Good post. But the problem you pinpoint afflicts every alternative to universalism, not just infernalism. Even if unbelieving adults will simply be annihilated, for example, it’s still infinitely better (in expectation) for people to die in infancy (assuming they’ll be saved if they do).
EDIT: Although, the view that infants are annihilated (perhaps painlessly) after death is much, much more plausible than the view that they’re tormented forever after death. So, annihilationists may be able to escape the problem by saying that all non-believers are annihilated. At least, they can do so more easily than infernalists can.
I have a Christian friend who is an annihilationist, and he believes exactly this: that people who have never heard the gospel, the mentally handicapped, and babies and small children will be annihilated; it is not as good as universalism, but it is better than an eternity of suffering.
In addition, universalists have another problem (I could be wrong): many of them, I don't know if all of them, say that people will go through a purgatory before entering heaven, proportional to the unethical acts done on earth; but let's analyze X, he is a person who believes in universalism and is young, he is 20 years old, considering that suicide is not unethical, if he has:
If he kills himself at 20 years old: punishment in purgatory proportional to a quantity Y of unethical acts
Dying later: punishment in purgatory proportional to a quantity Y + Z of unethical acts
If the person wants to reduce his own suffering, it would be better to kill himself as soon as possible
There may be objections, such as that if he lived longer, X would have "compensated" for his unethical acts and therefore spent less time in purgatory, or that suicide is in all cases morally wrong, or suicide in this specific case of trying to spend as little time as possible in purgatory is morally wrong, or that purgatory does not exist
I agree that this is a good objection to infernalism (it sometimes gets called informally the Torquemada Problem - why not torture the body if it saves the soul?). But Infernalism is not alone in having trouble with the 'babies dying is bad' judgment. If babies go to heaven when they die, it's hard to slice things in a way that makes their dying bad. Probably hopeless from an impersonal/axiological perspective, unless we appeal to something like incomparability between earthly and heavenly goods (which seems implausible). Potentially easier if we wonder whether babies dying is bad _for me_. But plausibly the infernalist can secure that too.
If they don't wake up in heaven immediately after dying, but instead are kept unconscious until some hypothetical Judgment Day, then their loss of earthly life is an uncompensated loss of a positive good. Of course, you can then ask why it's morally permissible for God to allow that instead of granting dead people immediate reward and not wasting potentially thousands of years of their time spent in torpor, but I'm sure a bunch of theists will say things like "it allows for more morally significant choices on Earth" or something.
I still can’t believe I once thought infernalism (traditionalism) and Calvinism were perfectly acceptable. One of the main reasons I eventually rejected Calvinist theology was the realization that, in embracing it, I would be required to worship and obey a God who exhaustively determines every evil action, thought, and emotion. In the biblical narrative, the devil is portrayed as a horrific being, but if Calvinism were true, then God would be worse, since he would have determined not only all human evil but also the devil’s.
And if that weren’t bad enough, imagine that this same God chose to damn almost everyone, human or demon, to eternal torment. The God of deterministic Calvinism seems to represent the worst theological picture one could conceive.
Even after abandoning Calvinism, I still held on to traditionalism, but that didn’t make sense either. You can’t rationally reject the eternal torment of innocent conscious beings while defending the same fate for non-innocent ones. Sure, it might be worse to torture innocent people than morally responsible ones, but eternal torture in any case seems like one of the most morally indefensible ideas imaginables.
In my defense, I can only say that I was not using my rational faculties. At that time in my life, I was blinded by theological commitments to biblicism and by my cultural upbringing. But if you do what any responsible theologian should, allow reason and lived experience to inform your faith, you will likely find yourself closer to Jesus and farther from doctrines that seem to come straight from the pit of hell.
Do you think we could paint Calvinism in a more plausible light? Presumably, Calvinists are compatibilists about free will, so they think causal determinism is compatible with free will. Even though God “exhaustively determines every evil action, thought, and emotion,” we are still responsible for these evil actions. Since God determines every action people do, he causes them to sin such that they become guilty of sin deserving eternal torment. But given compatibilism, the damned are really responsible for their sins even though God made those sins happen. This view of responsibility may sound strange, but if compatibilism is true, it’s not clear to me how one would object.
First, I reject compatibilism as an acceptable view of moral responsibility. I endorse the Consequence Argument against compatibilism as a powerful defeater. Premise 1: If determinism is true, then whatever occurs, including our actions, is the consequence of the past and the laws of nature. And we have no control over those antecedent facts or the laws themselves. Premise 2: If something is entirely the consequence of factors outside our control, then it isn’t up to us what happens. (A foundational modal‑control premise.) Conclusion: Therefore, if determinism is true, our actions are not up to us, and we lack free will. There are, I think, several successful arguments against compatibilism.
