An argument for purgatory

Here is a plausible argument for purgatory.

Start with these observations:

1. Some people end up in heaven even though at the time of death they had not yet forgiven all wrongs done to them by other people who end up in heaven nor had they been performing such an act of forgiveness while dying.

2. An act of forgiveness takes time, and at the beginning of the act one has not yet forgiven.

3. It is impossible to be in heaven without having forgiven all wrongs done to one by other members of the heavenly community.

Premise 3 seems clearly true: the perfection of the heavenly community requires it.

Premise 1 is pretty plausible. It does not seem that a minor bit of unforgiveness would damn one to hell.

Premise 2 is what I am actually least confident of. It is pretty plausible in our present state. But I guess there is the possibility that we can forgive in the very first instant of our presence in heaven, so that the act is already completed in that very instant. Maybe, but it doesn’t seem very human.

It follows from 1-3 that some people who end up in heaven have to initiate the necessary act of forgiveness post-death. When they initiated the act of forgiveness, they were not in heaven. Nor were they in hell, since they ended up in heaven, and one cannot transfer between heaven and hell. Hence, they must have been in some intermediate state, which we may call purgatory.

Here is a difficulty, though. Suppose a person in heaven is wronged by someone on earth
who will end up in heaven. This surely happens: for instance, a parent is in heaven, and their child on earth fails to fulfill a promise they made to the parent. If an act of forgiveness takes time, isn’t there a short period of time before the person in heaven forgives?

I don’t think so. Perhaps a part of becoming the kind of person that ends up in heaven is one’s having engaged in a prospective forgiveness of all who might wrong one (or at least all who might wrong one and yet are going to be a part of the heavenly community, since the argument above only requires one to forgive such persons as a condition for heavenly beatitude). Some have engaged in it in this life, having transformed themselves into perfect forgivers who have always already forgiven, and others need purgatory.

An argument against strong universalism

1. It is impossible end up in heaven without forgiving all evils done to one at least by other people who end up in heaven.

2. Some people have had evils done to them by other people who end up in heaven.

3. No one is necessitated to forgive evil done to them by other people.

4. So, at least one person is not necessitated to end up in heaven.

This is an argument against a strong universalism on which God necessitates everyone to go to heaven. It is not an argument against a weaker universalism on which there is a possibility of eternal damnation but no one in fact chooses it. (For the record, alas, I think the Biblical evidence is that the weaker universalism is also false.)

Why do I think the premises are true?

Premise 1: Heavenly beatitude is that of a perfect community of love. Such a community of love is impossible if one has failed to forgive evils done to one by other members of the community.

Premise 2: St Paul did evil to a number of people before his conversion.

Premise 3: This is probably the most controversial of the premises. There are two ways of arguing for it. One is by saying that necessitating someone to forgive is unfitting, and so we have good reason to think God wouldn’t do that—and presumably nobody else but God would be capable of necessitating forgiveness. The second is to note that it is impossible to be forced to forgive. It’s just not forgiveness if it’s forced. One can be forced to stop resenting, one can be forced forget, but that’s not forgiveness. This is akin to promising: it is not possible to force someone to make a promise—the words just wouldn’t be binding.

It's worth noting that the argument also tells against Calvinism.

Forgiving the forgiven

Suppose that Alice wronged Bob, repented, and God forgave Alice for it. Bob, however, withholds his forgiveness. First, it is interesting to ask the conceptual question: What is it that Bob withholds? On my account of objective guilt, when Alice wronged Bob, she gained a normative burden of guilt (minimally, she came to owe it to Bob that she think of herself as guilty), and forgiveness is the removal of that normative burden.

Now in forgiveness, God removed Alice’s normative burden not just to himself, but to Bob. For if God did not remove Alice’s normative burden owed to Bob, then it would be in principle possible that Alice is in heaven—having been forgiven by God—and yet still carries the burden of having wronged Bob. But no one in heaven has a burden.

But if Alice’s normative burden owed to Bob has also been removed by God, and forgiveness is the removal of the burden, then what is it that Bob is withholding?

I think the answer is that there are two parts of forgiveness: there is the removal of the burden of objective guilt and the acknowledgment of the removal of that burden. When God has removed the burden of objective guilt from Alice, all that’s left for Bob to do is to acknowledge this removal.

Note, too, that it would be rather bad for Bob to fail to acknowledge the removal of Alice’s burden, because we should acknowledge what is real and good, and this removal is real and good.

One might think this problem is entirely generated by the idea that God can forgive not just sins against God but also sins against other people. Not so. There seems to be a secular variant of this problem, too. For there seems to be a way in which one’s normative burden of objective guilt of wrongs against fellow humans can be removed without God’s involvement: one can repent of the wrong and suffer an adequate punishment. (Of course, any wrong against neighbor is also a sin against God, and this only removes the guilt with respect to neighbor, unless the punishment is adequate to sin against God, too.) In that case, the burden is presumably removed, but the victim should still acknowledge this removal.

This points to a view of forgiveness on which we ought to forgive those whose normative burden has been removed. If we think that God always forgives the repentant, then this implies that we should always forgive the repentant.

This is close to Aquinas’s view (in his Catechetical Instructions) that we are all required to forgive all those who seek our forgiveness, but it is even better (“perfect” is his phrase) if we forgive even those who do not.

A perhaps underemphasized aspect of Christ's atonement

Usually, Christ’s sacrifice of the Cross is thought of as atonement for our sins before God. This leads to old theological question: Why can’t God simply forgive our sins, without the need for any atoning sacrifice? Aquinas’s answer is: God could, but it’s more fitting that the debt be paid. I want to explore a different answer.

Suppose that when you do a wrong to someone, you come to owe it to them to be punished. But now instead of thinking of God as the aggrieved party, think of all the times when we have done wrong to other human beings. Some of them have released or will release us from our debt through forgiveness. But, probably, not everyone. But what, now, if we think of Christ’s sacrifice as atomenent for our sins before the unforgiving. We don’t need to pay to other unforgiving humans the debt of being punished, because Christ has paid it on our behalf.

