The Valuation Problem in Justice Theory: Incommensurability and the Categorical Failure of PSA - 35

This paper evaluates a specific form of penal substitutionary atonement: the penalty is endless conscious punishment; endless duration is constitutive of that penalty; Christ's passion is finite; and infinite worth or status is offered as the reason the passion satisfies the penalty. The bare worth appeal does not establish satisfaction because the account's own completion rule has changed without justification. The paper separates three questions often collapsed—who may bear a sanction, what kind of sanction is imposed, and what counts as completing it—and uses work on value comparison, punishment, mercy, and contemporary atonement theory to test the missing bridge. If duration is constitutive, completion requires that duration or a defended equivalence rule; worth, dignity, intensity, and status are not by themselves time undergone. A defender may deny that duration is constitutive, justify an equivalence rule, or identify another completion or release mechanism such as qualitative completion, commutation, or pardon. Representation can answer the bearer question, but it still needs an account of completion. The result is bounded: the Valuation Fallacy defeats one value-for-duration inference, not every form of penal substitution, doctrine of hell, or theory of atonement. The constructive demand is simple: apply one completion rule to the penalty and its alleged satisfaction, or explain the principled change.