bd-from-kg

In the original “Injustice of Divine Punishment” thread I argued that it is unjust for God to punish anyone for rejecting Him because, in essence, He is ultimately responsible for any such rejection. In the thread I am going to argue that it is unjust for God to punish anyone in any way for any reason, and especially by sending them to Hell.

1. The purpose of punishment

By definition, to punish anyone is to subject him to a state that he would prefer not to be in. This punishment cannot be an intrinsic good; any value that it has must be instrumental. That is, if it can be justified at all it must be justified in terms of its effects.

The traditional justifications for punishment are:

1. Deterrence. The threat of punishment deters people from doing things that society deems unacceptable or undesirable. In many cases the person punished is deterred from doing the same kind of thing again.

2. Security. The most common traditional forms of punishment prevent the perpetrator from doing the same kind of thing in the future (at least for a time), for example by incarcerating him or executing him.

One other justification has sometimes been offered for divine punishment, which could perhaps be considered to apply to earthly punishment as well:

3. Repentance. Punishment might awaken the perpetrator to the sinfulness of what he’s done and thus produce genuine remorse and guilt, which (it may be argued) is good for the soul.

I am unaware of any justifications for punishment that do not ultimately reduce to some combination of these, nor can I imagine what other justifications there could be.

An immediate implication of the fact that all punishment must be justified by its results is that any punishment that exceeds what is necessary to achieve these results, or that cannot by its nature achieve them at all, is unjust.

2. Hell

Now let’s look at whether Hell qualifies as a just punishment.

At first sight it might seem that Hell could hardly be equaled as a deterrent. But this is an illusion. In reality Hell is a weak deterrent indeed. It is axiomatic that a deterrent is effective just to the degree that it is swift and certain. The threat of Hell is neither. At best it will occur only after death, which in most cases can reasonably be expected to be many years off. Since most of those who commit serious crimes tend to have short time horizons, the prospect of being punished in the distant future hardly penetrates their consciousness at all. And of course a threat cannot deter a person at all unless he is aware of it and believes that it is real. Given that a great many people (and an especially large percentage of those who might be inclined to commit serious crimes) does not believe in Hell, and many of the rest have serious (well-justified) doubts about it, its deterrent effect is much weaker than it first appears.

And of course, by its nature Hell cannot deter the person subjected to it from any further wrongdoing; by the time he gets there he is beyond further wrongdoing.

All in all, if Hell is intended to be a deterrent to wrongdoing, the being who came up with it would seem to be singularly inept in choosing means appropriate to his ends.

As for security, it hardly needs to be pointed out that society has little to fear from a dead man in any case.

And Hell can hardly serve the purpose of repentance given that those who are sent there are not able to repent. According to orthodox Christian theology, those sent to Hell are deprived of their free will in the process.

Finally, there is the inescapable fact that Hell is an outrageously excessive punishment for any possible offence. Humans are unable even to comprehend eternal punishment, and so cannot be deterred by the prospect. The threat of a few quadrillion years of torment would have just as much deterrent effect as a threat of eternal torment; thus virtually all of the prospective punishment has no deterrent effect whatsoever, and can only be chalked up to pure vindictiveness.

It should be mentioned here that many Christians nowadays say that hell isn’t a “punishment” at all; it’s the natural, inevitable result of embracing wickedness or rejecting God. But God created nature, so if this is a “natural” result, it is so only because God has made it so. And it isn’t inevitable; God could prevent it or end it in an instant. So if unrepentant sinners suffer the torments of Hell for eternity, it’s because God has chosen this fate for them. So we’re still left with the question of what legitimate purpose is served by all this suffering that could justify it. And if Hell is not a punishment, this makes it even more difficult to see how this question can have a satisfactory answer.