This neatly answers the question of why God’s can’t simply forgive us our sins: God can simply release us from our debt to God, but it is either impossible or at least significantly unfitting for God to simply release us from our debt to fellow human beings.

Here is a consequence of the story. If we fail to forgive our fellow human beings, that is yet another way in which we become shamefully co-responsible for Christ’s sufferings, since now Christ is atoning for these fellow human beings before us. We should then be ashamed of ourselves, especially given that Christ is also suffering for us.

The story isn’t complete. Christ’s atonement applies not just to my sins against my neighbor, but also to my sins against God alone and my sins against myself. But once we have seen that some atoning sacrifice is needed on our behalf, the idea of a total atoning sacrifice, capable of atoning for everyone’s debts to everyone, including to God, looks even more fitting.

Forgiveness

If I have done you a serious wrong, I bear a burden. I can be relieved of that burder by forgiveness. What is the burden and what is the relief?

The burden need not consist of anything emotional or dispositional on your side, such as your harboring resentment or being disposed not to interact with me in as amicable a way as before or pursuing my punishment. For, first, if I secretly betrayed you in such a way that you never found out you were wronged, my burden is still there. And, second, if you die without forgiving me, then the burden feels intact—unless perhaps I believe in life after death or divine forgiveness.

The burden need not consist of something emotional or dispositional on my side, either. For if it had to, I could be relieved of it by therapy. But therapy might make it easier to bear the burden, or (if badly done) may make me think the burden is gone, but the burden will still be there.

People often talk about forgiveness as healing a damaged relationship. But that’s not quite right, either. Suppose I have done many grave wrongs to you over the years that have completely ruptured the relationship. You have finally, generously, brought yourself to forgive me some but not all of them. (A perhaps psychologically odd story: you are working backwards through your life, forgiving all who have wronged you, year by year. So far you’ve forgivenes the wrongs in the last three years of your life. But my earlier wrongs remain.) The remaining ones may be sufficient to make our relationship remain completely ruptured.

The burden is fundamentally a normative feature of reality, as is hinted at by the use of “debt” language in the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our debts as we forgive those indebted to us”). By wronging someone, we make a move in normative space: we burden ourself with an objective, and not merely emotional, guilt. In forgiveness, the burden is removed, but the feeling of burden can remain—one can still feel guilty, just as one’s back can continue hurt when a load is removed from one’s back.

Insofar as there is a healing of a relationship, it is primarily a normative healing. There need not be any great psychological change, as can be seen from the case where you have forgiven me some but not all wrongs. Moreover, psychological change can be slow: forgiveness can be fast, but healing the effects of the wrongdoing can take long.

So far we have identified the type of thing that forgiveness is: it is a move in normative space that relieves something that the wrongdoer owes to a victim. But we are still not clear on what it is that the wrongdoer owes to the victim. And I don’t really know the answer here.

One possibility it is that it has something to do with punishment: I owe it to you to be punished. If so, then there are two ways for the burden to be cleared: one is by being punished and the other is by being forgiven. I can think of one objection to the punishment account: even after being adequately punished, you still can choose whether to forgive me. But if punishment clears the burden, what does your forgiveness do? Maybe it is at this point that the psychological components of forgiveness can enter: it’s up to you whether you stop resenting, whether you accept the clearing of the burden? Plus, in practice, it may be that the punishment is not actually sufficient to clear the burden—a lifetime in jail is not enough for some crimes.

Another possibility is that there is something normative and emotional. I owe it to you to feel guilty, and you can clear that debt and make it no longer obligatory for me to feel that way. That, too, doesn’t seem quite right. One problem is circularity: objective guilt consists in me owing you a feeling of guilt, but a feeling of guilt is a feeling that I am objectively guilty. Maybe the owed feeling has some other description? I don’t know!

But whatever the answer is, I am convinced now that the crucial move in forgiveness is normative.

Unforgivable offenses that aren't all that terrible

When we talk of something as an unforgivable offense, we usually mean it is really a terrible thing. But if God doesn’t exist, then some very minor things are unforgivable and some very major things are forgivable.

Suppose that I read on the Internet about a person in Ruritania who has done something I politically disapprove of. I investigate to find out their address, and mail them a package of chocolates laced with a mild laxative. The package comes back to me from the post office, because my prospective victim was fictional and there is no such country as Ruritania.

If God doesn’t exist, I have done something unforgivable and beyond punishment. For there is no one with the standing to either forgive or punish me (I assume that the country I live in has a doctrine of impossible attempts on which attempts to harm non-existent persons are not legally punishable). Yet much worse things than this have been forgiven by the mercy of victims.

I ought to feel guilty for my attempt to make the life of my Ruritanian nemesis miserable. And if there is no God, there is no way out of guilt open to me: I cannot be forgiven nor can the offense be expiated by punishment.

The intuition that at least for relatively minor offenses there is an appropriate way to escape from guilt, thus, implies the existence of God—a being such that all offenses are ultimately against him.

Deflating particular normative states of affairs?

Some actions lead to a future normative state of affairs. A promise or valid command leads to a future state of affairs of my or someone else’s being obliged to fulfill it. A wrongful action leads to a state of obligation to repent. And so on.

Here are two views of these states of affairs:

• Deflationary: There is nothing more to these states of affairs than general conditional moral normative facts, such as the facts that you should keep your promises, together with the fact of the triggering action, such as that you’ve promised to ϕ.

• Non-Deflationary and Causal: These states of affairs are metaphysically irreducible aspects of reality that are caused into existence by their triggering actions.

In fact of the deflationary view is that it’s deflationary, and hence supported by Ockham’s Razor.

But I think there are some reasons to accept the non-deflationary view. First, suppose you now come to the time where the normative state of affairs obtains: you must now fulfill your promise or you must now repent. Then the deflationary view implies an odd sort of “tyranny of the past”. What obliges you is not anything about the present, but something about the past. Your present obligations, on the deflationary view, do not supervene on the present state of the universe. This might especially bother presentists, but I think it’s also a bit worrying to eternalists like me.

