1. In this video:
apostate Randal Rauser takes issue with the view popularized by C. S. Lewis that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. Keep in mind that Rauser is an annihilationist with a soft spot for universalism, so he's attacking Lewis's position to attack everlasting punishment.
2. Lewis's idea is that hell is justifiable because it's self-imposed exile. Self-inflicted suffering/misery. The damned choose hell.
Rauser objects in part on exegetical grounds. Although there's an element of truth to the fact that God turns some sinners over to self-destructive behavior (Rom 1), the Bible also depicts God as the agent of judgment.
3. Rauser then objects to the justification of hell based on the notion that it's self-inflicted, by using two examples: solitary confinement and people who practice self-harm.
4. There are some problems with his comparison vis-a-vis solitary confinement:
i) Inmates in solitary confinement don't choose to be in solitary confinement. Indeed, they hate it.
ii) To my knowledge, the purpose of solitary confinement isn't typically punitive but to control inmates who don't play by the rules. Inmates who attack prison guards or attack other inmates. They are separated from the general population because they don't get along with anyone else. They are too disruptive to fit into the prison regime.
In addition, some high-value witnesses are put in solitary confinement for their own protection as they wait to testify at trial. So his parallel breaks down at several points.
iii) Rauser's second example concerns individuals who suffer from pathological self-loathing. They resort to self-harm to temporarily release emotional and psychological stressors.
He cites a personal anecdote about a high school girl cutting herself in the kitchen. He and others took the knife away. It would be wrong to stand by and do nothing just because it was self-inflicted harm.
Of course that's true but Rauser typically omits a key consideration. Intervention is morally mandated in the case of "cutters" because they are mentally ill. It's for their own protection.
But the comparison falls apart in the case of the damned because they aren't suffering through no fault of their own. Damnation isn't a misfortune. That's quite different from someone whose actions are self-destructive but blameless due to exculpatory or extenuating circumstances like mental illness. There are no mitigating factors in the case of the damned.
5. In addition, Rauser blurs the distinction between self-inflicted suffering or misery from self-inflicted punishment. But while suffering or misery can be punitive, suffering or misery can also be innocent or unjust. So these are not equivalent categories. Just desert is not a necessary condition of suffering or misery.
6. It's revealing how Rauser oscillates between moralism and amorality. Rauser is very moralistic and judgmental when it comes to things he disapproves of, like OT ethics, but when he attacks everlasting punishment, he switches to amoral illustrations which leave guilt and retributive justice out of consideration.
Incidentally, Rauser looks like he's in a rather hot place due to the flames licking his back in his video.
ReplyDeleteSteve
ReplyDeleteRe: “But the comparison falls apart in the case of the damned because they aren't suffering through no fault of their own. Damnation isn't a misfortune. That's quite different from someone whose actions are self-destructive but blameless due to exculpatory or extenuating circumstances like mental illness. There are no mitigating factors in the case of the damned.”
I’m curious at the comparison you make here between the damned and the mentally ill. Why do you see being lost/damned as blameworthy yet being mentally ill exculpatory. Are not both conditions beyond the control of the person possessing these traits? Isn’t being born into a lost state/bonded will a mitigating factor to being lost just as possessing a mental illness is mitigating to self-harm? The lost “willfully” rebel against God due to the nature they are born with, while the mentally ill “willfully” carry out certain behaviour d/t their respective defective faculty. What makes a person responsible for what they do? I’m not saying no one is ever responsible for anything they do, I’m just wondering why the mentally ill would get a pass while the lost don’t-both cases are inherited conditions (I’m assuming the mental illness in these cases is inherited or d/t environmental factors beyond the persons control). Why wouldnt compatibilism (the person responsible for behaviour determined by influences utterly beyond their control) apply to acts done by the mentally ill? Am I confusing categories here somehow?
Good question but daunting to answer:
Delete1. For one thing, we approach these two issues from different starting-points. For Christians, or Calvinists in particular, we accept the justice of damnation because it's a revealed truth.
But when it comes to the diminished responsibility of the mentally ill, that's based on intuition. Usually a rough-hewn intuition.
2. But even in Calvinism, certain kinds of inability are deemed to be exculpatory. A certain kind of control is necessary for moral responsibility and blame. The question is what kind of control?
3. Nowadays, many philosophers distinguish between two necessary conditions for moral responsibility or blame: (i) the right kind of control and (ii) the right kind of awareness.
4. Apropos (ii), there are different kinds of awareness: (a) awareness of moral significance; (b) awareness of consequences; (c) awareness of alternatives.
5. A further complication is that freedom is a matter of degree. We are subject to gradations of internal and external pressure to act in certain ways. At what point may that become so coercive as to mitigate or exonerate our choices and actions?
6. Likewise, mental illness ranges along a continuum, up to the extreme case of psychopathy.
7. Finally, here are competing theories of moral responsibility and blame: attributability, accountability, or answerability.
So it may not be possible to give a philosophically uniform answer considering all the variables–as well as ongoing, unresolved philosophical disputes.
Great thoughts...daunting to answer for sure.
ReplyDelete1. My instinctive intuition, regarding being born with a totally depraved nature (lost from the point of conception in the womb) and therefore not having the opportunity to have reconciliation with my creator due to having the faculties of will and desire at a 180 orientation to Him, is repulsive to my natural mind. I’ve mentioned before, I find this is probably the hardest Scriptural truth to swallow and indeed I need to admit I harbor animosity toward the Lord on this. My cry to the Lord toward both cases-inherited sin and inherited mental illness is identical-can nothing be done?
2. From what I know of Calvinism, possessing the depravity and thus inability of the will, does not exculpate one from sinful use of the will.
What kind of control? If we use analogy of a car’s transmission, Adams descendants are manufactured with a reverse (relative to God) gear only, until and unless they are given a forward gear (regeneration saving faith) by God. If we give the inanimate, mechanical car an image-of-God bearing faculty such as a will, it is defective from the factory so to speak. This car has control, but not path reversing, leaf-turning control.
5. In the case of Adams descendants, there is no degree of freedom internally (total depravity, bonded will) or externally (predestination of God). I’m defining freedom here in the sense of ability to desire, will and choose a or not a. There are other definitions and concepts of freedom though I suppose. The way I see it, regenerated souls are able to choose a or not a since they possess both a new and old nature so I can conceive here of gradation of freedom considering pressures from within and without as you mention.
7. Not only theologians but people who work in the field of human justice will have an interest in these things.
Guillaume Bignon has a chapter titled "The mental illness argument" in his book Excusing Sinners and Blaming God.
Deletei) Different cultures have different honor codes and concepts of moral responsibility and blame. For instance:
Deletehttps://www.patheos.com/blogs/jacksonwu/2018/07/25/why-honor-matters-must-read/
https://dailystoic.com/tamler-sommers-honor/
My point is not do endorse cultural relativism, but all-to-often, critics of the Bible like Rauser simply treat their own social conditioning as if that's the unquestioned standard of comparison.
ii) Guillaume Bignon has analyzed the question you raise in Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil.
iii) In her influential Freedom within Reason, Susan Wolf frames the issue not in terms of control but whether the actions express who you are, your desires, intentions, &c.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-responsibility/#AttrVersAcco
Again, my point is not to promote moral relativism but to illustrate that many people take for granted certain assumptions about the necessary conditions of blame and moral responsibility that are questionable when scrutinized. Our concepts of blame and moral responsibility didn't fall from the sky, fully formed. We often have conflicting intuitions.