Eschatological Cutoffs

TL;DR

The paper reconstructs Ted Sider’s argument that a traditional heaven-or-hell eschatology conflicts with divine justice, criticizes Dougherty and Poston’s gappy-world reply, and offers a limited defense of a mortal-sin-based cutoff. It argues that treating moral similarity multiplicatively can block Sider’s inference, though many details remain unresolved.

Key findings

• The author reconstructs Sider’s reductio as relying on DICHOTOMY, BADNESS, NON-UNIVERSALITY, DIVINE CONTROL, JUSTICE, STRUCTURE, and NON-GAPPINESS: if damnation criteria admit degrees, a cutoff S makes similar people receive markedly different fates; if they do not admit degrees, vague cases arise.
• Dougherty and Poston deny NON-GAPPINESS, claiming God actualizes a gappy world hidden from humans; the author argues this likely requires middle knowledge/Molinism, a controversial thesis, and may imply God plans some people for hell. The author also argues that if heaven is infinitely better than hell, their moderate moral gaps may not satisfy proportionality.
• The author proposes a metric of unforgiven mortal sins at death with the cutoff at notch 1: zero unforgiven mortal sins leads to heaven, while one or more leads to hell. In the example, Manny has 0, Moe has 1, and Jack has 127; multiplicative similarity makes Moe infinitely worse off than Manny but Moe and Jack only finitely different, allowing denial of premise (4).
• The author presents this as a limited defense, not a decisive refutation, and says it needs further work on what distinguishes mortal from venial sin, how to avoid second-level vagueness, and why mortal sin merits hell.

Methods

• Philosophical and conceptual paper: it reconstructs Sider’s argument, critically examines Dougherty and Poston’s reply, and then develops an alternative response.
• No empirical data or sample are used; the analysis relies on thought experiments and examples, including Manny/Moe/Jack, profanity counts, and degrees of belief such as .8 versus .6.
• Main analysis is argument reconstruction and conceptual evaluation, including a proposed discrete metric and a contrast between additive and multiplicative ways of measuring moral similarity.

Limitations

• The author explicitly states that no demonstrative argument is given for preferring the ratio/multiplicative outlook, and that a full treatment of vagueness, mortal sin, forgiveness, repentance, punishment, and moral luck cannot be undertaken in a short paper.
• The author describes the positive proposal as a limited defense rather than a complete systematic account or decisive answer to all objections.
• Evident from the text: the proposal depends on contested mortal-sin theology and leaves some modal or other-possible-worlds issues only briefly addressed.