Second, the “general conditional moral normative facts” the deflationary approach deals with will have to have extremely complex antecedents. For instance, for a command, there will be a fact of the form:

• If you were validly commanded to ϕ, and you have not yet fulfilled the command, and the command wasn’t changed by a higher authority, and circumstances have not relevantly changed, and …, then you should ϕ.

My worry about this is that there might be an infinite number of possible ways for a command obligation to disappear that would have to be put in the “…”. But perhaps not. Perhaps all I’ve said above is enough.

However, there is some reason not to be persuaded by this consideration. It is reasonable to think that human beings have normative powers: our actions can create reasons and obligations for ourselves and others. But one way for the obligation from a promise or command to disappear is for the non-normative circumstances to change. For instance, if I promised to do a minor errand, and a giant herd of yaks blocked my way, so that I could only do the errand via an unreasonably large detour, I might be off the hook normatively. But it seems implausible that a herd of yaks has the causal power to annihilate normative facts. So, it seems, even the non-deflationist may want the normative states of affairs to be conditional: “I should do the errand unless it becomes unreasonable.”

Third, the phenomenology of being released from an obligation—say, by being forgiven or a promisee’s releasing you—is an experience as of a load being removed. That “load” felt like a real thing which was annihilated.

Fourth, being forgiven changes your obligations by removing your guilt, at least assuming repentance. But it seems that God could forgive you a sin without announcing the forgiveness in any way, or in any other non-normative way changing the world. In such a case, God’s forgiveness would have a contingent normative effect. But God is simple, and hence all contingent facts about God are grounded in necessary truths about God and contingent facts about creation. But then if there is no non-normative change in creation due to the forgiveness, there must be a normative change in creation due to it.

On the non-deflationary causal view, divine forgiveness consists in God’s destroying the normative state of affairs of your being guilty. On the deflationary view, it’s got to be grounded in something like a divine “I forgive you” speech act, whether specific to your case (e.g., God telling you in your heart that you’ve been forgiven), or general (e.g., God’s announcing that anything the Apostles forgive is forgiven by God in John 20:23). But in the case of our forgiving someone the speech acts are announcements of a contingent state of affairs of forgiveness that goes beyond the announcements. That state of affairs, in the case of a simple God, cannot be internal to God. And it seems like it’s normative.

I find the last two considerations fairly powerful, but not conclusive. Of course, I accept divine simplicity, but the claim that God can forgive without any announcement isn’t completely obvious. Divine forgiveness could be like a Presidential pardon, which must be promulgated.

For us non-naturalists, it would be cool if we could argue for the non-deflationary view. For on this view, naturalism is false: we have causal powers that go beyond those described by the sciences, namely the causal power to produce normative states of affairs.

Update: Here's an argument in favor of deflation. While a particular obligation feels like a something ("a load"), what we cite as reasons for action is often not a resultant normative state but the original triggering action: "You promised!" or "I need to make it up to her given what I did." But on the causal non-deflationary view, the original triggering action is not even a part of the reason for action: it is, rather, a cause of the normative state, and the normative state itself is the reason. Of course, this isn't conclusive, because it could be that we mention the triggering action as evidence for the resultant reason. We likewise say: "I need go home because I left the kettle on." That I left the kettle on is no reason to go back home. That the kettle is still on is a reason to go home, and that I left the kettle on is evidence that that the kettle is still on.

Forgiveness of sins

It is very plausible that God can forgive wrongs we do to him. But a very difficult question which is rarely discussed by philosophers of religion is how God can forgive wrongs done to beings other than God.

This puzle seems to me to be related to the mystery of the line: “Against you [God], you alone, have I sinned” in Psalm 51:4, a line that seems on its face to contradict the obvious fact that the sins in question (David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah) seem to be primarily against human beings. Perhaps also related is Jesus’s puzzling statement: “No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18).

I think the answer to all of these questions may lie in a metaphysics and axiology of participation on which all the value of creatures is value had by participation in God, so that only God is good in the primary sense and only God is sinned against in the primary sense, which in turn gives God the normative power to forgive all wrongs, including wrongs directly against God as such as well as wrongs against God’s goodness as participated in by creatures.

Third party vengeance

You cannot forgive someone who hasn’t wronged you, and it should follow that likewise you cannot take vengeance on someone who hasn’t wronged you.

But certainly there are actions that look very much like vengeance but that aren’t perpetrated by the victim. The treatment that pedophiles are said to receive in prison is a particularly awful example, but there are also various forms of mob justice on the Internet.

This kind of third party “vengeance” seems worse than ordinary vengeance. Ordinary vengeance is a failure to fulfill the Christian duty of forgiveness, sometimes a violation of procedural justice and sometimes a violation of retributive justice by being disproportionate to the offense. Third party vengeance, however, adds to the wrong-making features of ordinary vengeance one more ingredient: that one lacks the standing for vengeance.

At the same time, third party vengeance looks more like justice than ordinary vengeance due to the unselfish disinterestedness. Moreover, because there is no place for a non-aggrieved party to forgive, third party vengeance is not opposed to forgiveness in the way that ordinary vengeance is. These features only make third party vengeance look better, but in fact make it be worse. The reason for the disinterestedness is that one does not even have any standing for vengeance while the reason for the lack of opposition to forgiveness is that the paradigmatic attitudes that forgiveness forgoes shouldn’t be there in the first place.

It seems to me that just as forgiveness is opposed to ordinary vengeance, there needs to be something opposed to third party vengeance. But this something will be different from forgiveness. While true forgiveness is probably only a duty in the context of Christianity and is otherwise a supererogatory renunciation of certain (hard to specify) attitudes, “third party forgiveness” is something that is demanded by the fact that one lacks the standing for these attitudes. This “third party forgiveness” is akin to one’s duty to “forgive” those who one realizes not to be guilty (whether through lack of culpability or through simply not having done the deed). Thus, failure of third party forgiveness is more serious—even though it may feel more righteous!—than failure of ordinary forgiveness.

