The world we live in is certainly not perfect. It is marred by evil, both the evil that we ourselves commit (moral evil) and the imbalance and unjustness that exist in the world by virtue of it being an imperfect world (natural evil). It is common to see natural evil as a kind of fallout from moral evil; a “residual” evil that exists as a result of our past evil moral acts. An example may be a family suffering in poverty because a great-grandfather squandered the family wealth; or a town that’s ridden with crime because one particularly strong gang fifty years ago drove out the police from their area.
Because of natural evil (or established moral evil), good things don’t always come out of good acts, and bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Sometimes it works out right, and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s the world we live in. But with a lot of hard work, we can often do great amounts of good for this world, and reverse some of that “natural evil.”
Now imagine a Hell in which people could still make day-to-day decisions. Why, one might ask, couldn’t they choose to do good every once in a while, thereby making Hell slightly less awful of a place? The standard answer is that time doesn’t pass in Hell; we exist in a static state of sin and separation from God; there is no opportunity for choice. But if we were to imagine that the tortured souls were able to make individual decisions, what could motivate them? If Hell is a place of ultimate corruption, then the proper order of things is never kept. What *should* happen *never* happens. This means that good actions would never lead to good consequences — and, one might suspect, would only lead to worse situations that before. In this scenario, there is *no motivation* to do good: neither for Heaven, because the soul’s fate has been decided; nor for the good consequences of the good acts, for they would not occur in a perfectly evil world. I suppose the only reason left to do good would be for good’s own sake. But this begs the question, Why is the good good? Either because it is commanded by God (who in this case has already pronounced His judgment), or because the good is that which maintains order in the universe (which we have said may no longer be true in a purely evil world such as Hell). If the good accomplishes evil, what point is there to do good?