3. Annihilation

A growing number of Christians reject the notion of Hell altogether; they believe that doomed sinners are simply annihilated. It’s not clear that this can even be regarded as a punishment, but in any case it’s infinitely less severe than an eternity of torment in Hell. (In fact, that’s the point; many Christians have come to realize that Hell is an infinitely excessive punishment for anything that a human could possibly do.) On the other hand, being deprived of an eternity of joy in Heaven is actually a punishment every bit as severe as an eternity of torment in Hell. But as a deterrent, it is almost completely ineffective. And the other purposes of punishment – security and repentance – are again not served at all by annihilation. So to the extent that annihilation is a punishment, it is far less justifiable than Hell.

4. The general case against divine punishment

While Hell is a particularly egregious case of an unjust punishment, in reality any punishment by God would be unjust. The reason is simple. As I pointed out earlier, punishment is intrinsically bad; it can only be justified by its results. But it is axiomatic that something can only be justified as an instrumental good if the same results cannot be accomplished by means that are intrinsically good, or at least are not as intrinsically bad. Punishment is a coarse tool; it accomplishes its purposes very imperfectly, and inflicts a great deal of collateral harm in the process. We humans lack either the knowledge or the power to prevent wrongdoing directly; we are forced to use punishment as a tool for maintaining an acceptable degree of social harmony for lack of a better alternative. But God is not lacking in knowledge or power; He is omnipotent and omniscient. There is no need for him to resort to such blunt instruments to accomplish His purposes. There should be no need to go into the innumerable ways in which He could deter wrongdoing, provide for the public safety, or induce repentance without causing suffering in the process.

Thus, while punishment is an appropriate device for humans, who lack more precise, humane methods of accomplishing its purposes, it cannot be appropriate for God, who can always accomplish these purposes more directly without inflicting suffering in the process.

rainbow walking

Man that was awesome. I'm going to archive this argument for future reference. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

rainbow walking

I would also add that the incorporation of punishment as an inducment to love is entirely counter-intuitive to human experience. The incorporation of a negative to achieve a positive.

If I want my wife to love me I certainly wouldn't threaten to beat the hell out of her if she didn't. If I truly respect her autonomy as a human being I must take measures to win her affections.

Finally, it seems to me an omnipotent god could have used other natural human attributes to achieve his aims. For instance, humanities natural propensity to compete. This god could have created several sister universes with worlds like our own and people like us, given all of us the example of Jesus Christ, and then delivered the challenge. The world of people who come closest to achieving Christ-likeness will move on. The others will be left to flourish or perish without me.

Tercel

Hey BD,
<strong>NO</strong>. At least, what I perceive to be standard Christian thought on the subject would completely disagree with this. CS Lewis has a brilliant passage in one of his books on this subject (though I forget which book), and as I recall it he argues that punishment is an intrinsic good under the right circumstances. Your acceptance of the above idea seems to have lead you to miss out an entire category -indeed what Lewis argues is the primary category- for justifying punishment.

Under "1. The purpose of punishment" you give three justifications:
What about desert? Surely an important purpose of punishment is that this is what they deserve for their wrong-doing? If we wanted "deterrence", couldn't we get that by making an example of some innocent person and declare that this is what will happen to anyone who does disobey the law? If we wanted security, couldn't we lock everyone up? If we wanted to change the person into someone who did obey the law, couldn't we judge them mentally unbalenced and lock them in medical institutions 'till we'd "fixed" their minds to what we wanted?
You say we use punishment to get results: Well these are alternative methods giving the same results.
These sort of punishment sounds inhumane, and yes they are - but it's what happens when the idea of justice is left out.
Why do we punish people? It must surely boil down to because they deserve it.
Punishment can be used as an example to create a deterrance, but it's only fair if the person being used as an example actually deserved their punishment. Punishment can be used for security, but it's only fair if the person being secured actually deserved it. The basis of all fair punishment therefore must be justice and punishment being dealt as it is deserved. Giving punishment as it is deserved - aka justice is surely an intrinsic good and not something that is "justified by its results" as you argue.
Please read Lewis' book as he argues this far better than I can.

Though hell is often used as a deterrant, that is never suggested to be its reason for existence. Security, I think, is an issue that is more difficult to explain away, and I think your treatment of that issue is unsatisfactory. As far as repentence goes, there seems to be three streams of Christian thought on the matter. One that those who go there are those who refuse to repent and so obviously hell won't encourage repentence. Two that those who go to hell might repent, but it's too late. Three those who go to hell can repent and be saved, it which case your "repentence" argument is incomplete.