A complicating factor, however, is that there is a grain of truth in mob justice: No man is an island. A harm to one member of society is a harm to each. Nonetheless, typical cases of mob justice involve insufficient standing given the degree of harm. Yes, a pedophile by gravely harming a stranger derivatively harms me. But while the grave harm to the child deserves grave penalties, the derivative harm to a stranger is much less, and calls for very little in the way of penalty. (Quick but perhaps not very good argument: We don’t want to say that criminals in Tokyo deserve much, much greater punishments than those in Lichtenstein to account for the Tokyo community having over 200 times more derivative third party victims.)

Defeaters and the death penalty

I want to argue that one can at least somewhat reasonably hold this paradoxical thesis:

• The best retributive justice arguments in favor of the death penalty are sound and there are no cases where the death penalty is permissible.

Here is one way in which one could hold the thesis: One could simply think that nobody commits the sorts of crimes that call for the death penalty. For instance, one could hold that nobody commits murder, etc. But it’s pretty hard to be reasonable in thinking that: one would have to deny vast amounts of data. A little less crazily, one could think that the mens rea conditions for the crimes that call for the death penalty are so strict that nobody actually meets them. Perhaps every murderer is innocent by reason of insanity. That’s an improvement over the vast amount of denial that would be involved in saying there are no murders, but it’s still really implausible.

But now notice that the best retributive justice arguments in favor of the death penalty had better not establish that there are crimes such that it is absolutely morally required that one execute the criminal. First, no matter how great the crime, there are circumstances which could morally require us to let the criminal go. If aliens were to come and threaten to destroy all life on earth with the exception of a mass murderer, we would surely have to just leave the mass murderer to divine justice. Second, if the arguments in favor of the death penalty are to be plausible, they had better be compatible with the possibility of clemency.

Thus, the most the best of the arguments can be expected to establish is that there are crimes which generate strong moral reasons of justice to execute the criminal, but the reasons had better be defeasible. One could, however, think that there defeaters occur in all actual cases. Of course, some stories about defeaters are unlikely to be reasonable: one is not likely to reasonably hold that aliens will destroy all of us if we execute someone.

But there could be defeaters that could be more reasonably believed in. Here are some such things that one could believe:

• God commanded us to show a clemency to criminals that in fact precludes the death penalty.

• Criminals being executed are helpless, and killing helpless people—even justly—causes a harm to the killer’s soul that is a defeater for the reasons for the death penalty.

• We are all guilty of offenses that deserve the death penalty—say, mortal sins—and executing someone when one oneself deserves the death penalty is harmful to one’s character in a way that is a defeater for the reasons for the death penalty.

(I myself am open to the possibility that the first of these could actually be the case in New Testament times.)

Retributive punishment and Christian forgiveness

Start with this argument:

1. Christians ought to forgive all wrongdoing.
2. Forgiving includes foregoing retribution.
3. All ought to forego retribution in the absence of wrongdoing.
4. Therefore, Christians ought in all cases to forego retribution.

And, yet the following also seem true:

5. Retributive justice is central to the concept of punishment.

and:

6. Punishment is often needed for the public good.

What is the Christian to do? Well, one thought is that we should weaken (1). Thomas Aquinas in his sermons on the Lord's Prayer says that we are only required to forgive those who ask us for forgiveness. (After all, Christ tells us to expect God to forgive us as we forgive others; but we do ask God for forgiveness.) Forgiving the unrepentant is supererogatory, he says. That weakens the conflict between the displayed claims. Nonetheless, there are times when the criminal justice system needs to punish someone who we have good reason to think is repentant, because the risks to society of letting her go free may be unacceptably high. Furthermore, Aquinas's modification of (1) doesn't help all that much because the supererogatory is by definition always right. So even with Aquinas's modification of (1), we still seem to get a conflict between forgiveness and the needs of the public good.

Another move, and it may be the most promising, is to distinguish between the individual and the community. Forgiveness is the individual Christian's duty (or at least supererogation--but for brevity I won't consider that option any more), but there are wrongs that, on account of the public good, the community should not forgive. I think this is a quite promising option, but I am not completely convinced. One reason I am not convinced is that Catholic social teaching allows for the possibility of a Christian state, with Vatican City being an example. And there is some plausibility in thinking that the Christian state should behave rather like the Christian individual, but a Christian state has need of punishment for safeguarding the public good. Now maybe forgiveness and punishment are one of the things that varies between the Christian individual and the Christian state, so that the individual should forgive while the state sometimes is not permitted to do so. But it would be good to have another approach.

Think about sports and victory. The very concept of a fencing match cannot be understood apart from seeing it as a practice whose internal end is getting to a score of five before the opponent does. Nonetheless, it is possible to have a friendly and honorable match where no one is intentionally pursuing victory. Rather, the players are exercising their skills in excellent ways that tend to promote victory without actually seeking victory. (The clearest case may be a parent fencing with a child and hoping that the child's skills are so good that the parent will be defeated; but one can have cases where each wants the other to win.)

Similarly, perhaps, just as sports cannot be understood apart from victory, punishment cannot be understood apart from retribution. But just as there are reasons besides victory to play, there are reasons apart from retribution to punish. In those cases, punishment is not intended by the agent. (Another example: I have argued that sex cannot be understood apart from its reproductive end; however, agents can permissibly refrain from pursuing reproduction in particular cases of sex.) This suggests that perhaps we should weaken premise (2) of the initial argument to:

7. Forgiving includes refraining from pursuit of retribution.

The weakened argument only yields the conclusion that Christians ought to refrain from pursuing retribution. But refraining from pursuit of retribution may well be compatible with punishment. And the public goods that render punishment necessary need not include retribution--retribution can be left to the God who says: "Vengeance is mine".

This may be a part of why John Paul II says in Evangelium Vitae that for the death penalty to be justified in some particular (and presumably very rare) case it must be justified on grounds of protection of society. In other words, it is the protection of society, rather than retribution, that is to be sought.