Second, you’re quite right that Calvinism typically embraces divine determinism and a compatibilist account of free will. The challenge is to assess whether, assuming compatibilism is coherent, Calvinism’s implications for moral responsibility, especially concerning damnation, can still be rendered plausible. Coherence is not the same as moral plausibility. It is deeply counterintuitive to think that God could cause someone to sin, render that sin inescapable, and then punish them eternally for doing precisely what he determined they must do. This seems to violate our moral intuitions about justice and blame. Even if the sinner is “responsible” in a compatibilist sense, what becomes of God’s moral character? On Calvinism, God decrees every sinful thought and act and yet punishes people for sins he caused them to commit. Compatibilism might save human responsibility, but it does so by making God the author of evil, undermining divine goodness.
>Premise 2: If something is entirely the consequence of factors outside our control, then it isn’t up to us what happens. (A foundational modal‑control premise.)
This just begs the question, as it's a denial of the compatibilist theory. This isn't an argument that defeats compatibilism. An argument that defeats compatibilism would be one where this premise is the conclusion and some reasoning is provided for reaching the conclusion. As it stands, you've just said that you don't define free will in a compatibilist friendly way.
You're right that the second premise of the Consequence Argument needs more than mere assertion. But this isn’t just a definitional stipulation against compatibilism; it’s a claim with independent plausibility rooted in our ordinary understanding of moral responsibility. When we say someone is responsible for an action, we mean that they could have done otherwise in a robust sense, that they were the genuine source of alternatives. If determinism is true, then everything we do is fixed by the past and the laws of nature, things we had no hand in creating or choosing. Our desires, beliefs, and decisions, though internal, would still be shaped entirely by those external conditions. The compatibilist might respond that we’re still free so long as we act on our own desires, without external coercion. But if those desires were themselves determined by prior causes outside of us, how does that make us truly responsible? It’s like calling a puppet free because it moves according to its strings. To say that something is “up to you” in the morally relevant sense is to say that you could have done otherwise, even with the same initial conditions. So, far from begging the question, the modal-control premise is what gives the notion of moral responsibility its depth. Without it, “responsibility” becomes a hollow label for actions we were causally compelled to perform.
>rooted in our ordinary understanding of moral responsibility. When we say someone is responsible for an action, we mean that they could have done otherwise in a robust sense, that they were the genuine source of alternatives.
>To say that something is “up to you” in the morally relevant sense is to say that you could have done otherwise, even with the same initial conditions.
These are a series of empirical claims about how an unspecified group of people use language without any empirical evidence cited. In my experience most people don't have a robust or even any theoretical conception of "responsibility" because they don't need one to successfully communicate with one another, in the same way people historically didn't need to be committed to the germ or miasma or four humors theory of disease to meaningfully communicate about being sick.
You're right that we shouldn’t assume what most people think without evidence, but that’s not what I’m doing. My argument isn’t sociological, it’s conceptual. I’m not saying “the average person on the street defines responsibility this way.” I’m arguing that when we think seriously about what moral responsibility actually means, it involves the idea that someone could have done otherwise. That’s not a guess about common usage, it’s a claim about what makes the concept coherent.
Just as people could talk meaningfully about “health” long before they had a germ theory, people also talk about “responsibility” without philosophical training. But that doesn’t mean the concept has no structure. I’m trying to make that structure explicit: if your actions were determined by forces you never controlled and couldn’t change, then in what meaningful sense are they up to you?
So I’m not relying on an empirical claim, I’m defending an interpretation of the concept of responsibility that I think best explains why we treat people as responsible in the first place. If someone wants to deny that responsibility requires real alternatives, they owe us an account of how moral praise or blame is still justified when nothing else was ever possible.
You’re arguing that a descriptive claim (shrimp suffer in an important way comparable to humans/eternal hell is real) simply *cannot* be true because of the moral claim that it would imply (shrimp suffering is one of the most important things in the world/we should murder babies).
But as you have persuasively argued yourself in the former case, that’s exactly backwards; we should reason from our empirical beliefs to our normative ones, and not rule out otherwise plausible empirical claims because of their unpalatable moral implications.
It's a matter of coherence: If Scripture implies that we should kill babies, that would be a problem because Scripture also teaches that we should not kill babies.
I mean that doesn’t *seem* to be what BB is actually saying. Or at least, not all he’s saying. He starts out plausibly talking about Christian belief in particular, but he goes on to make what seems clearly a broader point. Note for example:
> Second, this fails to address the core challenge. Of course it’s wrong to kill babies! That much is obvious. The worry for infernalists is that it seems their doctrine implies that it would be good to kill babies.
