Repentance and Satan's Apple

Suppose Alice is an misanthropic immortal who lives in a universe of happy people. Suppose, too, that Alice is an immortal. Then one day Alice does a really bad thing. She is unreasonably annoyed at all other people and instantly freezes everything besides herself.

What ought Alice to do? Well, she ought to unfreeze everything.

But when? If she delays unfreezing the universe by a week, she gets to enjoy a week without the annoyance of other people. And nobody will be any the worse for it. So, why not? But if a week, why not a month, or a millennium?

There seems to be nothing wrong with procrastinating when the action is just as well done later. So, why can’t Alice just continue procrastinating for eternity?

Maybe the thing to say is this. Alice ought to repent now. It is wrong to live unrepentantly, so one should repent as soon as possible. And repentance requires an intention to repair the damage that one has done insofar as one can.

But it is true that when the damage can be equally well repaired later, the repentant person does not need to do it immediately. We can even tweak the case so that the repair is better done later. Perhaps Alice will be slightly less grumpy each day, and so if she unfreezes people later, they will be better off as they will have a slightly less grumpy Alice to live with (this makes the case more like Satan’s Apple). And it’s clear that when the damage repair is better done later, it may be left for later.

I think what we need to say is this: The intention needs to have a reasonable level of specificity. When one is able to specify how and when one will do the repair, one needs to intend that. One cannot simply have the intention to do one of infinitely many things (unfreeze tomorrow or unfreeze the day after or …). Intentions, either in general or in the special case of the intentions of restitution that repentance calls for, must come with a plan of action. And so Alice needs to set herself a plan, rather than just vaguely leaving things for the future.

But can’t she just procratinate, even so? When I have an intention to do something, and a better idea comes along, there is nothing wrong with switching to the better idea. So, take the case where the repair is better done later. It seems that Alice can permissibly form the intention to unfreeze tomorrow, and tomorrow change her mind, and so on. But that would allow Alice to get away with never unfreezing, and yet without violating any further moral obligations (besides the ones she violated by the initial freezing).

It seems to me that to get out of this, one needs some way for making intentions be morally binding. Perhaps repentant Alice needs to promise herself or vow to God to unfreeze people on a particular day.

It seems that from our outlandish freezing scenario we can get some interesting conclusions:

• intentions of restitution need a significant amount of specificity; and

• there are ways of moral self-binding, such as self-promises or vows to god.

Two ways of being vicious

Many of the times when Hitler made a wrong decision, his character thereby deteriorated and he became more vicious. Let’s imagine that Hitler was a decent young man at age 19. Now imagine Schmitler, who lived a life externally just like Hitler’s, but on Twin Earth. Until age 19, Schmitler’s life was just like Hitler. But from then on, each time Schmitler made a wrong choice, aliens or angels or God intervened and made sure that the moral deterioration that normally follows upon wrong action never occurred. As it happens, however, Schmitler still made the same choices Hitler did, and made them with freedom and clear understanding of their wickedness.

Thus, presumably unlike Hitler, Schmitler did not morally fall, one wrong action at a time, to the point of a genocidal character. Instead, he committed a series of wrong actions, culminating in genocide, but each action was committed from the same base level of virtue and vice, the same level that both he and Hitler had at age 19. This is improbable, but in a large enough universe all sorts of improbable things will happen.

So, now, here is the oddity. Since Schmitler’s level of virtue and vice at the depth of his moral depradations was the same as at age 19, and at age 19 both he and Hitler were decent young men (or so I assume), it seems we cannot say that Schmitler was a vicious man even while he was committing genocidal atrocities. And yet Schmitler was fully responsible for these atrocities, perhaps more so than Hitler.

I want to say that Schmitler is spectacularly vicious without having much in the way of vices, indeed while having more virtue than vice (he was, I assume, a decent young man), even though that sounds like a contradiction. Schmitler is spectacularly vicious because of what he has done.

This doesn’t sound right, though. Actions are episodic. Being vicious is a state. Hitler was a vicious man while innocently walking his dog on a nice spring day in 1944, even when not doing any wrongs. And we can explain why Hitler was vicious then: he had a character with very nasty vices, even while he was not exercising the vices. But how can we say that Schmitler was vicious then?

Here’s my best answer. Even on that seemingly innocent walk, Schmitler and Hitler were both failing to repent of their evil deeds, failing to set out on the road of reconciliation with their victims. A continuing failure to repent is not something episodic, but something more like a state.

If this is right, then there are two ways of being vicious: by having vices and by being an unrepentant evildoer.

(A difficult question Robert Garcia once asked me is relevant, though: What should we say about people who have done bad things but suffered amnesia?)

Repair and repentance

I love fixing things. I just fixed two keys on my phone, by scrubbing the contacts out with acetone on a toothpick. Since last night, I've also been trying to fix the WiFi on my PDA, by installing a software upgrade and running the battery out. On Saturday, I was repairing some of our furniture. There is a joy when something that once was broken is working again. And especially when it is working better than when it was new, e.g., because I can use a better glue (Titebond II) than what was probably used at the furniture factory.

This is a faint image of the joy of our Shepherd when he brings us back after we have strayed and not only restores us to the grace we had before the Fall, but raises us to something higher. The disanalogy is that all too often the stuff I fix is stuff that I broke (see the "Update" in the link), or that wasn't made right in the first place, while the creatures that God fixes are ones that he made right, but they freely broke themselves, or were broken by others that freely broke themselves. I am glad my possessions don't freely break. I'd be mad at them.