The value of punishment

Boethius gives a striking thesis:

The wicked are happier in undergoing punishment than if no penalty of justice chasten them. And I am not now meaning what might occur to anyone—that bad character is amended by retribution, and is brought into the right path by the terror of punishment, or that it serves as an example to warn others to avoid transgression [...] .
Surely, then, the wicked, when they are punished, have a good thing added to them, the punishment which by the law of justice is good [...]. (Consolation, IV)

The brief argument seems to be:

1. What justice calls for is good.
2. Justice calls for punishment.
3. So, punishment is good.

Unfortunately, the conclusion that we want is not (3) but:

4. Punishment is good for the person undergoing it.

Can we fill in some plausible steps between (3) and (4)?

Perhaps Boethius takes it as clear that justice does not call for punishment simply because "bad character is amended by retribution ... or as an example to warn others" or in any other easy reductive account that "might occur to anyone" (e.g., Nietzsche's "account" on which punishment gives compensatory pleasure to the victims, or accounts on which criminals are simply taken out of circulation by being jailed, for the protection of society). Such benefits are there, but they aren't the benefit that justice is primarily aimed at.

Plausibly, the benefits of justice are to persons. Well, the relevant persons seem to be:

• the criminal
• the victims
• other members of society
• the punisher
• God.

Which of these are such that justice's primary aim is at a benefit for them?

Let's start by ruling out options from the bottom of the list. Everyone benefits, in an extrinsic but important way, when those they love benefit. God loves all. So any benefit to anyone is an extrinsic benefit to God. God is love and is immutable and simple. It plausibly follows that all contingent benefits to God are such extrinsic benefits. Thus, a contingent benefit to God will require a benefit to someone else. So choosing the option of God doesn't get us out of the puzzle. Moreover, when we aim at a benefit for God in this way, we should also be aiming non-instrumentally at a benefit for the creature.

While the punisher may receive some pleasure or the good of excellence in a job well done, surely that's not what justice aims for. It seems clear that just punishment does not require other members of society. Imagine someone has killed every other member of her society. She deserves punishment—say, from another society, or from a self-imposed life of penance.

The victims? There is an intuition that punishment is a way of honoring victims, perhaps posthumously. One problem with this is that criminal punishment appears just even when the criminal was forgiven by the victims. But when the criminal was forgiven by the victims, the criminal should not be punished for the sake of the victims, since by forgiveness the victims relinquish claims to punishment on their behalf. But I worry that this argument is not sufficient. After all, it could be that all of society counts as a victim in the case of a crime, since society's laws have been unjustly violated, so forgiveness by the more particular victims is not yet forgiveness by all of society. (This also shows how "victimless" crimes aren't victimless.)

Here is perhaps a more telling counterexample to the victim theory. Suppose Patricia notices a planet with rudimentary unicellural life but where she has very good reason to think intelligent life will evolve. She leaves behind a device which will kill off the intelligent life on the planet as soon as there are a million intelligent beings. A week later, Darth Vader tests the Death Star on the planet. Patricia has committed attempted murder, but there are no victims: there never was and never will be any intelligent life on this planet. Yet Patricia is clearly deserving of punishment as having committed a species of attempted genocide. Moreover, even if she broke no society's law, there is some sense in which justice calls for her punishment—this is the sort of thing that there ought to be a law against, and this "ought" is an "ought" of justice.

Another worry about locating the benefit in the victims is that may seem problematic to impose such great intrinsic burdens on the living for the sake of what appear to be merely extrinsic benefits to the dead (apart from somewhat dubious theories of the afterlife on which the dead rejoice in seeing their malefactors punished).

That leaves the criminal as the recipient of the benefits of punishment.

I think the most serious challenge to the argument is one on which justice leads to goods that are not the goods to any persons. Maybe justice benefits "the moral order of the universe". I am sceptical, though, of goods that are not derivative from goods to fundamental entities, and on my ontology the universe and its moral order are not fundamental entities.

Posthumous benefits

Here's an interesting principle.

1. If a human being x exists in worlds w₁ and w₂ and x's lifetime occupies the same times in the two worlds, and at every time t in this lifetime, x is no better off in w₂ than in w₁, then x is no better off in w₂ than in w₁.

This principle implies that strictly posthumous benefits—i.e., benefits that do not make one better off at any time before death—are only benefits to one if there is life after death. Hence, if there are strictly posthumous benefits, there is life after death.

Are there good candidates for strictly posthumous benefits? Well, of course, such things as having a joyous afterlife might be examples, but those examples wouldn't be helpful for arguing that there is an afterlife.

What about such things as someone's posthumous keeping of a promise or fulfillment of a request, or maybe a writer's gain in reputation after death? I am not sure the benefit is strictly posthumous in these three cases. If you keep your promise to me, you bring it about that a promise that won't be kept wasn't made to me. And so, arguably, by keeping your promise you make me have been better off at the time the promise was made. Likewise, if my request was fulfilled or my writing gained in reputation, I did not request or write in vain, so I was better off at the time of the request or writing.

Posthumous forgiveness by you of my wrongdoing against you might be a better example of a strictly posthumous benefit. It seems that the benefit of being forgiven accrues not at the time of wrongdoing but at the time of forgiveness. If so, then that posthumous forgiveness would be a strictly posthumous benefit gives an argument for an afterlife.

But perhaps the benefit of forgiveness somewhat accrues at the time of wrongdoing. Maybe one is worse off there and then if one does a wrong that will never be forgiven. That sounds right to me. However, I don't think this accounts for the entirety of the benefit of being forgiven. Being forgiven removes guilt. However, the argument is now weakened. For the denier of an afterlife can claim that posthumous forgiveness only gives one the benefit of not having committed a wrong that won't be forgiven. It is definitely a benefit, but not as great one as forgiveness while one is alive.

I still think that consideration of posthumous benefits like those of forgiveness gives some evidence for an afterlife.