This seems to be quite explicitly the argument I accuse him of making, although I did read the article during a busy work day so if I’ve missed something there I’d be happy to be corrected.
Not if the hypothesis specifies that god is morally good — if that’s a claim the theist antecedently accepts, then we obviously lower our credences in any doctrine that has morally repugnant implications.
I think you're absolutely right here, but I'm not sure it's only believers in eternal hell who face this problem. Shouldn't universalists who believe everyone goes to heaven or is otherwise redeemed also consider it better for every single person that they die immediately? They should at least consider killing babies, who haven't sinned yet and would therefore avoid any purgatorial punishment before receiving their reward.
I think it's less of a problem for universalists because God, apparently, thinks it's beneficial for some people to go through life before death. I don't know why. But it doesn't seem hard to think of plausible reasons. (Maybe Bentham's Bulldog will do a post listing some of these!) It just doesn't seem like nearly as much is at stake.
In any event, the argument that it's immoral to take this choice into our hands seems a lot more compelling in this case.
Do you consider the truth of consequentialism itself to be an objection to Christianity? It seems to me that you are pretty convinced that consequentialism is true. It also seems like if Christianity is true, consequentialism is not true—at least, that is what my Christian philosopher friends have said, that consequentialism is incompatible with Jesus's teachings. That feels like a modus tollens for you, but I'm curious if you feel this way!
Some commenters have asked: given universalism about salvation, why not kill everyone now? The universalist can say that God has reasons for letting people go through a complete life. Let me draw an analogy to infernalism. For the infernalist who accepts infant salvation, why not kill infants? But why can’t the infernalist likewise say that God has reasons for letting people live a complete life even if God’s reasons are not known to us? The disanalogy is that on infernalism, adults have a significant chance of going to hell upon death.
On either universalism or infernalism, we might think it would have been best for God to have created everyone already in heaven to avoid earthly suffering. But God didn’t do that, so both views presumably admit that God has reasons for allowing the possibility of worldly suffering. Here, the infernalist goes further than the universalist. The infernalist adds that God has reasons for allowing the possibility of an eternal hell in addition to suffering during one’s physical lifetime (perhaps punishment in hell is sometimes demanded by God’s justice).
You might object to God’s allowing the possibility of eternity in hell, but that would be an independent objection to the eternality of hell as such. I’m saying that given the eternality of hell, it seems like the infernalist’s response isn’t too different from the universalist’s response.
> While God commanding one not to kill means that one should not kill babies, it does not provide an explanation of why killing babies is wrong if there’s an eternal hell.
“But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”
I would affirm a mixture of solutions. I’m probably willing to bite the bullet that its possible that many infants are unsaved. If the doors to hell are locked from the inside, then they would presumably be instantly have their intellegences advanced to where they can reject God. They would have less individual characteristics that they would have gained in life, but also less sins to be punished for. As an annihilationist, without any active sins, they probably would be destroyed instantly.
If you believe that God elects believers, then you would say that he uses the means of grace to regenerate any he chooses. When it comes to infants, most of the time he will use the normal means of grace such as baptism and the word of God to impart faith on children of members of the covenant community or those inducted into the church generally.
If children outside the covenant community are saved (and I hope and expect they will in many cases) then it will be because God uses extraordinary means of grace to convert them. But because I a) think those extraordinary means will be available to adult non-Christians as well and b) can’t 100% prove those means will be used for any given person, I cannot assume that dying in infancy is a necessary advantage for salvation.
A few final thoughts. First, if God determines who will be saved and what means of grace will be used to convert them, why bother? Well because we can cooperate with the plans of God to help his glory be expressed in the world. We follow his commandments of evangelism and not murdering for this reason. Second, mass murder of infants would result in less future people. Maybe the only reason why God lets some of us live to adulthood is for us to beget more people for him to convert a million years from now.
Finally if everyone murdered children, it would sear our conscience because we’d be acting in opposition to God’s command to not kill. We’d all be damned, which would in the long term be pretty bad for the whole salvation project.
Obviously, this article is extremely persuasive. Equally obviously, a lot of people (claim to) believe in an eternal hell.
I've never met you personally but, from what I've read, I feel confident in saying that you would not have written this article if you believed it was unpersuasive or if you believed that it would lead to a rash of baby murders (or even shrimp murders!). Also, I'm sure you're not so naive to think that people will give up religious views because of something they read on a blog.
So, what follows?
