any more punishment than what is necessary is unjust. There is a necessary disanalogy between rewarding people for good actions and punishing them for bad actions.

Conclusion

So far, I generally agree with Seymour's defense of the 'argument from justice.' The arguments so far do not justify an eternal hell. See my upcoming post to see how the book continues to defend the argument from justice against an eternal hell.

A Theodicy of Hell

Hi,

It's been a long hiatus. I spent several years reading very little philosophy. I've been reading some books lately and wanted to get back into this.

I recently read Four Views on Hell and was a great dialogue between four talented authors. It represented the Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) view, annihilationist view, universalist view, and a view that included purgatory. All of the essays helped me to better understand their positions and appreciate them more.

In reading this book, I remembered a very good and thorough book on the topic that I read several years ago A Theodicy of Hell. (Don't ask me why the book is so expensive! I got it on sale for $22 in 2008)

Charles Seymour covers every major argument against the existence of hell. His goal is to provide a 'theodicy' of hell. In other words, a plausible explanation for why some may end up in hell for eternity.

In the introduction (p.12), he has main assumptions that he assumes throughout the book. They are libertarian free will and God having 'middle knowledge' of future actions of humans. I personally do not believe in either of these positions but for this series, I don't plan on questioning them too much since they can be pretty common views among Christians.

He defends what he calls the 'freedom view' of hell. Basically, those that go to hell end up there due to unrepentant sinning. Once in hell, they have the freedom to serve out their punishment for their wrongdoing and potentially crossover into heaven. Those that choose to stay in hell and keep sinning may end up suffering eternally. In this situation, those in hell still have the possibility of leaving if they repent so may seem fairer than other versions of hell. However, this view of hell is not perfect either and still has some issues.

I plan on going through the book's various sections and summarizing the arguments he makes and making my own comments. I will skip chapters 1-2 as 1 provides a short introduction and 2 provides a history of the belief of hell. I'm more concerned with justification so I'll start with Ch. 3.

Also, I will note that generally, he does not examine biblical texts until the end and the book is primarily philosophical, not biblical. I'll mainly focus on philosophical arguments as well.

A Theodicy of Hell

Chapter 3: The Argument from Justice

• Sections I-II

Chapter 4: Arguments from Divine Love
Chapter 5: Arguments from Human Choice
Chapter 6: The Freedom View Compared with Rival Versions
Chapter 7: Theodicy and Theology

Second Presidential Debate, Some Notes

Last night, Obama and Romney debated for the second time. Here is a link to the transcript and here is a link to the video. I want to make some quick notes on what Romney said. 

Revenue Neutrality

You heard what I said about my tax plan. The top 5 percent will continue to pay 60 percent, as they do today. I’m not looking to cut taxes for wealthy people. I am looking to cut taxes for middle-income people. 

And why do I want to bring rates down, and at the same time lower exemptions and deductions, particularly for people at the high end? Because if you bring rates down, it makes it easier for small business to keep more of their capital and hire people. 

And for me, this is about jobs. I want to get America’s economy going again. Fifty-four percent of America’s workers work in businesses that are taxed as individuals. So when you bring those rates down, those small businesses are able to keep more money and hire more people. 

Does anyone else here see the contradiction? If the wealthy keep paying the same amount they pay today, then they will not be able to keep more of their capital. He's made such a big point about his plan being revenue neutral that I'm surprised he turned it into a tax cut argument.

One may respond that he was talking about his middle income tax cuts here but then we have a conflict with his revenue neutrality. If the tax revenue from the middle class goes down due to tax cuts, then the revenue from either the lower or upper class has to increase to compensate for this. However, Romney has explicitly denied he will raise taxes on the wealthy or the poor.

AK-47's and Getting Parents to Stay Together

Romney's answer to the AK-47 question was awful and even the moderator called him out on it. I want to look at this part.

But let me mention another thing. And that is parents. We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids. Wherever possible the -- the benefit of having two parents in the home, and that’s not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that’s a great idea. 

Because if there’s a two parent family, the prospect of living in poverty goes down dramatically. The opportunities that the child will -- will be able to achieve increase dramatically. So we can make changes in the way our culture works to help bring people away from violence and give them opportunity, and bring them in the American system.

So what is Romney proposing here exactly? To make a speech to parents that they should stay together after having kids? That is an important part of his plan for reducing poverty and violence? See this blog post for a similar point.

Contraceptives

Romney's answer to the equal pay of women was also terrible. He did have this to say.

I’d just note that I don’t believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not. And I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care of not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives.

Um, except the Republican party has been hammering Obama for making contraceptives a required benefit for health insurance. This supposedly denies the religious freedoms of some employers. Here, he seems to be saying that employers should not deny coverage for contraceptives to employees.

