◉ The Benevolent Monster: Age of Accountability, Infinite Utility, and the Soteriological Reductio of Infant Salvation

An age-of-accountability defense can turn the death of an infant or young child into a consoling claim: the child was not morally responsible and is now guaranteed eternal happiness. Combined with irreversible hell and a non-zero risk of adult damnation, however, that reassurance creates a comparison the defense does not intend. Death before accountability secures the best eternal outcome; survival removes the guarantee. The resulting pressure is sometimes described as a utilitarian recommendation to kill. That description is both morally dangerous and analytically mistaken. This paper separates three questions: what outcome is better for the child, what an agent is permitted to do, and what a deity would be justified in allowing or commanding. A deontic prohibition can decisively answer the second question without changing the first. A finite expected-value model then shows that literal infinities are unnecessary. If the probability and magnitude of irreversible loss make the expected afterlife disadvantage of survival greater than the value of finite-life goods, early death is soteriologically safer. Treating heaven and hell as infinite makes ordinary expectation calculations unstable; it does not dissolve the underlying contrast between guarantee and risk. The conclusion is a conditional reductio. It does not apply to every Christian account of children, salvation, or hell, and it provides no permission, recommendation, or practical proposal. It applies to the conjunction of guaranteed pre-accountability salvation, adult risk of irreversible loss, afterlife dominance, and the use of the child's heavenly gain as a moral defense of death. A coherent reply may deny the guarantee, remove the irreversible risk, enlarge the value of earthly life, restrict the defense to permission rather than welfare, or abandon the claim that postmortem benefit answers the original moral objection. None is cost-free, but each identifies the premise that must change.