Do you think people who claim to believe in eternal hell don't actually believe what they say they believe? Or... something else?
Shouldn't the universalist also be saddled with a problem of killing babies/people in general, because doing so would be guaranteed to get them to heaven sooner? This life has suffering; heaven is eternal bliss. So the sooner you send people there, the better, right?
It is really bizarre that when Augustine was faced with the choice between infant damnation and universalism, he explicitly chose infant damnation, and then most people followed him.
An extension of the issue about infants is, of course, fetuses. What's wrong with abortion? Isn't miscarriage good? Shouldn't people who believe human life starts at conception be researching technology to produce as many fertilized embryos as possible and then immediately dispose of them so they can all go straight to heaven?
I think universalism leads to a comparably troubling conclusion - if everyone goes to heaven, then it’s never a good idea to save anyone’s life, and in fact, we should all die as quickly as possible (without doing anything that might jeopardize our ticket to heaven, like directly committing murder or suicide). That way we waste as little time here as possible.
So the optimal life would be one that is maximally reckless while still being free from sin, and which does as little as possible to extend the lives of others (and shortens them whenever the opportunity to do so arises without breaking the rules).
This may seem absurd at first, but it offers a concise and perfect explanation for widespread contemporary attitudes toward climate change, nuclear war, and the tobacco industry
I think the best response to this is actually to accept a pretty traditional understanding of what heaven is and why purgatory is necessary. If the real substance of heaven is the beatific vision itself, and the beatific vision is only possible for a person of Christlike virtue, it's not clear that living, even if that living involves bad deeds, necessarily distances you from the ultimate end goal.
An infant has no guilt, but also no virtue, and virtue must be developed, either here or in purgatory, before one can attain the beatific vision.
Well, if purgatory exists and is adequate to help the young (or even unborn) develop virtue from scratch, one wonders what the point is of life! If soul creation, refinement, and the subsequent beatific vision can all happen outside the observable world, reality is basically vestigial at that point - there’s no need for it!
And perhaps there’s no direct contradiction in positing that God creates the material world unnecessarily and sends some folks there for seemingly-random amounts of time - or perhaps we can cook up some reason why it’s better for him to do that - but this account of the cosmos seems, to me, to explain very little about why the world is the way it is. On this account it’s highly surprising that there’s a material world at all, really.
I would probably respond to that by not committing to the claim that "purgatory" is a radically different kind of existence than this world. My personal favorite universalist, George MacDonald seems to basically believe in reincarnation as "purgatory".
Purgatory is not necessary at all. The sinless do not need to undergo any purgation. Since babies are sinless, they can directly access the beatific vision.
But more generally, God, being omnipotent can infuse a person with virtue just by fiat — after all, given that virtue is a disposition and we all have an innate disposition for goodness that we didn't develop by any experiences or choices of our own, there is nothing stopping God from opting for direct virtue-infusion.
Now one might argue that perhaps God has chosen to use purgatory to develop his creatures' virtue instead of directly infusing them, but then the traditionalist can say that perhaps God has also chosen such that only those who live good lives will attain to the beatific vision, and the rest will never attain it. After all, no creature _deserves_ the beatific vision.
My understanding is that the beatific vision is traditionally thought of as the purpose for which humans are created to begin with, so attaining or not attaining it is quite different from other accidental circumstances of life.
A human who attains the beatific vision after millions of years of struggle and setbacks is ultimately a successful creation. A human who never attains it is ultimately a failed creation.
Let's assume the beatific vision is the purpose of human life. Why then don't we immediately attain to it? It's entirely possible for God to infuse human beings with incorruptible virtue and perfect noetic sight right from conception (after all, that is the traditional view of the sacred humanity of Jesus).
As to why no human being (indeed, no creature) can deserve the beatific vision, this is because creatures by their very nature have only a contingent relation to the Good. Their flourishing is only contingent upon the cooperation of others (and also their own wills). Given this, no creature can be such that God owes it to them (or to himself) to give them an unfailing mode of flourishing. That God has deigned to appoint humans to the dignity of becoming gods by cooperation with grace is a privilege, not a right. And like all privileges, it is one that can be lost forever.
Good post. But the problem you pinpoint afflicts every alternative to universalism, not just infernalism. Even if unbelieving adults will simply be annihilated, for example, it’s still infinitely better (in expectation) for people to die in infancy (assuming they’ll be saved if they do).
EDIT: Although, the view that infants are annihilated (perhaps painlessly) after death is much, much more plausible than the view that they’re tormented forever after death. So, annihilationists may be able to escape the problem by saying that all non-believers are annihilated. At least, they can do so more easily than infernalists can.