Now, you dealing in passing with the idea of hell as just deserts:
Which raises the question of "who are we to say what appropriate punishement is?"

More interesting, to my mind are your thoughts on alternative versions of hell. (I confess I am agnostic towards hell, both to whether it exists and its nature if it does.)
But don't we get back again to "can god make a square circle". If people insist on rejecting God, and hell is what happens when people reject God then can God magically make it some other way?

Got to go now, I'll finish my response later.
Tercel

Samhain

Tercel:

I think that bd explained the idea behind this as far as how they deserve such punishment. Besides that, the ideas of the omniscience/omnipotence of god conflicting with human free will also have to be concluded in order to delve into this question.

One last thing on this, though. How is an eternity of torment which is incomprehensible to us just in comparison to 70 or so years of an evil life, or just a life with the rejection of god? How could it be just for eternity of torture because of a few bad years on earth? Isn't this extremely excessive?

parkdalian

"What they deserve" sounds more like a gut reaction rather than a rational reason (such as deterrence) to punish. If a justice system is based soley on hatred of criminals, it ceases to be justified by the results and becomes an institution of revenge.

The point of deterrence is to actually demonstrate what happens to criminals when they are guilty of an offense. Making a "scapegoat" example out of an innocent person would only demonstrate hypocrisy by the punisher and the deterrence would lose credibility. ("I may be punished anyway so I might as well offend") It isn't necessary to punish an innocent when there are plenty of criminals around.

As for locking everyone up, that would be counterproductive to security since there would nobody left for producing food, etc. You only jail or do other nasty things to bad people as necessary to satisfy security and the other rational reason for punishment, deterrence.

As pointed out by bd-from-kg, we only have so many methods at our disposal for keeping the peace, and mental institutions are inadequate at present for people who are compus mentis offenders. Until neuroscience and psychiatry advance to the point that they can control the subtleties of the criminal mind, deterrence remains the only effective controlling mechanism for people who are aware of the consequences of breaking the law, criminally inclined or not.

Tercel

Continuing...
That's simply the spin you're putting on it. Annihilationism simply comes from an alternative interpretation of the relevant biblical verses.

I am inclined to think that some of the things you would mean when you say "humane" here, I would believe to be gross inhumanities...

Quatermass

I have to question what could anyone do to deserve eternal punishment? If you agree with the doctrine of original sin, then just being born is enough to deserve damnation. If instead there is free will involved, what evil could be committed in 70 years that justifies eternal punishment? This is a notion of justice that seems totally foreign to human reason.

bd-from-kg

Tercel:

Naturally. Standard Christian thought has it that God put temptation in the path of immortal beings whom He had deliberately made vulnerable to such temptation, and when (surprise, surprise) in the course of time they succumbed to the temptation, punished not only them but all of their descendants by making them so debased and depraved that the only way they could escape their just deserts of being tortured unimaginably for all eternity in Hell was to have Jesus undergo the punishment that was due them. Standard Christian thought has it that perfect justice consists of a perfectly innocent Man suffering for the sins of the wicked. Standard Christian thought has it that, when the creatures that he deliberately made defective manifest these defects in their actions, as they inevitably will, this perfectly just God is unwilling to show mercy without demanding horrible suffering from His own Son as a ransom. Standard Christian thought has it that anyone who finds it impossible to believe that God could be such a moral monster will be tortured for all eternity for harboring such blasphemous notions.

I don’t claim that standard Christian thought leads to the conclusion that all Divine punishment is unjust. I claim that the Christian conception of justice is even more primitive and barbaric than that of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Oh. You have a vague recollection that someone said something on the subject somewhere, but you can’t remember what. Hey, I’m convinced.

If you don’t remember the argument itself or where it can be found, why are you wasting our time?

These arguments are either not meant seriously or they come from someone with little or no understanding of the real world. All of these methods would produce disastrous results. Do you really need me to explain why?

