Hell and Proportionality

According to a traditional view of the afterlife, God causes or allows some people to go to hell after death, where hell is understood as a place or condition that involves everlasting suffering. This view—call it "traditionalism"—faces a well-known proportionality objection. If we regard the suffering of the damned as a punishment, traditionalism seems to imply that some receive an infinite punishment. But no one’s earthly deeds merit an infinite punishment, and God does not punish unjustly, so (the objection concludes) traditionalism is false. This paper develops two lines of response to the proportionality objection, both of which challenge the assumption that traditionalism implies that some receive an infinite punishment. There are at least two reasons why a punishment involving everlasting suffering need not be an infinitely severe punishment. First, everlasting suffering doesn’t entail infinite suffering. Moreover, I suggest that there are theologically attractive models that combine everlasting suffering with finite total suffering. Second, infinite suffering wouldn’t entail infinite negative well-being, even if the suffering isn’t counterbalanced by positive experiences, and even if there are no relevant non-hedonic contributors to well-being. I show that the inference from infinite suffering to infinite negative well-being should be rejected by anyone who rejects Parfit’s “repugnant conclusion” in its single-life form.