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Hell and character

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2010

JOSEPH CORABI
JOSEPH CORABI*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Saint Joseph's University, 5600 City Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19131
*
e-mail: jcorabi@sju.edu
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Abstract

The view that consignment to hell is a matter of having a fixed vicious character of a certain sort – rather than a matter of paying a retributive penalty for sin – is quite popular among philosophical theologians today. However, if proponents of this view wish to maintain that some individuals wind up consigned to hell, and if they embrace a number of independently plausible assumptions, they will be forced toward unreasonable claims about character development and its relationship to consignment to hell. In this paper, I describe the difficulties for these philosophical theologians.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 233 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. Swinburne, Richard ‘A theodicy of heaven and hell’, in Freddoso, Alfred J. (ed.) The Existence and Nature of God (South Bend IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 48–49Google Scholar. For another good statement of the basic gist of SCT, see Michael Murray ‘Heaven and hell’, in idem (ed.) Reason For the Hope Within (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 295–296.

2. See Kvanvig, JonathanThe Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Walls, JerryHell: The Logic of Damnation (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and C. S. Lewis The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940). According to Charles Seymour, even Plato's conception of the negative afterlife seems to be of this form! See Charles Seymour A Theodicy of Hell (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 19. (It should be said that, in some moods, Walls presents his view in a way that makes it sound considerably different from the SCT paradigm. This is because he posits something he calls ‘optimal grace’, which involves quite a bit more interference by God in the natural trajectory of character development than canonical versions of SCT will allow. Consequently, my arguments here will only apply to Walls insofar as he eliminates or heavily constrains the role of optimal grace. I think there are difficulties reconciling the notion of optimal grace with any sort of minimally orthodox picture of Christianity anyway, as the sort of widespread interference it involves is considerably more intrusive than anything that has been taken seriously in mainstream Christian tradition or which is suggested by the New Testament, at least according to standard readings.)

3. What might these trivial and irrelevant ways be? If, for instance, someone has suffered unjustly on earth at the hands of a human tormenter, God may owe this person compensation for his suffering in the form of some finite period of enjoyment in the afterlife.

4. There may, of course, not be any retributive demands of justice. In fact, denying that there are any may be the best way to make sense of the most extreme outcome compatible with the limited-retributivism thesis, where retributive considerations play no role in assignment of afterlife outcomes.

5. In an effort to be fair to the diversity of views under the SCT heading, I don't wish to take a stand on whether this process of arriving at closed-downness could be completed by the time of natural death. Some proponents of SCT have clearly intended to claim that it could be, others to claim that it could not, and others to remain agnostic.

6. It may not be more enjoyable for a person who winds up in hell to wind up elsewhere, however, owing to the individual's character. (Such an individual might find heaven extremely boring or downright psychologically painful, for instance.) I only mean the badness thesis to imply that, all things considered, an individual's experiences are far less enjoyable overall in hell than they would be elsewhere (if the person had developed a different character perhaps). I also do not take a stand here on whether hell would involve both what have traditionally been called ‘pains of sense’ and ‘pains of loss’, or rather only ‘pains of loss’. (I take it that no-one claims that hell contains merely ‘pains of sense’.)

7. I ignore here the issue of how value could be meaningfully predicated of something which no longer exists. There is a history of making much bolder claims: that, e.g., value can be meaningfully predicated of the life of someone who never existed; see, e.g., Adams, Robert ‘Must God create the best?’, Philosophical Review, 81 (1972), 317–332CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in particular, Adams's second condition on 320. Even Jesus makes a similar (albeit not exactly equivalent) kind of claim when he tells his disciples at the Last Supper that it would be better for his betrayer if he (i.e. the betrayer) had ‘never been born’. I am grateful to Dean Zimmerman for first making me aware of this issue with the Last Supper.

8. Crucially, also, the fairness that God displays is a fairness based on matters that are under the ultimate control of the agent – with moral luck abstracted away. This makes the fairness God displays considerably purer than the sort we humans would be expected to show in (e.g.) criminal punishment, where our limitations of knowledge and prediction, as well as legitimate concern for things like deterrence and protection, could limit the importance of fairness and our very ability to display it.

9. See also 1 Timothy, 2.3–4.

10. See Murray ‘Heaven and hell’. Incidentally, such a view already enjoys considerable popularity within apostolic Christianity, especially Catholicism.

11. In Sider, Ted ‘Hell and vagueness’, Faith and Philosophy, 19 (2002), 58–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. See Kvanvig The Problem of Hell; Walls Hell: The Logic of Damnation (especially 81 and 89–95); and Seymour A Theodicy of Hell. See also Buckareff, A. & Plug, A. ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’, Religious Studies, 41 (2005), 39–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It may be that Swinburne rejects the assumption, since he seems sympathetic to the idea that God would allow people to at least partially control the salvation opportunities of others, based on consequences of their free choices; see Swinburne, RichardResponsibility and Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. I call these ‘quasi-retributive’ because they are obviously analogous to retributive considerations in important ways.

14. There are a number of other subtle assumptions that must be made, but they tend to be straightforward and uncontroversial. I omit discussion of them because of spatial constraints.

15. Examples of discussion of these sorts of cases are in Walls Hell: The Logic of Damnation, 86, and in C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 85 and 178.

16. See, for example, the discussions in Lewis Mere Christianity, 84–87 and 177–180, and in Walls Hell: The Logic of Damnation, 88. For some related points, see also Zagzebski, Linda ‘Religious luck’, Faith and Philosophy, 11 (1994), 397–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. At least in the literature on hell. Related issues have recently received some treatment in the literature on moral responsibility. See, for instance, Vargas, Manuel ‘The trouble with tracing’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 29 (2005), 269–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. For a fascinating discussion of the psychological consequences of killing in war, see Dave Grossman On Killing (Boston MA: Little Brown, 1995). For those unsympathetic to the idea that there could be (or at least have been) just wars, one could construct similar examples (albeit less dramatic ones) for difficult police work.

19. C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters (London: Centenary Press, 1942), xiii–xiv.

20. Another important part of the ultimate story about character development is that some actions do not incline one toward habits to repeat the actions in question; in fact, they may incline one in the opposite direction (as illustrated by the Gerry case).

21. Obviously, the precise level of commonness of these sorts of cases will play a large role in fixing just how superficial the façade is. Unfortunately, getting to the bottom of this is a tedious and difficult project which I can't enter into here; I will have to let my examples and the reader's imagination in extrapolating from them stand on their own as a guide.

22. A related response would be to claim that real life parallels to these cases are so rare that they call only for very occasional artificial interventions by God. These interventions would be so infrequent as to be virtually inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

23. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pressing me to engage with such a worry.

24. The view that hell is empty will wind up entailing universalism if we suppose that heaven and hell are the only possible ultimate afterlife outcomes.

25. I am very grateful to Joe Lombardi, Betsy Linehan, and anonymous reviewers for the journal for their comments on previous drafts of this paper. Thanks also to David Manley and Vishnu Flores for extremely helpful discussions.