Of Distributive Justice and Hellfire

Abstract

Defenses of God’s permission of evil by appeal to free will are alleged to have a value problem. Laura Ekstrom argues that free will does not obviously have a value which would outweigh or justify the disvalue associated with moral evil and its consequences. I propose that a free will defense of moral evil does not need to conceive of free will as being more valuable than moral evil or its consequences. Rather, free will is a moral transformer in virtue of which created persons can deserve their moral character and those consequences which follow upon it. From this perspective, I show that the alleged ‘value problem’ rests upon controversial conceptions of distributive justice and that Thomas Aquinas gives us a way to argue plausibly that God’s decisions to allow serious consequences to result from free agency, i.e., hell, could be distributively just and compatible with God’s love for persons.