Friday, June 12, 2020

Does punishment vary according to the greatness of the victim?

One argument for eternal hell goes roughly like this: 

(1) The perpetrator of an injustice should be punished in proportion to both the moral greatness of the victim and the severity of the injustice. 

(2) We have all committed an injustice, in virtue of our sinful nature, against God. 

(3) God is infinitely great.

(4) Therefore, our punishment will be infinitely great. 

In everyday conversation, a youth pastor might explain this argument as follows: "If I break my neighbor's window, then I need to fix the window for my neighbor. Once I've done that, then we're on good terms again. But if I break something of God's (i.e., his law!), then, because he is infinitely holy, my sin has become infinitely worthy of damnation."

Now, I've always been a little uncomfortable with this notion, even if I acknowledge that it does have at least some intuitive appeal. If I commit assault, it seems much worse if my victim is a more vulnerable kind of person than a less vulnerable one, since my injustice of assault can also be coupled with the injustice of exploiting the vulnerable. Context might even give further intuitive plausibility for this argument: assault seems more justified if I do so in the context of a fist fight with a bully than if I do so in the context of a friend's wedding. But however intuitively plausible this argument is, I think it runs its course when we apply it to the person of God. 

Here's another example (inspired by Marilyn Adams, of course) of this principle:

Suppose Mother Teresa and Kierkegaard are having dinner with two prisoners they've met as they're doing prison ministry: Bill is serving a life sentence for eating every cow in the state of Kansas, and Jeff is also serving life for driving a tractor through every building in downtown Dallas. Now, during dinner, a massive debate ensues: if abstract objects exist necessarily (such that, for every possible world, each abstract object could not have failed to exist) and eternally, does this pose a problem for the sovereignty and aseity of God? The debate gets out of hand: Teresa and Jeff vigorously vote no, while Bill and Kierkegaard affirm (realistically, Kierkegaard would not care about this issue, fideist he is!). And before you know it, a fight breaks out: Bill punches Mother Teresa in the face (injustice a). Then Teresa regains balance and punches Kierkegaard (injustice b). Kierkegaard, bloodied as he is, manages to punch Jeff (injustice c). Then Jeff punches Bill (injustice d). 

Every injustice here is roughly the same: the punch is given with equal force within the same context. However, the victims and perpetrators within each sort of injustice are very different: whereas Jeff and Bill roughly have a moral greatness level of about .4 (on a 0-1 scale), Teresa and Kierkegaard have a .8. So, how do we assess these punishments? It seems like something like this would emerge: 

a = Bill is given a punishment that is .8 severe (on a 0-1 scale)
b = Teresa has Bill's punishment.
c = Kierkegaard is given a punishment that is .4 severe. 
d = Jeff has Kierkegaard's punishment. 

This seems not right. It might be right to say that a would make sense only because Bill broke other rules within the prison--but this is an appeal to other things within the context, not to the moral greatness of the victim. Also, this would leave us with Teresa being punished doubly harsher than Jeff for committing the same injustice! 

So, is this prison fight enough to do away with the youth pastor's over-simplified argument for eternal hell? Maybe. It probably needs a bit more fleshing out (e.g., if classical theism is right that God is not a person like us such that he is not constrained by moral obligations among human social contexts, would this argument matter to him?), but this will do for now.

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