I have a Christian friend who is an annihilationist, and he believes exactly this: that people who have never heard the gospel, the mentally handicapped, and babies and small children will be annihilated; it is not as good as universalism, but it is better than an eternity of suffering.
In addition, universalists have another problem (I could be wrong): many of them, I don't know if all of them, say that people will go through a purgatory before entering heaven, proportional to the unethical acts done on earth; but let's analyze X, he is a person who believes in universalism and is young, he is 20 years old, considering that suicide is not unethical, if he has:
If he kills himself at 20 years old: punishment in purgatory proportional to a quantity Y of unethical acts
Dying later: punishment in purgatory proportional to a quantity Y + Z of unethical acts
If the person wants to reduce his own suffering, it would be better to kill himself as soon as possible
There may be objections, such as that if he lived longer, X would have "compensated" for his unethical acts and therefore spent less time in purgatory, or that suicide is in all cases morally wrong, or suicide in this specific case of trying to spend as little time as possible in purgatory is morally wrong, or that purgatory does not exist
I agree that this is a good objection to infernalism (it sometimes gets called informally the Torquemada Problem - why not torture the body if it saves the soul?). But Infernalism is not alone in having trouble with the 'babies dying is bad' judgment. If babies go to heaven when they die, it's hard to slice things in a way that makes their dying bad. Probably hopeless from an impersonal/axiological perspective, unless we appeal to something like incomparability between earthly and heavenly goods (which seems implausible). Potentially easier if we wonder whether babies dying is bad _for me_. But plausibly the infernalist can secure that too.
If they don't wake up in heaven immediately after dying, but instead are kept unconscious until some hypothetical Judgment Day, then their loss of earthly life is an uncompensated loss of a positive good. Of course, you can then ask why it's morally permissible for God to allow that instead of granting dead people immediate reward and not wasting potentially thousands of years of their time spent in torpor, but I'm sure a bunch of theists will say things like "it allows for more morally significant choices on Earth" or something.
Plausibly life in earth could enrich your experience in heaven
That's a common thought, but the details get tricky quickly. I wrote on something similar here.
https://dkfrubio.substack.com/p/putting-afterlives-on-a-par
I still can’t believe I once thought infernalism (traditionalism) and Calvinism were perfectly acceptable. One of the main reasons I eventually rejected Calvinist theology was the realization that, in embracing it, I would be required to worship and obey a God who exhaustively determines every evil action, thought, and emotion. In the biblical narrative, the devil is portrayed as a horrific being, but if Calvinism were true, then God would be worse, since he would have determined not only all human evil but also the devil’s.
And if that weren’t bad enough, imagine that this same God chose to damn almost everyone, human or demon, to eternal torment. The God of deterministic Calvinism seems to represent the worst theological picture one could conceive.
Even after abandoning Calvinism, I still held on to traditionalism, but that didn’t make sense either. You can’t rationally reject the eternal torment of innocent conscious beings while defending the same fate for non-innocent ones. Sure, it might be worse to torture innocent people than morally responsible ones, but eternal torture in any case seems like one of the most morally indefensible ideas imaginables.
In my defense, I can only say that I was not using my rational faculties. At that time in my life, I was blinded by theological commitments to biblicism and by my cultural upbringing. But if you do what any responsible theologian should, allow reason and lived experience to inform your faith, you will likely find yourself closer to Jesus and farther from doctrines that seem to come straight from the pit of hell.
Do you think we could paint Calvinism in a more plausible light? Presumably, Calvinists are compatibilists about free will, so they think causal determinism is compatible with free will. Even though God “exhaustively determines every evil action, thought, and emotion,” we are still responsible for these evil actions. Since God determines every action people do, he causes them to sin such that they become guilty of sin deserving eternal torment. But given compatibilism, the damned are really responsible for their sins even though God made those sins happen. This view of responsibility may sound strange, but if compatibilism is true, it’s not clear to me how one would object.
A few points:
First, I reject compatibilism as an acceptable view of moral responsibility. I endorse the Consequence Argument against compatibilism as a powerful defeater. Premise 1: If determinism is true, then whatever occurs, including our actions, is the consequence of the past and the laws of nature. And we have no control over those antecedent facts or the laws themselves. Premise 2: If something is entirely the consequence of factors outside our control, then it isn’t up to us what happens. (A foundational modal‑control premise.) Conclusion: Therefore, if determinism is true, our actions are not up to us, and we lack free will. There are, I think, several successful arguments against compatibilism.