This is an important question, which I intend to devote an entire post to later. But for the moment I’ll just note that this objection comes very ill from a Christian. If we believe the Bible, the Christian God quite clearly does not believe that people should not be punished unless they have done something to deserve it.

You’re asking me to read a book whose name you don’t remember??

I didn’t claim that it was; I was considering how it might be justified. Deterrence is one possible justification; in fact, so far as I can see, the only possible one.

Would you care to favor us with your ideas about how my treatment is unsatisfactory, or better yet, give what you consider a satisfactory treatment?

It’s not possible to deal with every heretical idea on every subject offered by anyone who calls himself a Christian. The first and third alternatives you offer depart radically from orthodox doctrine.

The first (if I understand you correctly) is that the only people who end up in Hell are those who would not repent under any circumstances. Of course, if that’s true all the work Christians do in spreading the “good news” is a waste of time; everyone who is capable of being saved will be saved, so why bother? The orthodox position is that one had better repent and accept Jesus now, because otherwise one might die before getting around to it and it will be too late. This idea also raises the question of why God created souls who are doomed to eternal torment; who are so wicked that they would reject Him in the end no matter what.

The third alternative again raises the question of what the point is of all the proselytizing Christians do on earth. What’s so important about spreading the “good news” if everyone is going to know all about it eventually and will have an opportunity to make an informed choice at that time? And of course, why would any sane person choose Hell under these conditions? If everyone has a chance to repent and be saved after they understand the alternatives, Hell might as well close up shop; there won’t be any customers.

Actually even your second alternative is a bit unorthodox. The orthodox position is that those who go to Hell are incapable of repenting because they have been deprived of their free will. This is the “second death” according to traditional theology.

The original post answered this question tolerably well, but I plan to expand on it later. At this point I’ll be content to reply to this point from a theistic perspective.

In the first place, if you want to claim that God acts justly and you intend this to mean something more than the vacuous tautology that God dos what God does, you must have some concrete notion of what constitutes justice other than “whatever God does”.

In the second, how can we be moral agents if we have no innate sense of right and wrong? God is extraordinarily silent (at least these days), so when it comes to figuring out what’s right and wrong in a huge number of significant cases we’re completely on our own. Even in the most important cases He has provided us with precious little guidance. For example, the bible says “thou shalt not kill”. But how does this apply to capital punishment? To abortion? Killing enemy soldiers? Killing innocent civilians unintentionally (but predictably) with weapons aimed at military targets? When is self-defense a legitimate exception? What about helping people with terminal conditions and in agonizing pain to die? The list goes on and on. You probably have opinions about some of these things, but if so you didn’t get the answers from the Bible. You had to find them within yourself.

It’s the same with justice. Who decides what appropriate punishment is? We do. We do it every day, all the time, in large ways and small. I’ll bet you never dream of questioning the legitimacy of doing this until it comes around to judging God’s supposed acts. Then suddenly we are not fit to judge.

Now I would agree that if we knew that God exists and is perfectly just, and if we actually knew what He had done and was doing, it would be silly to question the justice of His actions. But we don’t. What we actually have is claims that God exists, that He is perfectly just, and that He has done this and that, and that he follows such-and-such policies. In evaluating such claims it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether, given our innate sense of justice, it’s plausible that a perfectly just God would act so, or follow such policies.

First off, everything God does is “magical” in the sense of being miraculous; using such terms to ridicule the idea that God can do something is itself ridiculous. If the thing in question is not self-contradictory, God can do it. That’s what it means to be omnipotent.

Second, causal relationships are not relationships of logical necessity. To say that A causes B is not to say that there is some logical reason why B must follow A; it is merely to say that as a matter of fact B does always follow A. Thus to say that Hell is the “necessary” result of “wickedness” is to say only that God has so arranged things that, as a matter of fact, a wicked life (or rejection of God if you prefer) always leads to Hell. God needn’t have arranged things this way, and He can rearrange them at any time if He so chooses. This is nothing like a “square circle”, which is a logical impossibility.

