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Hell and divine reasons for action

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2009

KYLE SWAN
KYLE SWAN
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore, 3 Arts Link, Singapore 117570 e-mail: phisk@nus.edu.sg
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Abstract

Escapism, a theory of hell proposed by Andrei Buckareff and Allen Plug, explicitly relies on claims about divine reasons for action. However, they say surprisingly little about the general account of reasons for action that would justify the inferences in the argument for escapism. I provide a couple of plausible interpretations of such an account and argue that they help revive the ‘Job objection’ to escapism that Buckareff and Plug had dismissed.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 51 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1. Buckareff, Andrei and Plug, Allen ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’, Religious Studies, 41 (2005), 39–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All in-text references are to this article.

2. Buckareff and Plug point readers to C. S. Lewis The Great Divorce (New York NY: Macmillan, 1946), and Jerry Walls Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

3. This argument is presented, along with explanatory comments in support of the premises, on 42–45 of Buckareff and Plug ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’.

4. The characterization of different versions of universalism as ‘naïve’ and ‘sophisticated’ comes from Murray, Michael ‘Three versions of universalism’, Faith and Philosophy, 16 (1999), 55–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Or consider Robin Williams's character ‘Chris’ in the 1998 film What Dreams May Come, who left a heavenly realm (not considering it something to be grasped?) in order to rescue his wife from hell.

6. Alternatively, continuing to fail to repent and receive the gift of salvation might be considered continuing to sin.

7. An anonymous referee for this journal suggests that my claim is in tension with the lex talionis, but allows that the doctrine may not be an essential component of retributivism. I certainly agree that the lex talionis is not essential to retributivism. Retributivism is a view about what makes punishment justified, appropriate, or required. The view justifies punishment on the basis of the offenders deserving it. The lex talionis provides a kind of metric for determining the amount or character of the punishment offenders should receive. According to the most demanding version, the punishment should reflect the character of the offence by doing to offenders precisely what they have done to their victims. However, this need not be what the lex talionis requires. Many have made the point that it rather establishes the upper limit to the amount or seriousness of punishment in order to avoid further escalation of hostilities. Either way, understood as a way of determining an offender's desert, the lex talionis is a kind of proportionality principle. So there is no tension between my understanding of retributivism and the lex talionis. There could be a tension between the details of the retributive view I say the escapist can accept and the lex talionis, but only if the latter is understood in the most demanding way. Thanks to C. L. Ten for a helpful discussion about punishment theory.

8. David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 460.

9. See Bernard Williams ‘Internal and external reasons’, in Moral Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).

10. Ibid. 103.

11. This is subject to the qualification concerning (4) that the Job objector is not also a naïve universalist.

12. See Stephen Darwall ‘Reasons, motives, and the demands of morality: an introduction’, in Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton (eds) Moral Discourse and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Sobel, David ‘Subjective accounts of reasons for action’, Ethics, 111 (2001), 461–492CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. The reasons are objective in the sense that they depend on how things actually are. However, on subjectivist accounts, an agent's reasons for action depend on how things actually are with the agent's desires or other pro-attitudes, or, rather, how things would be with his desires were the agent relevantly informed.

14. Bernard Williams ‘Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame’, in idem Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 35.

15. Michael Smith The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 187.

16. Romans 8.29.

17. Thanks to Andrei Buckareff for pressing me on this.