He may be saying that he is in favor of allowing women to spend their own money and not insurance money on contraceptives and that is what he meant here. However, that is irrelevant to Obama's point. Obama's point was that he was expanding access to contraceptives by making it a required benefit for health insurance and Romney ignored that.

Romney's 12 Million Jobs

Romney claimed again that his 5-point economic plan will create twelve million jobs in 4 years. He was asked to substantiate this claim and I will just leave it to Ezra Klein's team to debunk this. The studies Romney cites are:

1. A study that claims a Romney-like tax plan will create 7 million jobs in 10 years (if fully paid for and instituted in an economy with full employment).
2. A study that says under current policies, there will be 3 million energy related jobs over 8 years (not taking into account any of Romney's policies).
3. A study that says if China were to respect our intellectual rights, 2 million jobs would be created (Romney is not proposing anything to help with this).

From these three studies, Romney concludes that his plan will create 12 million jobs in 4 years. What a joke.

Even worse, Moody's shows that over the next four years, 12 million jobs will be created under current policy anyways.

I was anxious for Obama to bring up these points but he did not do so. 

Pretty good debate overall and I'm glad Obama came out swinging this time. 

Recession Economics

Brad DeLong on the causes and cures of the great recession and why the many supposed cures floating around in politics are wrong.

1, 2

Research = rationing?

We have Mike Huckabee objecting to comparative effectiveness research:

Tucked away in the $787 billion stimulus was the establishment of the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness, which will become our version of Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, the ironically and Orwellian-named NICE. NICE decides who lives and who dies based on age and the cost of treatment. So the stimulus didn’t just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow…

After Sarah Palin invoked death panels in her critique of the health care bill, it has become a standard objection that buried somewhere in the healthcare bill (or in any other bill), there is something that will lead to health care rationing. This is a fact and we don't need very much argument to prove it.

However we need to find out what treatments work better than others. Surely, having more knowledge in this area is not a bad thing. If this will lead to rationing, why not just abolish any research done to test treatments? If comparative effectiveness research would lead to rationing, so would any research at all.

And even if we would use this information to encourage the use of the cheaper treatment in Medicare, would that be a bad thing? Many insurance plans already do something similar by requiring higher co-pays for brand name drugs versus the generic version.

The bigger point though is that he is saying if the government isn't willing to pay for something, then it is rationing. However, there are millions of uninsured people who aren't able to pay for their own care. As a result, they do not receive care. If this is rationing, their plan (which is to not provide universal coverage) would also lead to rationing. Their plan is to ration by price instead.

Rationing by prices will not always lead to the most desired goods going to those who need them most. If everyone had the same level of wealth, we could allocate goods to those who are willing to pay the most for them. These people would also be the people who value them the most.

However, clearly we do not live in a world where everyone has the same amount of income to draw from. As a result, the good of healthcare will go to the ones who can pay more. So, any attempt to level the playing field (through say Medicaid or the healthcare bill) attempts to fix this income effect so markets can work better.

The despair Huckabee finds in the fact that government may at some point attempt to control its costs by encouraging Medicare recipients to use less costly (but just as effective) treatments is astounding. His view of government would leave millions uninsured with no ability to pay for care. This should lead Huckabee to much more despair and corresponding support of the healthcare bill. Yet, consistency is not his strong suit. This may be the most despairing thing of all.

See these two blog posts for similar points: The "Rationing" Switcheroo and Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face.

Aggregate Value

Alonzo is doing a series which kills the objection:

There's no way to aggregate well-being over different individuals.

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Subjective Morality: Fact or Fiction?

In a comment to this post, a commenter stated something that is commonplace amongst moral subjectivists and relativists.

Who said happiness, desire fulfillment are good and suffering is bad is an objective truth? They may exists as being objective in some sense, but applying labels to them is not grounded in anything objective.

We can apply the same reasoning to the statement "Pluto is a planet." In one sense of the word, a sense adopted for a long time, the statement was true. However, after scientists decided to change the definition, it became false. So, is the statement objectively true or false? It depends on the definition of "planet" being used.

None of this affects the objectively true statements in astronomy. Scientists can define existing terms in new ways or make up entirely new words to describe an object. As long as we are saying something that is objectively true about the object, we are fine.

There is no magical reason why we should define the term "planet" in one way or another. So why should we expect the same thing of any other label?

So, if by "Rape is bad" one means that it thwarts desires, then it is equivalent to the objectively true statement "Rape thwarts desires." Labels are made up and the definitions thereof do not matter. They do not change the facts about rape.

