Thank you for another tour de force. Your erudition is genuinely impressive. I found this essay especially interesting because in the past few years I had come to reject infernalism, though I did not know that term for it or that it existed as an issue in Christian theology.

I have come to the conclusion that theology becomes a problem when one decides that others should share one’s beliefs about such matters. Sharing one’s beliefs for others to consider would be all well and good, except that it seems to be human nature to feel a rejection of one’s beliefs as an attack on one’s being. Christian evangelicals, being the most ‘out there’ in that way, provide evidence for that observation: they are convinced that they are being persecuted though all that is happening is that most people aren’t accepting what they are proffering.

Heretofore beliefs (religious/theological or secular/ideological) have been humanity’s only source for knowledge of ‘the good’. Real justice is a strictly rational rendition of goodness (most broadly, ‘taking other human beings into account’), involving no beliefs. [On my Web site, ajustsolution.com; Page: real justice, the subtitle is ‘goodness without limit’.]

The ethic of real justice follows from observation within material existence: (1) that one is a ‘human being’ (as we call ourselves) coexisting with fellow beings in a common material existence and (2) that human beings have no choice but to effect choices (choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). Justice is thereby limited to taking human beings into account in the large but finite domain of effecting choices; personal morality is the only source for governance outside that domain.

The ethic of real justice is undeniably applicable to anyone who accepts the validity of those observations. To validly reject it one must consistently act contrarily to those observations. Since to exist is to effect choices, the only grounds for being outside the reach of real justice is to act all the time as though there are no fellow beings of the same kind as oneself.

Such people exist. We call them psychopaths and sociopaths. They deserve to be treated as human beings by society, but we are under no obligation to allow them to do harm to any other human beings.

Real justice is summarized in a “5 min read” here in Medium.