Second, you’re quite right that Calvinism typically embraces divine determinism and a compatibilist account of free will. The challenge is to assess whether, assuming compatibilism is coherent, Calvinism’s implications for moral responsibility, especially concerning damnation, can still be rendered plausible. Coherence is not the same as moral plausibility. It is deeply counterintuitive to think that God could cause someone to sin, render that sin inescapable, and then punish them eternally for doing precisely what he determined they must do. This seems to violate our moral intuitions about justice and blame. Even if the sinner is “responsible” in a compatibilist sense, what becomes of God’s moral character? On Calvinism, God decrees every sinful thought and act and yet punishes people for sins he caused them to commit. Compatibilism might save human responsibility, but it does so by making God the author of evil, undermining divine goodness.
>Premise 2: If something is entirely the consequence of factors outside our control, then it isn’t up to us what happens. (A foundational modal‑control premise.)
This just begs the question, as it's a denial of the compatibilist theory. This isn't an argument that defeats compatibilism. An argument that defeats compatibilism would be one where this premise is the conclusion and some reasoning is provided for reaching the conclusion. As it stands, you've just said that you don't define free will in a compatibilist friendly way.
You're right that the second premise of the Consequence Argument needs more than mere assertion. But this isn’t just a definitional stipulation against compatibilism; it’s a claim with independent plausibility rooted in our ordinary understanding of moral responsibility. When we say someone is responsible for an action, we mean that they could have done otherwise in a robust sense, that they were the genuine source of alternatives. If determinism is true, then everything we do is fixed by the past and the laws of nature, things we had no hand in creating or choosing. Our desires, beliefs, and decisions, though internal, would still be shaped entirely by those external conditions. The compatibilist might respond that we’re still free so long as we act on our own desires, without external coercion. But if those desires were themselves determined by prior causes outside of us, how does that make us truly responsible? It’s like calling a puppet free because it moves according to its strings. To say that something is “up to you” in the morally relevant sense is to say that you could have done otherwise, even with the same initial conditions. So, far from begging the question, the modal-control premise is what gives the notion of moral responsibility its depth. Without it, “responsibility” becomes a hollow label for actions we were causally compelled to perform.
>rooted in our ordinary understanding of moral responsibility. When we say someone is responsible for an action, we mean that they could have done otherwise in a robust sense, that they were the genuine source of alternatives.
>To say that something is “up to you” in the morally relevant sense is to say that you could have done otherwise, even with the same initial conditions.
These are a series of empirical claims about how an unspecified group of people use language without any empirical evidence cited. In my experience most people don't have a robust or even any theoretical conception of "responsibility" because they don't need one to successfully communicate with one another, in the same way people historically didn't need to be committed to the germ or miasma or four humors theory of disease to meaningfully communicate about being sick.
You're right that we shouldn’t assume what most people think without evidence, but that’s not what I’m doing. My argument isn’t sociological, it’s conceptual. I’m not saying “the average person on the street defines responsibility this way.” I’m arguing that when we think seriously about what moral responsibility actually means, it involves the idea that someone could have done otherwise. That’s not a guess about common usage, it’s a claim about what makes the concept coherent.
Just as people could talk meaningfully about “health” long before they had a germ theory, people also talk about “responsibility” without philosophical training. But that doesn’t mean the concept has no structure. I’m trying to make that structure explicit: if your actions were determined by forces you never controlled and couldn’t change, then in what meaningful sense are they up to you?
So I’m not relying on an empirical claim, I’m defending an interpretation of the concept of responsibility that I think best explains why we treat people as responsible in the first place. If someone wants to deny that responsibility requires real alternatives, they owe us an account of how moral praise or blame is still justified when nothing else was ever possible.
Aren’t you just doing a Lyman Stone here?
You’re arguing that a descriptive claim (shrimp suffer in an important way comparable to humans/eternal hell is real) simply *cannot* be true because of the moral claim that it would imply (shrimp suffering is one of the most important things in the world/we should murder babies).
But as you have persuasively argued yourself in the former case, that’s exactly backwards; we should reason from our empirical beliefs to our normative ones, and not rule out otherwise plausible empirical claims because of their unpalatable moral implications.
What is the difference here?
It's a matter of coherence: If Scripture implies that we should kill babies, that would be a problem because Scripture also teaches that we should not kill babies.
I mean that doesn’t *seem* to be what BB is actually saying. Or at least, not all he’s saying. He starts out plausibly talking about Christian belief in particular, but he goes on to make what seems clearly a broader point. Note for example:
> Second, this fails to address the core challenge. Of course it’s wrong to kill babies! That much is obvious. The worry for infernalists is that it seems their doctrine implies that it would be good to kill babies.