If the statement "Rape is bad" is a statement that has no basis in fact, then it must be fiction. We would not look at the statement "There are invisible teacups flying around Saturn" and say, "Oh well since you can't prove or disprove it, it is a subjective claim." No, we would say it is false.

To bring to light the absurdity even more, moral subjectivists are saying there is no evidence that can prove an act to be wrong, yet we are justified in taking a position one way or another. However, shouldn't one withhold judgment when faced with a lack of evidence? Why would we choose one way or the other?

But then moral subjectivists usually argue that we have strong moral feelings and that is enough to justify our moral beliefs. However, "My feelings say you should be sent to jail" is not any justification for sending someone to jail or determining who lives and who dies.

So, in summary, moral statements are either fact or fiction. There is no third option. Moral statements are not statements that have no basis in fact but are somehow still relevant to the real world. We cannot use our feelings to justify sending people to jail. Admitting the truth of moral statements depends on our feelings does away with morality altogether. It relegates it to the world of fiction.

See this post for a similar sentiment from Alonzo.

So why should we label desire fulfillment as "good" and desire thwarting as "bad?" Stay tuned for the answer in a later post.

Good Physicist Gone Bad

Steven Weinberg, a physicist who won the Nobel prize, wrote a mantra of New Atheism which is indicative of the brilliance Dawkins and Hitchens come up with:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

Now this statement is false and bigoted and one should condemn whoever says it. One can note the vagueness of certain words and that the statement is only true in an irrelevant sense. One can easily switch a few things:

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for bad people to do good—that takes religion.

or

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do bad—that takes atheism.

Surely, atheists would take these claims to court, and rightly so. But those same reasons would take Weinberg's claim to court as well. And the prosecution rests its case.

See this post for the standard objections I have to blaming evils on religion.

Business Ethics

Milton Friedman is a famous economist of the 20th century. In this paper, he argues against a business being concerned about social issues, except that which the law forbids. Here is a quote from the article:

There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

He also states elsewhere that a business needs to follow the law as well. So we can define his principle as follows:

MF: A business does no wrong in maximizing its profits when it is not breaking the law and engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

Why believe this is true? Friedman states that a manager's sole obligation is to its stakeholders. If the manager decides to use money from selling hamburgers to help save the rain forest, he is not maximizing profits for the shareholders which presumably is what they want. If they wanted money going to the rain forest, that would be fine too but if they want him to maximize profit, then he must do it as long as he does not break the law and engages in open and free competition.

In advanced societies, one may be tempted to think the law is good enough to keep businesses out of trouble. However, imagine a society where a "Hitman" company would not be illegal. A business could accept payment in return for killing someone. In such a society, a business could follow the Milton Friedman principle yet still be unethical.

Everyone would agree such a society should make a law against corporations being allowed to kill people. However, if a corporation has no social obligations outside of those mandated by law and free trade, then how could one say this? In this society, the act is not illegal, deceptive or fraudulent. The foundation on which this principle is built falls apart when considering this.

The only justification for laws limiting what a business can and cannot do comes from the ethical obligations of a business. Making a law stating businesses cannot kill people is only justified if businesses already have an ethical obligation to not kill people.

Since there are societies where the law can be seriously inadequate, one cannot simply follow the law to avoid any wrong. One must act ethically. If the Milton Friedman principle is to be justified, it must be done by appealing to the social responsibility of businesses. As has been shown, there are more responsibilities than following the law and avoiding deception (like not killing people). Therefore, the Milton Friedman principle fails.

See this paper for another negative assessment of Friedman's paper. See this post for a similar argument against the claim "One should not legislate morality."

The Manhattan Declaration: Objections

The Manhattan Declaration is a declaration by Christians of all types about the threats to vital institutions in our current society. The three are life, marriage, and religious liberty.

Sanctity of Life

The three dangers to the sanctity of life, according to the authors, are the institutions of abortion, stem cell research, and euthanasia. They object to the first two because they kill an innocent life. Here is what they have to say about euthanasia:

At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and “voluntary” euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons. Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th century, they have returned from the grave.

Their argument is that allowing assisted suicide or euthanasia will lead to something similar to the Nazi death camps where instead of putting people of a particular race in the camps, we are killing off the disabled and elderly.

It seems they cannot tell the difference between allowing someone to choose when to die and killing someone outright. Why is it that when the idea of allowing someone to die, when it conforms to their will, is brought up, cases are brought up where people have been killed when it is against their will? Clearly, these are two different situations and allowing one does not imply we will allow the other.

Also, there is an assumption that any life, no matter how unbearable, is worth living. This is clearly false. Denying this does not give any legitimacy to the Nazi death camps however.