As in heaven so on earth

Here are some thoughts on St Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer, many taken from or loosely inspired by things people said at our Department Bible study yesterday (though what I say should not be taken as representing anything like a consensus). First, my translation:

⁹Our father, who art in heaven:
    Thy name be sanctified,
    ¹⁰thy kingdom come,
    thy will come to pass,
        as in heaven so on earth.
    ¹¹Give us daily our supersubstantial [epiousion] bread.
    ¹²And forgive us our debts
        as we forgive our debtors.
    ¹³Do not bring us to a trial,
        but instead deliver us from the evil one [tou ponerou]. (Matthew 6:9-13)

The overall theme is that of the earthly and the heavenly, with the earthly being brought in conformity with the heavenly, by our own activity and that of our father. "As in heaven so on earth", I take it, applies to each: "thy name be sanctified", "thy kingdom come" and "thy will come to pass." Each of these three is simultaneously a request and a personal commitment to the indicated task, and in each case the act of praying is already partly constitutive of the prayed-for result: by praying these we sanctify our Father's name, make his kingdom present and do his will.

Implicit behind all three requests is an image of the majesty of God enthroned above the heavenly hosts who sanctify his name and bring his will to pass--and yet this King of the Universe is also our father.

The prayer is enveloped between the "father" (the first word in the Greek--while in Aramaic and Hebrew, "our father" would be one word) and "the evil one" at the end. This involves reading tou ponerou as "the evil one" (masculine) rather than as generically "evil" (neuter). This is supported the neatness of the resulting envelope structure, the central focus in the prayer on the beyond-earthly significance of our actions, as well as the implicit imagery of the angels of the heavenly host.

The central request is for our epiousios bread. We really don't know how to translate the word. A leading view is that it is the bread for the day to come. But it could also be the bread needed for our existence or ousia, the bread for the life to come, or, following St Jerome's Latin calque, the supersubstantial bread. In any case, the Church has traditionally taken a Eucharistic reading of the text, and such a reading makes the tendency of the earthly towards the heavens come to a head here: we sanctify his name and do his will just as the angels do, and here we boldly ask for the bread of angels, the new manna, the earthly bread made into the body of him who became flesh for us, the bread that is literally the Logos of God on which man lives (cf. Jesus' struggles with the evil one two chapters back in Matthew). At the same time, this reading should not rule out--and indeed the heavenly-earthly parallelism structure is very friendly to it--that this is also a request for what we need for our earthly lives from our heavenly royal father.

In verse 12, we have a switch from the positive to the negative aspects of transforming the earthly into the heavenly. The debt of our sin to God imposes on us an obligation we cannot pay and yet paying which is essential to the coming of his kingdom on earth. We boldly ask that it be forgiven, because (seemingly a non sequitur, but yet God in love for our children makes it follow) of our forgiving the debts of our debtors. It is neither good to be debtor nor creditor, and here by ceasing to be creditors we cease to be debtors. The forgiveness here is in the first instance a loosing or a release. The essential effect is normative, that the debtor is quit of the debt. Of course, when we forgive another, the essential effect is not all that we are called to: we are called to an affective component--we should feel as if the person who sinned against us is no longer in debt to us--and sometimes to a concrete reaching out to heal the relationship. Likewise, God's forgiveness heals us, and gives us the grace to avoid incurring further indebtedness, as indicated by the next verse.

The trials of verse 13 may well include ordinary temptations, but it is also plausible that the text is specifically talking of the trials of persecution and torture. We pray that our father not bring us there, and at the same time we should not deliberately take ourselves there either (there is the scary story in Eusebius about the early Christian who from bravado turned himself in to the Romans--and then broke down and apostasized). Finally, we are reminded that we do not struggle against mere flesh and blood, but that persecutions and temptations are the work of infernal intelligence, like the devil that Jesus fought two chapters back.

The sacrifice of Isaac

None of us are called to sacrifice our children on Mount Moriah. But some of us are called to forgive horrendous evils done to our children. It is interesting that the two kinds of acts have important features in common. In both cases, the actions are difficult precisely because of the agent's virtue, and if they are not difficult, then that is evidence that the agent is morally corrupt. There is a significant way in which forgiving the evil done to one's child is a way of sacrificing the child—of letting go.

We do have the intuition that an obligatory or supererogatory action is the more valuable the more difficult it is. But a further thing seems to be true: the obligatory or supererogatory action is even more valuable when the difficulty derives (in the right way) from one's virtue. Thus, if Abraham had a friend who was asked to sacrifice her car, and it was just as difficult for her to sacrifice her car as for Abraham to sacrifice his son, nonetheless Abraham's sacrifice would be the more valuable one, though the sacrifice of his friend would have significant value, too. Likewise, it may be just as difficult for someone to forgive damage to her property as it is for another to forgive harm to her child, but the latter forgiveness has the greater value.

I think a partial theodicy focusing on exercises of virtue which are incredibly difficult precisely because of the agent's virtue has promise. It has been suggested that God could have, say, created a world of utterly non-violent inquirers where the main virtues are things like perseverance and intellectual integrity, which do not require horrendous evils. But I am not sure such a world would have much of the kind of exercises of virtue I am talking about. In fact, it is plausible that cases where virtuous action is made very difficult precisely by virtue are going to have to be cases where one is facing grave evil.

(I am also reminded of Aristotle's remark that the virtuous man fears death more, for the death of a virtuous man is a greater evil. This point might be relevant, also, to the death of Christ.)

Forgiveness

1. (Premise) If one has done a wrong, one ought to ask someone for forgiveness of it.
2. (Premise) If God does not exist, there are some wrongs (e.g., the murder of someone who has no friends or relatives) that one cannot appropriately ask anyone for forgiveness of.
3. (Premise) If one ought to do something, then one can appropriately do it.
4. Therefore, if God does not exist, there are some things one ought to do but cannot appropriately do. (By 1 and 2)
5. Therefore, God exists. (By 3 and 4)

Justification and love

Justification consists in God's forgiveness of our sins. What does this forgiveness consist in? At least partly in the taking away of the penalty. But what, most deeply, is the penalty? One thinks here of hell-fire. But while hell may contain fire (or it may contain great cold!), it is not constituted by fire, but by separation from God. Now, lack of charity—lack of the right kind of love for God—is at the heart of separation from God.

