Do We Deserve Infinite Suffering?

Why I reject Ethan Muse's defense of hell

Recently, Ethan Muse appeared on Miles K. Donahue’s podcast to talk about fine-tuning, the papacy, and hell. It was a really interesting conversation—both Ethan and Miles are extremely clever. Ethan’s defense of hell contained two basic arguments:

1. The wrongness of an offense against a being scales with the dignity of the being. Dignity is a slightly hard thing to pin down, but it refers to something like how worthy the being is of good treatment. It is worse, Ethan claims, to mistreat a human than a non-human animal, even if you cause them comparable suffering. It is similarly worse to mistreat a virtuous human than a vicious one, because the virtuous person merits better treatment. Thus, when we offend against God, we merit infinite punishment.

2. We shouldn’t really trust our moral intuitions about hell, because many smart and ethically reflective people disagree with us about them. Holy saints Padre Pio and Alphonsus Liguori both thought they deserved hell. When you have a moral intuition that conflicts with the moral intuitions of other people, absent some special reason to think you are more reliable, you shouldn’t really trust yours over theirs.

Unsurprisingly, as a person who thinks the doctrine of eternal hell is profoundly wicked, I didn’t buy either of these arguments. I thought it would be worth explaining why.

I don’t actually share the intuitions that Ethan’s first argument is based on. I don’t think that harms to humans are worse than comparable harms to non-human animals. In fact, I think there are decisive arguments against this view (and I should have another piece out soon giving an argument that’s even more decisive). Similarly, I don’t believe in desert, but even if I did, it doesn’t follow from the fact that bad people merit bad things that the badness of an offense against someone scales linearly with their greatness.

Imagine that there was an infinitely good being. Suppose you stole a pack of gum from them. I don’t think that merely because of their infinite moral status that would make you infinitely deserving of punishment. This is especially clear if we imagine your action doesn’t lower their welfare at all, and you know in advance that it won’t.

Ultimately, if you believe that the badness of an offense scales with the virtue of the being offended against, I think that you should think it reaches some kind of limit. Alternatively, if you think it does scale linearly, you should think that maximally virtuous beings are not infinitely virtuous in the way needed for offenses against them to merit infinite punishment. It isn’t at all clear why a being that is perfect would have infinite virtue—if they do the right thing in all cases, why would they have infinite dignity rather than, say, only twice the dignity of someone disposed to act virtuously in half of cases?

The deeper problem with Ethan’s argument is that it has crazy implications. Applied consistently, it conflicts with many of the deepest moral intuitions. I mean, first of all, if I am confident in anything, I’m confident that nice people that I know shouldn’t be made to suffer for all of eternity. Insofar as the view conflicts with that judgment, I can know it to be false.

Second, it conflicts with the judgment that suffering in ordinary cases is bad. Ethan’s view is that most people go to hell. Even the people who don’t go to hell deserve to. But deserved suffering is good. By this standard, it seems that all else equal, we should want there to be more suffering in the world. Whoever invented anesthetic did a terrible thing—reducing suffering. Cluster headaches and even torture inflict 0% of the suffering that their victims deserve. When you prevent this kind of suffering, by this standard, you are doing something very bad. You are preventing deserved suffering.

Imagine a criminal justice system that treated people this way. If people masturbated, they got tortured in the most brutal way imaginable. On Ethan’s view, it’s hard to see what would be wrong about this. If anything, it would be too lenient because it would only inflict upon people 0% of what they deserve.

Now, here’s one possible response: perhaps it’s not up to us to punish people for their crimes against God. While people deserve infinite punishment, we don’t have the right to inflict it. It’s a bit unclear precisely why this would be—the state has the right to punish all sorts of offenses retributively. Why couldn’t it punish infinitely severe offenses? If someone tortures a child, we don’t ordinarily think that it isn’t up to us to punish them. Yet on Ethan’s view, we all actually merit infinitely more suffering than people standardly think child abusers merit—for people generally think child abusers only merit finite punishment.

In addition, even if you cannot rightly punish those who merit infinite punishment, it at least seems wrong to benefit those deserving infinite punishment. It would be wrong to bake a cake for Hitler, because he doesn’t deserve a cake. So it seems if we applied this consistently, we’d get a general prohibition on doing nice things for people.

Lastly, the view seems to imply that suffering is good, even if we’re not justified in carrying it out. If Hitler suffers, on the standard view according to which he deserves suffering, that is good even if private actors aren’t licensed to punish him. So this view seems to imply that suffering is, in general, a good thing. And if suffering is good, then we shouldn’t try to prevent it.

I think we can reject this view as self-evidently wrong. Think about some time you suffered really intensely. Is it at all plausible that this was a great thing? Is it plausible that if the suffering was more intense and lasted forever, that would be very good?

Here’s one last worry about Ethan’s argument: it seems to imply that it would be permissible to punish us in hell to any arbitrary degree. If we merit infinite punishment, then no matter how much we suffer, we’ll never have gotten what we deserve. By this standard, then, God could permissibly make every second in hell contain toolbox killer-level torture (if you find that intuitive, I encourage you to read more about what they did to their victims).

In fact, God could permissibly make our suffering start out as more intense than all the suffering collectively experienced so far in human history, and have its intensity double every millisecond. In fact, even if he did this, it would be too lenient—there would be no single time during which we’d ever have gotten any fraction of what we truly deserve.

I accept that we’re a lot worse morally than we tend to think. But surely this is not plausible. Surely no one could deserve this kind of thing. And if we are this rotten—so that even the best of us have such darkened hearts that we merit infinite torture—it’s unclear why God would go about making us in the first place. It doesn’t seem one should create a class of beings that are each so wretched that they merit infinite punishment.