Imagine the following situations:

1. A person is in a car accident and arrives at the hospital brain dead and in a coma. The person is still alive, thanks to the machines he is hooked up to. However, he will never be able to function again. Once the machines are disconnected, he will die.

Is this a life worth living? Clearly not, so we are not doing anything wrong in pulling the plug and letting the person die.

2. A person is in a car accident and survives. However, he is completely paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life.

Is this a life worth living? Suppose the person wants to end it all and just die. Suppose also this is a persistent desire, not just a spur of the moment decision. The person is not able to do the job himself since he is paralyzed. He asks his friend to give him a lethal injection to kill him.

Many people argue there is a morally relevant difference between the two situations. However, in both cases, the person is acting to end the life of someone. In the first case, the person pulls the plug, knowing this will surely kill the patient. In the second case, the person gives his friend a lethal injection, knowing he will surely die. If the first situation is not wrong, the second one cannot be either.

Also, it is important to note here that we are not ending all lives that are judged as unworthy of life. We require the consent or the implied consent of the person being killed. That is the difference between euthanasia and the Nazi death camps.

Redefining "Marriage"

The second objection the authors make is to people to threaten marriage by thinking of allowing same sex marriages or polygamous marriages. They argue the following:

It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life.

Later on, the authors state that allowing homosexual marriages implies we should allow polygamous and incestuous marriages as well. But wait, polygamous and incestuous marriages can still procreate. One may object that in incestuous marriages, birth defects can occur. However, there are plenty of cases where we allow people to procreate even when it is likely they will create a child with some unfortunate characteristic. For example, two carriers of the cystic fibrosis gene will have a 25% chance of having a baby with cystic fibrosis. There are countless other genetic diseases that have a good chance of being passed onto the children of parents. So, one cannot object to incestuous marriages for this reason.

So, their argument here also implies that we should allow incestuous or polygamous marriages too. They must come up with an independent reason why these should not be allowed, which has nothing to do with reproductive capabilities.

But do reproductive capabilities matter? The person arguing the above would also have to argue that a couple with one infertile person should not be allowed to be married. After all, they cannot procreate. What about people over a certain age? They cannot procreate either. Should we have couples get a fertility test and create an age ceiling on when people can get married?

Also, suppose another situation. A couple gets married and has a couple of kids. The kids are grown up and move out of the house. The couple is now in their 70's. They are unable to have any more kids and clearly are not taking care of their kids anymore. This argument would seem to imply we should not allow these people to be married anymore. If marriage is only for those who can procreate and take care of children, then how can one argue that we should allow marriages to continue that are no longer involved in this function?

Or imagine a member of the marriage loses their ability to procreate at some point in the marriage. If they do not already have children, then the argument would imply the couple should no longer be allowed to maintain their marriage.

Therefore, any argument against homosexual marriage because they cannot procreate clearly does not work.

The authors state one bad thing that comes from legalizing homosexual marriage is that family life and school sex-ed programs will teach children that such unions are "marriage" even though many people believe they are wrong. However, imagine we lived in a society where many people believed interracial marriage was wrong. Imagine someone argues, "Children will be taught that interracial marriage is okay when many people clearly believe it is wrong. Therefore, we should not allow interracial marriage." Does this argument make any sense?

Also, it is argued that calling homosexual unions "marriages" disallows their religious liberty. Once again, imagine a member of a religion which vehemently opposes interracial marriages. Should we make interracial marriages illegal because this group's religious liberty is jeopardized? Clearly, not.

Protecting Religious Liberty

The third point made in the article is threats made to Christian's religious liberty. However, one must note that religious liberty is not a liberty that trumps all other concerns. If the 9/11 hijackers argued anyone who gets in their way is jeopardizing their religious liberty, we surely have reason to regard their argument as wrong. Religious liberty is only relevant when the relevant belief is not harming others. Once the religious belief is doing harm to others, we can stop people from acting on that belief.

Jehovah's Witnesses object to blood transfusions. Should we ban blood transfusions because this religious group does not agree with it? Does it harm Jehovah's Witnesses' religious liberty to give other people blood transfusions? Clearly not.

Therefore, a religious belief cannot inform the law to ban a particular act. This brings us full circle to the other two points of the article. Using the Bible to argue against particular laws should have no effect since considerations of the law should be apart from any particular religion. It does not matter if the religion is the majority one or not.

This is what protecting religious liberty really means. One should not be forced to suffer based solely on rules from another person's religion. So, the statements concerning what the Bible says or what Christians believe may well motivate Christians to object to the laws, they do not form a basis for changing the law. Any basis for the law must not be informed by Christianity or any other religion.