So: Divine forgiveness must consist, at least in part, in the removal of the penalty of separation from God, and the removal of our lack of charity. Therefore, the instilling of charity is at least partly constitutive of divine forgiveness. Hence, basic sanctification—the movement from lack of charity to the presence of charity—is not merely causally tied to justification, but is at least partly constitutive of justification. Moreover, this sanctification is not appropriate, and maybe not possible, apart from justification, since a just being is unlikely to waive punishment without forgiving.

Guilt

One of the interesting questions about Christian moral philosophy is how moral life differs if Christianity is correct from how it would be if atheism is correct. Here is one difference. When I have culpably done wrong, I become guilty of the wrongdoing. The state of guilt is a bad state to be in. (It is good, however, if in addition to being guilty, I feel guilt.) If Christianity is right, then every state of guilt in this life has a potential cure through divine forgiveness. If atheism is right, however, then there will be incurable states of guilt.

There are two plausible ways of guilt being relieved. One of them is making sufficient restitution/satisfaction—as it were entirely undoing the badness of what one had done (I actually don't know if this really removes guilt—I think forgiveness may still be needed—but I don't need this for the argument). The other is accepting or maybe just receiving (it's a really interesting question which) forgiveness. But not just anyone can forgive a wrongdoing—the right person or persons must offer forgiveness. The most obvious thing to say here is that it is only those against whom the wrongdoing was done that can offer forgiveness.

If Christianity is right, every wrongdoing is also a wrongdoing against God. One can then argue that God has the authority to forgive the wrongdoing on behalf of all the aggrieved parties, say because all of the goods of all the aggrieved parties come from God, or because the aggrieved parties' very possibility of being better or worse off is a participation in God, or some such story. If this is true, then every wrongdoing can be forgiven by God, in a way that removes guilt. The defense of an exact account here needs more work, but it is clearly true that if Christianity is right, then forgiveness is possible.

But if atheism is right, then there will be wrongdoings which the wrongdoer cannot make sufficient restitution/satisfaction, whether due to the kind of wrongdoing (e.g., murder or rape), or due to the wrongdoer's lack of power (e.g., stealing money, then gambling it away, and then being unable ever to earn it back). Moreover, some wrongdoings of this sort will be such that it will be impossible to obtain forgiveness for them because the wrongdoings are against non-persons (e.g., wanton environmental damage, torture of non-human animals, etc.) or because for some other reason one or more of the victims are incapable of offering forgiveness (this will be the case if the victim is dead—by the wrongdoer's hand or not—or in a coma or the like). One might think that society as a whole can offer forgiveness on behalf of all victims. But that is implausible. First of all, a society plainly cannot offer forgiveness to someone whose crime was not against a member of that society. If Maxine wipes out an enemy tribe, forgiveness from a member of her own tribe will do nothing to remove her guilt. Likewise, society cannot offer forgiveness for the bulk of the wrong of torturing non-human animals (one might think society can forgive one for the parts of the wrong that consist of brutalizing society, or harming the animal's human friends or owners, but those are not the main wrong). Secondly, while one can argue that all wrongdoings are in a primary sense against God ("Against You, You alone, have I sinned," the Psalm has David praying) who is the first and final cause, and hence God's forgiveness suffices to remove guilt, many wrongdoings are clearly only secondarily wrongdoings against society.

This is not an argument against atheism or for Christianity. It is merely an observation of an important difference between the two. My feeling is that non-religious moral thought, however, mitigates the difference by not taking guilt to be as significant as Christianity takes it. But that mitigation is mistaken.

On forgiving and forgetting

Somewhere in his diaries, Kierkegaard thinks forgiveness by an omniscient being is paradoxical. (Of course, that's no reason to deny either divine forgiveness or divine omniscience, for Kierkegaard—paradox here is good.) One way of filling out the paradox is that forgiveness is a kind of forgetting, and an omniscient being can't do that. There is a story, quite possibly anecdotal, of a girl who claimed to have visions of Jesus. Eventually she has an audience with her bishop, who to check if the visions were genuine, asked her to ask Jesus what he (the bishop) confessed in his last confession. Next week the girl comes back: "Jesus said he forgot." And of course our language has the phrase: "Forgive and forget."

However, forgiveness is actually very different from forgetting. First of all, forgetting is insufficient for forgiveness. Forgiveness (when valid) has a crucial normative consequence—there is something that the forgiven malefactor no longer owes her forgiving victim. Forgetting has no such normative consequence. I may be glad that my misdeed has been covered over by mist in your memory, but I am in no way off the hook. If anything, I am in a tougher place once you have forgotten, because the only way I can get forgiveness from you is by reminding you of what I have done, and that might be undesirable (it might cause pain to you again).

Moreover, forgetting has no place in ideal cases of forgiveness. For if you have forgetten the ill I have done you, you surely have likewise forgetten that you have forgiven me that ill, unless your logical skills have gone haywire. But now it is possible that you will come across evidence of what I did to you, without at the same time coming upon any evidence of your forgiveness. And if you do not know that you have forgiven me this offense, you may well experience the kind of resentment towards me that you had put away when you forgave me, and even seek vengeance. Forgiveness includes an objective and a subjective component: the objective component is a certain normative canceling of debt (as it were?), while the subjective is a putting away of resentment and a surrender of the desire for vengeance. But if you do not remember having forgiven, the resentment may return, until you go through the subjective component of forgiveness again.

In the ideal case, when you have forgiven me, you keep track of your new commitment not to resent such-and-such a deed and of my new normative status as "forgiven former malefactor".

This, however, carries a danger with it. For if you keep track of what you have forgiven me, then surely you run the danger of your priding yourself on your moral superiority in not holding me bound. To dwell on having forgiven is dangerous—forgiveness does, after all, put us in a position of superiority, and there is a danger that our forgiveness will be haughty and humiliating to the one forgiven. The cure for this is love, and we sinners have an additional help, which is meditation on our own sinfulness—we do not forgive haughtily, but we forgive as we wish to be forgiven.