Even setting aside these moral intuitions, I find there to be something theoretically inelegant about this account. Humans are complex, having both good impulses and bad ones. It would be a bit odd if this patterned behavior—neither fully dark nor fully light—merited simple unending torture. And if it does, if we really are so bad that we should be tortured forever, allowing anyone into heaven seems deeply immoral. If Hitler deserves infinite suffering, you shouldn’t grant him infinite reward. If we deserve infinite suffering, you shouldn’t grant us infinite reward!

Before I turn to Ethan’s second argument, I feel there’s a hubris that lots of non-infernalists have when it comes to infernalism. We feel as though we are sane and enlightened—opposed to suffering, correctly recognizing that torment is a terrible thing. But I want to remind everyone: torturous suffering lives on earth today as a result of ordinary people’s meat consumption, and years of it can be stopped for a dollar.

The callousness that we display toward non-human animals is every bit as extreme as the callousness of the infernalists. Concerning indifference to suffering, we’d do well to focus on our own malfeasance before chiding our infernalist neighbors. Hell lives on earth today. It is in our power to stop it. We all ought to do considerably more.

Sorry for the proselytizing about animals, returning to hell, Ethan tries to debunk our contrary moral intuitions by noting that they’re not shared by various smart and virtuous people. This, Ethan claims, should make us treat our moral intuitions as merely defeasible evidence. This evidence is then outweighed by the amazingly awesome evidence for Catholic miracles—evidence that’s good for a Bayes factor of 10^60, apparently. Ethan thinks that the odds of having evidence as good as the evidence for Catholic miracles, given atheism, are about equal to the odds of throwing an atom-sized dart across earth randomly and then hitting any particular atom—then winning a 10,000,000,000 person lottery.

Now, suffice it to say, I disagree that the evidence for Catholic miracles is that good. I think no evidence for anything is ever that good. As an atheist, on priors, I would be a lot more surprised to win the 10 billion person lottery and hit a random atom on earth than to have reports of some hard-to-explain healings. And I haven’t been much impressed by the one Catholic miracle I’ve seriously investigated (though I am a bit spooked by Padre Pio—some skeptic should really do a deep dive on him). But for what it’s worth, I agree that if you have evidence that’s good for a Bayes factor of 10^60, that is more than enough to overcome pre-existing moral objections.

Here’s a first reason I don’t buy Ethan’s skeptical argument against trusting anti-Catholic moral intuitions: I think it applies just as much in the non-moral domain. If I should distrust my moral intuitions because smart people don’t have them, then surely Ethan should distrust his photogrammetric analysis of the Fatima photographs when smart people disagree with him. Similarly, he should distrust his extreme confidence that Padre Pio did miracles, when other smart people who have examined the evidence disagree.

I am a lot more confident in my ability to do philosophy than to investigate miracles. So if there’s a conflict between philosophical judgments and miracle-investigating, I’ll generally favor the philosophical evidence. In any case, skeptical arguments cut both ways. The judgment “God wouldn’t torture people forever” seems a lot more straightforward than anything about Padre Pio!

Second, the judgments that I’m giving aren’t exactly contentious judgments rejected by large numbers of people. They’re things like “suffering is bad,” “it’s good, all else equal, for people to have less painful surgeries rather than more painful ones,” “if you got tortured the way the toolbox killers tortured their victims for all of eternity, that would be bad,” and “it’s good to help people and bad to hurt them.”

Even the judgment that people deserve to suffer forever in hell is one that, as best I can tell, virtually no non-religious person has ever endorsed. I’m not very impressed if people endorse some crazy moral judgment because they are religiously committed to it. That tells us little about how counterintuitive it is. People can talk themselves into anything.

My final point is the one that moves me the most but I find hardest to defend: sometimes some verdict is sufficiently clear that you can simply see that you are right and those who reject it are wrong. Suppose, for instance, that I was sent back in time to America in the 1830s. Those around me insisted in large numbers that people with black skin simply were intrinsically less morally important. Even if learned people who were otherwise virtuous were split between my judgment and theirs, I would still be justified in believing with great confidence that they were wrong. It’s just so clear!

Similarly, Bryan Caplan thinks that the badness of one’s pain depends on how smart they are. Bryan is a smart guy—but if he and I were the only people on earth to form judgments on this matter, I could still be confident that he was wrong. Sometimes you can just see that you’re right, even if you can’t convince other people. I feel the same about the judgment that it would be wrong for a perfect being to make people suffer intensely for all time. When I think about that judgment, I just know it’s correct.

Here’s one way of motivating this: the idea that you should take seriously ethical disagreement from other smart people depends on philosophical assumptions. And sure enough, these are plausible assumptions. But they’re way less plausible than the assumption “it’s wrong to make people suffer forever—and having most people suffer forever wouldn’t be part of a perfect divine plan.” So if I’m forced to choose between the two, I’d give up almost any conceivable judgment about peer disagreement long before believing in an eternal hell that most people go to at the hands of a perfect God.

There are other moral judgments that Ethan believes in which I think I can know are false in the same way. For example, if I know anything about ethics, I know that it would be right to use contraception in order to prevent everyone on earth from being tortured for a million years. That judgment is sufficiently clear that even if smart and holy people disagreed with it, I wouldn’t give it up. If Ethan can hold that his reading of the miracle evidence is certain to be right, even though peers disagree with him, I don’t see why I can’t say the same about other obvious moral judgments.

Now, this should only be an option of last resort. In general, you should be worried about declaring any contentious moral view you have to be self-evident—and not changing it even in the face of strong contrary argument. But some things really are self-evident, and that God wouldn’t torture people for infinite time is one of them.