Thanks again to Prosblogions

Congratulations!

Judging entirely by the title, and perhaps thus completely missing the point, I am guessing that the issue is that whatever one is being judged on is somewhat vague, whereas ultimately people need to be sorted into sheep and goats, with no chimeras allowed. Is that right?

Off the top of my head I have a couple of answers to THAT question, though maybe it's not the one that's asked, or maybe Sider has conclusive arguments against these.

- God only sends the clearly damnable to hell, mercifully sending the only vaguely damnable to heaven, and not worrying about the transition between the clearly damnable and the vaguely damnable, because that can always be resolved in favor of mercy.

- Purgatory provides for a continuity of punishments. (heaven = 0 years in purgatory; hell = infinite number of years in purgatory; and everything in between is possible; this need not be done in terms of years but total disvalues of the suffering)

- The punishments of hell need not be infinite. (This might help to generate continua of punishment.) For the pain of hell may, at least for some people, asymptotically decrease (e.g., due to spiritual purification) in such a way that the total integral of the disvalue is finite. This could yield an orthodox version of universalism: everyone is purified, but some only asymptotically.

- The punishment of hell is given to those who spiritually reject God. This is a spiritual sin, one where vagueness is not possible. Of course various continuities will be present in the physical expression of that spiritual sin, but there is no reason to think that the spiritual sin itself will be subject to vagueness.

Hi Alexander, That’s the issue. The first response you mention is one we mention in passing. It’s a supervaluationalist response to the problem, where God sends only the super-damnable to the bad place. The second response is a variant on a Lewisian conception of Hell and it escapes Sider’s argument, though Sider does restrict his argument to “traditional” conceptions of hell. Re your third response it’s consistent with Sider’s argument that the punishments of Hell are not infinite. It’s sufficient for his argument that that hell is worse than heaven. There’s a lot to say about the fourth response. Sider claims that the spiritually relevant features supervene on the morally relevant features and the latter features are smeared. One of the things we do in the paper is to argue that the Sider’s moral-smear thesis is not adequately supported. There’s good reason to believe that some morally relevant features are not detectable. We also provide some reason to think that God has reason to actualize a world that appears morally smeared but isn’t.

I have a question. How can a perfect being have concepts such as Heaven and Hell? How would this distinction arise for such a being?

Ted:

Thanks--this is helpful.

On the fourth response, I don't see how one could argue, without presupposing supervenience, that the relevant features are smeared. All the features of an action relevant to a judgment of culpability (and it is culpability rather than rightness/wrongness that matters here) are purely mental.

But if the mental is does not supervene on the physical, then I do not see what good reason one could have for supposing smearing. I guess I may need to actually read the Sider paper. :-)

John:

Well, a perfect being might make a distinction between those who freely choose to accept his love and those who do not freely choose to accept his love, and might not impose his love on the latter, no?

Alexander
But how does that distinction arise? My concern is with what charactistics God has before He created anything. It seems to me that a being who exists and is the only thing that does exist would not be able to make distinctions between x and -x because x would not be part of that being. This problem resurfaced for me the other day when I was reading some of the articles in the latest Faith and Philosophy. I suspect this is one of the issues Spinoza had (but it has been decades since I read him so I do not want to make that claim). But if a necessary being exists (and I will grant that it must) then do those attributes we attach to that being from our perspective actually pertain to that being. We can understand x and -x from our experiential perspective, but a necessary being without any contingent beings (the being before creation) would not have that perspective therefore it would not have those concepts. I guess my issue is what would a necessary being know other then its nature (what it is). If this being is perfect it would have no knowledge of distinctions that arise for only contingent beings that are imperfect because it would not have those experiences. It might have self-love, but how would the concpet of other-love arise for this perfect being? If I remember Spinoza correctly, the desire for other-love would indicate a need and therefore a lack of perfection.

I know that I am not a contributor and am trying to sneak in a post, but I have wanted to ask this question to those who might have an answer and I appreciate your answer. Also, congratulations to Ted and Trent on what I think will be two interesting papers.

Dear John,

This is an excellent question, and I really have no good answer. However, I might caution you not to assume that concepts always come from experience. It might be that some concepts can come from self-reflection. And if one's self-reflection is on a being capable of creating every feasible (or some other such restriction) possible world, then quite a lot of knowledge might be possible there.