Imputed righteousness

Reformed Christians believe that justification—the event by virtue of which a person comes to be saved—consists in the juridical imputation of righteousness. This is distinguished from God's sanctifying the person, where righteousness is induced in the person. Reformed Christians, of course, believe that sanctification comes along with justification, but want to maintain a distinction between the two.

What would justification consist in on such a view? What is the difference between being justified and not being justified? In this post I want to clear the way for further discussion by rejecting some accounts that I think are particularly problematic. While I myself reject the Reformed distinction between justification and sanctification, I want to offer these arguments in a friendly way to my Reformed brethren.

Problematic account 1: Justification consists in predestination.[note 1] On this account what makes Patricia justified is that God has predestined her for salvation. Thus, her being justified is not grounded in any intrinsic property of hers, but in a property of God—that God intends to save her.

The most obvious problem with this account is that then Patricia is justified from the first moment of her existence. But if so, then she does not change in respect of justification when she repents of her sins and accepts Christ as her savior. It seems plausible to suppose that justification does not precede faith. (One argument for this is that according to the Reformed, one is saved by faith, and hence being justified cannot precede faith; this is a bad argument because it neglects the possibility of backwards causation or causation mediated by God's foreknowledge.) It likewise seems plausible to connect justification and the forgiveness of sins. Something changes for the Christian. She was lost, and now she is found. And this change seems tied to justification. The correct thing vis-à-vis Reformed Theology (and probably the truth, too) to say seems to be that prior to receiving salvific grace, Patricia was predestined but not yet justified; after receiving salvific grace, she is predestined and justified.

Problematic account 2: Justification consists in a changing divine attitude. On this account, when Patricia becomes justified, God's attitude towards Patricia changes.

A major difficulty with this approach is that it is difficult to square with divine simplicity or immutability. Perhaps one can square it with immutability by positing that God eternally has one attitude towards Patricia-at-t for t<t₀ and eternally has another attitude towards Patricia-at-t for t>t₀, where t₀ is the moment of justification. If so, then in some sense there is no real change at all in anything at the time of justification—it's simply that Patricia has reached a time at which she is favored, but any change here whether on the part of Patricia or of God is a Cambridge change. Can justification be a Cambridge change? Does it make sense to rejoice in a mere Cambridge change in the way in which one rejoices in one's salvation?

Moreover, this will not take care of problems of divine simplicity. God being omnipotent could, surely, have justified Patricia not at t₀ but at t₁ instead. Consider a world just like this one but where that happens. What is the difference between this world and that world in virtue of which in this world Patricia is justified at t₀ but in that world she is justified at t₁? Since justification is an extrinsic property of Patricia on this view, the difference must lie in God's attitudes: in one world God has one set of attitudes and in the other another. But this seems to violate divine simplicity: it suggests that God is not identical with divine attitudes. There is a way of handling this in general, and that is to suppose that the attitudes are extrinsic properties of God. But this solution raises the question of what properties of creatures are such that in virtue of them it is correct to talk of God having one attitude in one world and the other in the other? Since on the present account Patricia's justification was supposed to be solely a fact about God's attitudes, it does not seem that there is room for such properties of creatures.

Problematic account 3: Justification is a dispositional property: x is justified at t iff were x to die at t, x would go to heaven. Granted, before the time t₀ of justification, it was true of Patricia that she will go to heaven (this is true in virtue of predestination, say). But if t_-1<t₀, it was not true that of Patricia that were she to die at t_-1, she would go to heaven—predestination only ensures the indicative that she will go to heaven, and therefore that she won't die before t₀.

This account has several problems. The first is that on this view, it seems one only has instrumental reason to desire justification: the value of justification consists in going to heaven. Moreover, it is not clear why it makes sense, given predestination, to rejoice at all at having acquired justification. After all, now having this dispositional property is of little value as such (except insofar as now might be the exact time of one's death, which is improbable, especially of the now is instantaneous). What is of value is having this dispositional property at the moment of death. It is true that Reformed Christians generally believe that once you have this dispositional property, you have it for the rest of your life. Thus, evidence for having the property now is equally evidence that one will have it at the moment of one's death. But then one does not have reason to rejoice even instrumentally in the present possession of the dispositional property. The true object of rejoicing is the salvation, rather than the present having of the property of justification. It is true that on some Reformed views one comes to have knowledge that one will be saved at the time that one becomes justified, and it would make sense to rejoice in this knowledge. But the knowledge is distinct from the salvation. Granted, we can talk of Martha rejoicing at the negative results of her HIV test. But it seems that the appropriate object of rejoicing is her being HIV negative, or her knowing that she is HIV negative, though we admittedly transfer our joy to things associated with the primary object of our joy, and so perhaps there is something to the idea that Martha rightly rejoices in the negative results of the test. But, in any case, the joy at being justified should not be joy by association.

Another problem is with the ground of the dispositional property. We can't just "jump into heaven" at our death. "To go to heaven" is to be placed in a heavenly state by God. The dispositional property is not, then, grounded in some kind of a power of the person who has it. Nor, on the Reformed view, is it grounded in the merits of the person. Rather, it seems to be grounded in God's will. But if so, then the problems of Account 2 come back.

Conclusions: These three accounts are problematic, especially for those who accept divine simplicity (as at least some classic Reformed creeds apparently do). What these accounts all have in common is that they make the imputation of righteousness be an extrinsic, Cambridge property of the person being justified. I suspect that this is what is wrong with all of these accounts. Instead, one needs an account on which justification consists in a real, grace-wrought change in the person. From a Reformed perspective, the difficulty with such an account is the danger that the change will then consist in actual righteousness in the person, and hence the distinction between justification and sanctification will be erased. Personally, I don't mind this danger at all—the distinction between justification and sanctification is shaky biblically and pretty much non-existent patristically. But Reformed folks do mind it. I think that what they might do well to do is to adopt a view according to which it is a genuine intrinsic property of a person that the person is guilty or innocent of something (there are suggestions to that effect in Wojtyla's The Acting Person, so it's a view that not just Reformed folks might find congenial), and then hold that in justification God directly produces a change in the person in respect of that property.