This seems to be quite explicitly the argument I accuse him of making, although I did read the article during a busy work day so if I’ve missed something there I’d be happy to be corrected.
Leave coherence behind and join the contradiction club!
Not if the hypothesis specifies that god is morally good — if that’s a claim the theist antecedently accepts, then we obviously lower our credences in any doctrine that has morally repugnant implications.
It is fantastic to see another substacker critiquing Infernalism! Looking forward to reading more of your posts!
Knowing that Bentham's Bulldog has read some (perhaps even quite a bit of?) DBH brings me great joy.
Oh tons! I read that all can be saved.
You Are Gods is also very good on topics like this
I think you're absolutely right here, but I'm not sure it's only believers in eternal hell who face this problem. Shouldn't universalists who believe everyone goes to heaven or is otherwise redeemed also consider it better for every single person that they die immediately? They should at least consider killing babies, who haven't sinned yet and would therefore avoid any purgatorial punishment before receiving their reward.
I think it's less of a problem for universalists because God, apparently, thinks it's beneficial for some people to go through life before death. I don't know why. But it doesn't seem hard to think of plausible reasons. (Maybe Bentham's Bulldog will do a post listing some of these!) It just doesn't seem like nearly as much is at stake.
In any event, the argument that it's immoral to take this choice into our hands seems a lot more compelling in this case.
Do you consider the truth of consequentialism itself to be an objection to Christianity? It seems to me that you are pretty convinced that consequentialism is true. It also seems like if Christianity is true, consequentialism is not true—at least, that is what my Christian philosopher friends have said, that consequentialism is incompatible with Jesus's teachings. That feels like a modus tollens for you, but I'm curious if you feel this way!
Some commenters have asked: given universalism about salvation, why not kill everyone now? The universalist can say that God has reasons for letting people go through a complete life. Let me draw an analogy to infernalism. For the infernalist who accepts infant salvation, why not kill infants? But why can’t the infernalist likewise say that God has reasons for letting people live a complete life even if God’s reasons are not known to us? The disanalogy is that on infernalism, adults have a significant chance of going to hell upon death.
On either universalism or infernalism, we might think it would have been best for God to have created everyone already in heaven to avoid earthly suffering. But God didn’t do that, so both views presumably admit that God has reasons for allowing the possibility of worldly suffering. Here, the infernalist goes further than the universalist. The infernalist adds that God has reasons for allowing the possibility of an eternal hell in addition to suffering during one’s physical lifetime (perhaps punishment in hell is sometimes demanded by God’s justice).
You might object to God’s allowing the possibility of eternity in hell, but that would be an independent objection to the eternality of hell as such. I’m saying that given the eternality of hell, it seems like the infernalist’s response isn’t too different from the universalist’s response.
> While God commanding one not to kill means that one should not kill babies, it does not provide an explanation of why killing babies is wrong if there’s an eternal hell.
“But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”
Romans 9:20
I would affirm a mixture of solutions. I’m probably willing to bite the bullet that its possible that many infants are unsaved. If the doors to hell are locked from the inside, then they would presumably be instantly have their intellegences advanced to where they can reject God. They would have less individual characteristics that they would have gained in life, but also less sins to be punished for. As an annihilationist, without any active sins, they probably would be destroyed instantly.
If you believe that God elects believers, then you would say that he uses the means of grace to regenerate any he chooses. When it comes to infants, most of the time he will use the normal means of grace such as baptism and the word of God to impart faith on children of members of the covenant community or those inducted into the church generally.
If children outside the covenant community are saved (and I hope and expect they will in many cases) then it will be because God uses extraordinary means of grace to convert them. But because I a) think those extraordinary means will be available to adult non-Christians as well and b) can’t 100% prove those means will be used for any given person, I cannot assume that dying in infancy is a necessary advantage for salvation.
A few final thoughts. First, if God determines who will be saved and what means of grace will be used to convert them, why bother? Well because we can cooperate with the plans of God to help his glory be expressed in the world. We follow his commandments of evangelism and not murdering for this reason. Second, mass murder of infants would result in less future people. Maybe the only reason why God lets some of us live to adulthood is for us to beget more people for him to convert a million years from now.
Finally if everyone murdered children, it would sear our conscience because we’d be acting in opposition to God’s command to not kill. We’d all be damned, which would in the long term be pretty bad for the whole salvation project.
Thank you for this.
I have a weird meta-question/observation.
Obviously, this article is extremely persuasive. Equally obviously, a lot of people (claim to) believe in an eternal hell.