Get serious. The orthodox interpretation is the interpretation of the early Church, which had access to a strong oral tradition that, if nothing else, gave it a pretty clear idea of what the NT authors meant. They also were intimately familiar with the nuances of the languages involved, which are now dead, and with the cultural background of the authors, which can reasonably be presumed to have influenced their ideas. None of this is available to the same extent even to the best modern scholars, much less to laymen. But you think that many modern Christians have rejected this interpretation because they think they have a better idea of what the authors meant than the early Church did? I don’t think so.

Also, anyone who actually looks at the Bible can see that alternative views of Hell can only be maintained by strained interpretations (to put it mildly) of the relevant passages. It’s pretty obvious that those who have adopted these interpretations formed their conceptions of divine punishment on other grounds and interpreted the Bible accordingly. Given the nature of the Bible, I can’t really object to this procedure, but it’s silly to pretend that this isn’t what’s really going on.

Since I didn’t say what means I’m referring to, this is a pretty meaningless statement. But I don’t want to argue about specific means, which is why I didn’t mention any. The point is, is it your position that the only way that God can get free creatures to love Him is to threaten them with eternal torture if they don’t?

bd-from-kg

Tercel:

At this point I want to deal more thoroughly with your point that it is just for God to punish people simply because they deserve to be punished, regardless of whether anything is accomplished thereby beyond the punishment itself.

This is certainly the most obvious objection to my argument here, and the one that would be raised by most Christians. I want to deal with this in two parts.

I. Deontological ethics and justice

The idea that punishment is justified regardless of the consequences, simply by virtue of the fact that the person being punished “deserves” it, makes sense only in the context of a deontological moral theory. Such theories say that the “rightness” or “wrongness” of an act does not depend on its effects or consequences (whether actual, likely, or intended) but is simply right or wrong in itself; it is an intrinsic property of the act itself. Historically such theories have been associated with an absolutist concept of justice. the classic expression of this type of ethic is the Roman maxim “Let justice be done though the heavens fall”. The fact that anyone who accepted this maxim literally would plainly be insane should be a sufficient proof that this type of moral theory is not only untenable but unintelligible. But since such theories have been, and continue to be, taken seriously by some, a more careful examination and refutation seems in order.

A. The remarkable correspondence between “justice” and the general welfare.

If the “rightness” of an act were really independent of its consequences, it would be odd to find an extremely close correspondence between principles that are “just” and those whose adoption would have the best consequences. And yet any impartial examination of the general principles of justice shows that there is indeed just such a correspondence. If one were to evaluate thousands of possible “principles of justice” and select just those that seemed to be best calculated to promote the general welfare, one would find that in virtually every case one had selected just the principles that are generally accepted as valid. It seems impossible to account for this except on the hypothesis that the criterion that distinguishes a “just” principle from an unjust one is precisely whether it is likely to promote the general welfare.

Hume pointed this out hundreds of years ago. For example, in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals he observed:

It would be a waste of time to cite examples of this principle, since every generally accepted principle of justice is (IMO) an example of it. I challenge anyone who questions this to produce an example of a generally accepted principle of justice that does not conduce to the general welfare. And I would challenge anyone who admits it to give a plausible explanation of why this should be so if promoting the general welfare were not the defining property that distinguishes just principles from unjust ones.

B. Conflicts between principles

It is notorious that even the best accepted principles of justice often conflict with one another, and there is no apparent way to resolve such conflicts on the basis of deontological principles. As John Stuart Mill says in Utilitarianism:

He goes on to cite a number of examples:

His conclusion, which can hardly be denied by anyone who considers the question objectively, is that:

In other words, where principles of justice conflict, the question is resolved by appeal to the best interests of society as a whole. But this makes no sense unless the principles themselves are ultimately grounded in the general welfare.

