Hell and the Good
Hell and the Good
While it might come as a surprise to some readers, there is an overwhelming consensus in Western philosophical thought (perhaps such agreement also exists in Eastern thought, but I am not qualified to say) that what is good, and only what is good, is ultimately attractive to human beings. One thing this entails is that what we desire is ultimately always something that is good for its own sake. Because of this truth about what is good, we are able to make sense out of the idea of immoral or morally bad/wrong action. Whenever someone acts immorally, he ultimately does so in his pursuit of what is good for its own sake.
Just as what is good and only what is good ultimately attracts, so also no one ever pursues what is bad for its own sake. Everyone ultimately seeks to avoid what is bad for its own sake because everyone desires to avoid what is bad for its own sake. Lewis noted that we come closest to the idea of someone pursuing what is bad for its own sake in cruelty. Even here, however, he stressed that those who are cruel are so for the sake of some good they are pursuing:
But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. In real life people are cruel for one of two reasons—either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it—money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.…No one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong—only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him.…In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong way.4
Elsewhere, Lewis adds: “I think all pleasure simply good: what we call bad pleasures are pleasures produced by actions, or inactions, which break the moral law, and it is those actions or inactions which are bad, not the pleasures.”5
How is the matter of what is good relevant to the doctrine of hell? In the following way: If someone goes to hell, it cannot be because that person chooses to go to hell. No person can choose to go to hell because hell is by hypothesis bad and no one can pursue what is bad for the sake of its badness. Thus, if there is an explanation for why people go to hell, it cannot be or include that they go to hell because they choose to go there.