The Problem of Justice, The Problem of Love

Abstract

Traditionalism, which takes hell to be a state of eternal conscious suffering whose purpose is retributive punishment, faces a problem of justice. No matter how egregious an individual’s earthly sins might be, the infinite punishment of endless suffering will always be far out of proportion to the severity of the crimes committed, and thus never a punishment that fits. On the heels of this is a second difficulty for traditionalism: the problem of love. On retributivist accounts, the suffering of hell neither serves nor is intended to serve a reformative function: it is not aimed at the moral improvement—or more generally, the good—of the one punished. But a punishment inflicted with neither the intention nor the possibility of reform is unloving, even if it can be made to fall within some plausible account of justice.