A legacy post originally published on JANUARY 3, 2009 at 3:46 AM
🔗 Easy Universalism by Mike Almeida
Let me try out this proof of universalism in which perfect goodness and perfect justice seem to coincide. (Inspired by points made in discussion with Richard Otte and Alexander Pruss—neither is responsible for my use of the points).
- For all x, no matter how morally evil x chose to be, it is possible that God says, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life.”
- For all x, were God to utter, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life”, then x would have led a morally perfect life.
- If God were (i) to utter, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life” and (ii) to send x immediately to heaven, then it would display perfect justice and perfect goodness.
- For all x, no matter how morally evil x chose to be, God should and does say, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life” and God should and does send x immediately to heaven.
- Universalism is true
I’m worried about this sort of argument, since I’m not at all sure that (1) or (2) is true. Instead of (2), (6) sounds at least as right to me. - For some x, were God to utter, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life”, then (per impossibile) God would have uttered a falsehood.
If (6) is true, then both (1) and (2) are false. Instead of (1), we have (7). - For some x, it is impossible that God says, after x’s death, “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life.”
The real difficulty here is that there are two ways to resolve these counterfactuals. On some resolutions, (1) and (2) come out true. On others, (6) and (7) come out true. My own view is that there is no single correct way to resolve these counterfactuals. But I’d be happy to learn that only one of these resolutions can be right.
NB: Two points: (a) it’s a minor point, but we could replace ‘God says “I commend x for having led a morally perfect life”’ with ‘God says “x led a morally perfect life and I commend x for it”. This is for anyone worried about the inference from “God commends x for doing F” to “x did F”. (b) I assume that each x could lead a morally perfect life, but this is probably not essential to the proof. It might be that each agent could lead an imperfect, but morally excellent life.