I've never met you personally but, from what I've read, I feel confident in saying that you would not have written this article if you believed it was unpersuasive or if you believed that it would lead to a rash of baby murders (or even shrimp murders!). Also, I'm sure you're not so naive to think that people will give up religious views because of something they read on a blog.
So, what follows?
Do you think people who claim to believe in eternal hell don't actually believe what they say they believe? Or... something else?
Fact checkers have confirmed that BB, leader of the EA movement, is in fact pro baby killing
Shouldn't the universalist also be saddled with a problem of killing babies/people in general, because doing so would be guaranteed to get them to heaven sooner? This life has suffering; heaven is eternal bliss. So the sooner you send people there, the better, right?
Eternal Hell is probably the least probable commonly held belief imo, conditional on ‘Eternity’ being unlikely and ‘Torturous hell’ even less so.
It is really bizarre that when Augustine was faced with the choice between infant damnation and universalism, he explicitly chose infant damnation, and then most people followed him.
An extension of the issue about infants is, of course, fetuses. What's wrong with abortion? Isn't miscarriage good? Shouldn't people who believe human life starts at conception be researching technology to produce as many fertilized embryos as possible and then immediately dispose of them so they can all go straight to heaven?
I think universalism leads to a comparably troubling conclusion - if everyone goes to heaven, then it’s never a good idea to save anyone’s life, and in fact, we should all die as quickly as possible (without doing anything that might jeopardize our ticket to heaven, like directly committing murder or suicide). That way we waste as little time here as possible.
So the optimal life would be one that is maximally reckless while still being free from sin, and which does as little as possible to extend the lives of others (and shortens them whenever the opportunity to do so arises without breaking the rules).
This may seem absurd at first, but it offers a concise and perfect explanation for widespread contemporary attitudes toward climate change, nuclear war, and the tobacco industry
I think the best response to this is actually to accept a pretty traditional understanding of what heaven is and why purgatory is necessary. If the real substance of heaven is the beatific vision itself, and the beatific vision is only possible for a person of Christlike virtue, it's not clear that living, even if that living involves bad deeds, necessarily distances you from the ultimate end goal.
An infant has no guilt, but also no virtue, and virtue must be developed, either here or in purgatory, before one can attain the beatific vision.
Well, if purgatory exists and is adequate to help the young (or even unborn) develop virtue from scratch, one wonders what the point is of life! If soul creation, refinement, and the subsequent beatific vision can all happen outside the observable world, reality is basically vestigial at that point - there’s no need for it!
And perhaps there’s no direct contradiction in positing that God creates the material world unnecessarily and sends some folks there for seemingly-random amounts of time - or perhaps we can cook up some reason why it’s better for him to do that - but this account of the cosmos seems, to me, to explain very little about why the world is the way it is. On this account it’s highly surprising that there’s a material world at all, really.
I would probably respond to that by not committing to the claim that "purgatory" is a radically different kind of existence than this world. My personal favorite universalist, George MacDonald seems to basically believe in reincarnation as "purgatory".
Purgatory is not necessary at all. The sinless do not need to undergo any purgation. Since babies are sinless, they can directly access the beatific vision.
But more generally, God, being omnipotent can infuse a person with virtue just by fiat — after all, given that virtue is a disposition and we all have an innate disposition for goodness that we didn't develop by any experiences or choices of our own, there is nothing stopping God from opting for direct virtue-infusion.
Now one might argue that perhaps God has chosen to use purgatory to develop his creatures' virtue instead of directly infusing them, but then the traditionalist can say that perhaps God has also chosen such that only those who live good lives will attain to the beatific vision, and the rest will never attain it. After all, no creature _deserves_ the beatific vision.
My understanding is that the beatific vision is traditionally thought of as the purpose for which humans are created to begin with, so attaining or not attaining it is quite different from other accidental circumstances of life.
A human who attains the beatific vision after millions of years of struggle and setbacks is ultimately a successful creation. A human who never attains it is ultimately a failed creation.
Let's assume the beatific vision is the purpose of human life. Why then don't we immediately attain to it? It's entirely possible for God to infuse human beings with incorruptible virtue and perfect noetic sight right from conception (after all, that is the traditional view of the sacred humanity of Jesus).
As to why no human being (indeed, no creature) can deserve the beatific vision, this is because creatures by their very nature have only a contingent relation to the Good. Their flourishing is only contingent upon the cooperation of others (and also their own wills). Given this, no creature can be such that God owes it to them (or to himself) to give them an unfailing mode of flourishing. That God has deigned to appoint humans to the dignity of becoming gods by cooperation with grace is a privilege, not a right. And like all privileges, it is one that can be lost forever.
That does make more sense - somewhat, at least!