Eric Reitan

In Hell and Divine Goodness, James Spiegel defends the surprising position that of the two dominant non-universalist Christian views on the fate of the damned—the traditionalist view that the damned suffer eternal conscious torment, and the annihilationist view that the damned are put out of existence—the annihilationist view actually posits the more severe fate from the standpoint of a punishment. I argue here that his case for this position rests on two questionable assumptions, and that even granting these assumptions there are intuitive reasons, reasons Spiegel has not addressed, for supposing that ECT is more severe.

Recently, Eric Yang and Stephen Davis have defended what they call the separationist view of hell against an objection leveled by Jeremy Gwiazda by invoking the concept of hard-heartedness as an account of why some would eternally choose to remain in hell. Gwiazda’s objection to the separationist view of hell is an instance of a broader strategy of objection invoked by other universalists to argue that God could guarantee universal salvation while respecting libertarian freedom—an objection that Kronen and I have dubbed the Infinite Opportunity Argument. Yang’s and Davis’s reply to Gwiazda thus amounts to a response to the Infinite Opportunity Argument, and the merits of their reply bear on the feasibility of the freedom-respecting version of universalism that the argument supports. I argue that the kind of hard-heartedness that must be posited in order to derail the Infinite Opportunity Argument—the kind of absolute hard-heartedness that Yang and Davis explicitly invoke—suffers significant problems that prevent it from posing a serious challenge to freedom-respecting universalism.

_Is God a Delusion?_ addresses the philosophical underpinnings of the recent proliferation of popular books attacking religious beliefs. Winner of CHOICE 2009 Outstanding Academic Title Award Focuses primarily on charges leveled by recent critics that belief in God is irrational and that its nature ferments violence Balances philosophical rigor and scholarly care with an engaging, accessible style Offers a direct response to the crop of recent anti-religion bestsellers currently generating considerable public discussion

Two interrelated questions drive this work. First, what moral status does violence have within the framework of the Christian tradition which gives the command to love one's "neighbor" the status of fundamental moral principle? Second, can an ethics of the sort articulated in this tradition stand on its own as a coherent and complete moral system? ;In exploring these questions, I focus attention on the following forseeable situation, which provides a special problem for the sort of Christian ethics I explore, and which therefore serves as a testing ground for the satisfactoriness of that ethic: suppose one is in a situation in which, in order to prevent a malevolent aggressor from harming or killing an innocent person, it seems one must inflict violence on the aggressor. This circumstance is problematic for Christian ethics because in doing violence to the aggressor one seems not to love the aggressor properly, and in refraining from violence one seems not to love the aggressor's victim properly. The question is whether this problem can be resolved. Just War theorists have sought to resolve this problem by arguing that it is sometimes not contrary to love to do violence to a person. Christian pacifists argue that it is always contrary to love to do violence to a person, but that it is not likewise contrary to love to defend innocent persons by nonviolent means alone, even when such means seem likely to fail. Christian realists maintain that the problem cannot be resolved, and that the love ethic of Christianity fails therefore to constitute a coherent and complete moral system: its sphere of application must be truncated, and outside that sphere other principles must hold sway. ;I conclude that the pacifist solution to the posed dilemma is the right one, but that there is nevertheless one sort of violence that is not contrary to love: namely, the violence associated with properly administered punishment. While current systems of criminal punishment are not properly loving, one may find examples of loving punishment in such micro-communities as the family

Both Arne Naess and Warwick Fox have argued that deep ecology, in terms of “Selfrealization,” is essentially nonmoral. I argue that the attainment of the ecological Self does not render morality in the richest sense “superfluous,” as Fox suggests. To the contrary, the achievement of the ecological Self is a precondition for being a truly moral person, both from the perspective of a robust Kantian moral frameworkand from the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics. The opposition between selfregard and morality is a false one. The two are the same. The ecological philosophy of Naess and Fox is an environmental ethic in the grand tradition of moral philosophy.

When philosophers contribute to public debates as polarized as contemporary ones about theistic belief, it is common to encounter responses that, philosophically, are woefully misguided. While it is tempting to simply dismiss them, a closer examination of recurring responses can offer insight of philosophical significance. In this paper I exemplify the value of engaging with recurring but misguided popular objections by looking carefully at one such objection to my recent book, Is God a Delusion?