C. Cases where the public interest clearly conflicts with a principle of justice

As a final demonstration of the true status of principles of justice, consider what happens when one of them comes into clear-cut conflict with the public interest. For example, it is unjust to force a person who has done nothing wrong to remain in a place that he wishes to leave. Yet this right is routinely infringed when the injustice to the individuals involved is deemed to be outweighed by the public interest. (For example, I was once forced to remain on an airplane for hours without being allowed to contact anyone, and to leave the plane for a time to stand in subzero temperatures while my bags were searched without my permission, because of a bomb threat.) But how can this sort of thing be justified if the demands of justice are absolute and not contingent on their being conducive to the general welfare?

As Hume put it:

But if the principles of justice are not absolute, but contingent on their contributing to human welfare, how can it be justified to punish some people by subjecting them to eternal torment in a manner calculated to provide almost no benefit to society while causing infinite misery to those so treated?

II. “Desert” is not a sufficient justification for punishment

A. Mercy is often preferable to strict justice

Even conceding for the sake of argument that it is always wrong to punish a person for a crime of which he is innocent, it doesn’t follow that it is always right to punish someone when he is guilty. In fact, it is quite frequently wrong to do so.

This idea should be very familiar to Christians. Christianity is based on the notion that all of us deserve eternal punishment, but not everyone receives it. The reasons for this need not concern us here. The point is that, even according to orthodox Christian doctrine, other considerations can outweigh the demands of justice.

More mundane examples are everywhere. For example, a man I knew was clearly guilty of manslaughter in an auto accident, but was given probation because he had never committed any other crime and was the sole support for his wife and six children.

There seems to be little point in citing endless examples. We all (I hope) understand that people should not be, and generally are not, punished, even if they deserve it, if doing so will do more harm than not doing so. Of course, one must look at all of the effects of both choices as well as considering alternative punishments. The direct, immediate effect of punishing an individual is almost always to harm him; that’s why it’s called punishment. Thus no punishment looks reasonable until indirect effects such as deterrence and repentance are factored in.

The conclusion from all this is that, while almost everyone would agree that a punishment cannot be justified morally unless the person to be punished actually deserves it, most people would also agree that this is not a sufficient justification. Punishing someone is only the “right thing to do” if the person involved deserves to be punished and the punishment will actually serve a useful purpose.

On this basis Hell fails to qualify as a justified punishment, even if a person sent to Hell deserves it. Whether you choose to call such a punishment “just” is a matter of terminology. But if one wants to say that God is both perfectly benevolent and perfectly just, one must identify justice with benevolence. And in that case, since an act that produces results inferior to those that would result from a different choice cannot be “perfectly good”, it follows that it cannot be perfectly just either.

B. Prevention is often preferable to punishment

It is generally agreed that preventing a crime is vastly preferable to punishing it after the fact, if it can prevented by methods that are morally acceptable and do not unduly impact the general welfare. Thus, if one sees a young man who seems to be about to attempt to steal some merchandise from a store, it is often better to warn him that you’re onto him rather than wait until the deed is done. And of course, if one had intervened earlier in that man’s life to help guide him onto a course that does not involve shoplifting or other crimes, everyone would applaud your actions. On the other hand, inducing him to do something wrong with the intent of punishing him for it afterwards would be universally condemned as the height of injustice. That’s why “entrapment” is a complete defense to a criminal charge.

Now if anyone is incapable of following God under any circumstances, it is because God chose to make him that way. And this would certainly fall under the heading of inducing someone to do something wrong with the intent of punishing him for it afterwards. On the other hand, if a person is capable of following God, it follows that He can induce that person to follow Him by seeing to it that he is provided with proper guidance (from God Himself personally if necessary). Indeed, it seems pretty obvious that, through a judicious combination of creating people with reasonably virtuous characters and seeing that they are provided with an appropriate environment, God could bring about a world in which anything that can be seriously regarded as “crime” is unknown (although lesser sins might still be fairly common) and everyone eventually finds his way to God. Thus there would seem to be no reason why anyone should even be deserving of eternal punishment in the end. But even if this were not so, plainly God could easily produce whatever trivial benefits might be produced by eternal punishment by methods that do not involve such unimaginable harm. And therefore, since God can achieve the purposes of such punishment by more humane means, it is never just for Him to inflict such punishment, even when it is deserved.