This is certainly one way to resist an age-of-accountability view. There’s no age of accountability even for one individual, because each person’s moral responsibility gradually increases.

But I mentioned a completely different age-of-accountability-denying view, and that’s the view that everyone is equally responsible (i.e. has original guilt). I would lean this way in terms of what seems most likely to me given what the Bible actually says, and I’d need a strong argument to convince me of (b) instead. But I’m open to such an argument, and I think (b) is more likely than the typical age-of-accountability view. So I would say that I do not have a firm conviction on whether (b) is true, even though I lean away from it.

As for Alex’s comment, I think he may well be right. Maybe original guilt doesn’t require punishment but just requires preventing someone from eternal bliss, which perhaps could be manifested by annihilation or eternal sleep. Of course, those who think hell just is annihilation and that that’s punishment will not be able to go the annihilation route. Whether annihilation is neutral or a punishment will matter. I’ve gone back and forth on that, but I tend to think it’s a punishment, whereas eternal sleep with neutral experience but very minimal consciousness of it might be a more neutral result that isn’t punishment. It’s hard to figure out how this non-punishment but non-bliss state is going to look. It would be separation from God, but it also needs to be distinct from hell somehow, and if hell just is separation from God, as Augustine thought (and as scripture does support) then there’s little room left for a middle ground.

As for your last paragraph, I’m not agnostic in the sense of having no views whatsoever, no leanings even. I’m agnostic in the sense that I don’t think I know whether it’s true. I have a view that I think is more likely to be correct, but that’s not something I believe to be knowledge.

I’m not sure why such agnosticism amounts to radical skepticism about common sense morality. I do think I have a healthy skepticism about common sense morality, because I think the doctrine of the fall requires such a skepticism. I think we should see our own internal conscience as a fallible guide to morality, because we do have the ability to know right from wrong to some extent.

On the other hand, it’s quite fallible due to the presence of sin that leads to our ease in excusing our actions and those of people we love or have soft spots for. I do think most of the things we take to be right and wrong, good and bad, are right and wrong, good and bad. But I tend to think most people’s foundations of ethics are horribly wrong, and that’s what we’re getting closer to when we start asking questions about the implications of the doctrines of original sin and original guilt in cases where someone who has no capacity (or a much-diminished capacity) to understand morality is involved.

(b) Later stage fetuses (esp. those older than 24 weeks) presumably deserve a greater condemnation than earlier stage fetuses….

In reading the Prosblogion comments under your accountability post, I thought Pruss’ remark was apt (italics added):

Even if I never committed any actual sin, I would not automatically deserve heaven….Justice does not require God to give heavenly bliss to the person who never sins if she lacks that supernatural love. Justice does require that God not bestow any punishment on that person.

Are you really agnostic on the idea of whether a fetus deserves to be punished? Are you aware that such agnosticism actually seems to imply a very radical form of skepticism towards what is sometimes called “common sense morality”?

Depending on what you mean by an ontological fall, you might be getting me right. I do think it’s clear in scripture that we are fallen from the outset and that we are in sin as a condition prior to any sins that we commit. It’s the former and not the latter that makes us incompatible with being in God’s presence and deserving of separation from God.

Janice, the reason hell is described in such terms is that it’s separation from God, and that’s a very bad thing, especially for those who can appreciate it for what it is. Perhaps fetuses can’t do so, and if they ended up separated from God they might not experience the full-on horror of it, in which case perhaps what they deserve isn’t the same thing as what we deserve given our fuller levels of understanding and more complete thoughts, desires, and actions flowing from the sin nature that we have in common with fetuses.

On questions (a) and (b), you’re assuming I have some view on the matter, whereas I’m simply offering some arguments against certain positions. I’m agnostic about most of the issues relevant to those two questions.

TUAD, yes, that seems to me to be exactly the position she’s taking, and it strikes me as morally horrendous. She’s admitting that she sees a woman’s right to kill her fetus as more important than the full right to life of a fetus that she seems to admit has such a right. Even Judith Jarvis Thomson denies such a monstrous claim, saying that women only have a right to eviction of the fetus, and if it happens to die then so be it. Mary Anne Warren has a false premise (that fetuses have very little rights) and a conclusion that doesn’t monstrously follow but is monstrous from the correct premises. But it involves self-deception. This piece is outright endorsing evil as evil.

Have you read this post “When Feminism Kills — Abortion As ‘The Lesser Evil’“?

Excerpt:

“Indeed, the experience of having a child convinced Senior that the inhabitant of the womb is indeed a human life. Responding to a recent British medical report claiming that fetuses feel no pain before 24 weeks of gestation, she correctly observes that this has nothing to do with the fundamental issue at stake. “Either a fetus is life from conception, or it is not,” she rightly asserts, “ability to feel pain is not, in itself, a defining factor.”

…

Just when she seems to be poised to deliver a clear affirmation of the value and dignity of that unborn human life, she veers into an absolutist argument for abortion rights. Yes, that fetus is a human life, she argues, but that life must yield to the inviolable feminist principle of abortion rights.

You simply cannot “decouple feminism from abortion rights,” she insists, adding, “you cannot separate women’s rights from their right to fertility control.”

Even as she admits that her position on the moral status of the unborn child has been utterly changed, she insists that her absolutist position on abortion rights has not. When it comes down to the right of the fetus to live versus the right of the mother to abort, the abortion right wins.

Abortion, which she acknowledges is the killing of a human life, is defined as “a lesser evil” than the curtailing of abortion rights in the name of liberating women.

“As ever, when an issue we thought was black and white becomes more nuanced, the answer lies in choosing the lesser evil,” she assures. “The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.”

You must be prepared to kill for the sake of defending abortion rights? That is exactly what abortion entails — the killing of an unborn child for the sake of asserting a woman’s so-called “right to choose.”

In this essay, published in one of the world’s most venerable newspapers, Antonia Senior goes public with the argument that feminists should just admit that abortion is the killing of a human life, and then they should go on to assert that the right to kill an unborn human life is just the price that must be paid if feminism is to be defended.

“If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.” That statement, published for all the world to see, perfectly distills the inescapable logic of the abortion rights argument. It is based on a willingness to kill — and on the horrifying audacity to call this killing “the lesser evil.”

(Do read the entire essay.)

That leaves room for degrees of how bad hell is, which allows for less-developed human beings to have a diminished capacity to recognize the horror being separated from God.

It sounds like you are suggesting two things:

(a) Human fetuses–or even zygotes–may be condemned to hell for all of eternity, but they would continue to experience merely as a fetus or a zygote. (In the case of the zygote or the early stage embryo, this means that they wouldn’t experience anything.)

(b) Later stage fetuses (esp. those older than 24 weeks) presumably deserve a greater condemnation than earlier stage fetuses–insofar as these presumably have the capacity to suffer from the effects of eternal banishment from God. Young children (e.g., 8-year olds) deserve a much greater eternal condemnation.

Am I understanding you correctly?

“Janice, you seem to be assuming that hell is painful in exactly the way that the article is discussing pain. Why assume that?”

There is certainly no such assumption on my part. My assumption about hell is rather this: many Christian believe that hell is a place of eternal suffering, a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” with torments that are in some way comparable to burning forever in a lake of fire.

And here’s my question to you: regardless of whether or not God ends up sending fetuses to hell (that’s really beside the present point), do you actually believe that, on their own, human fetuses deserve to be punished in hell, where hell is as described?

Even so, how did we come to limit agony to pain in the first place?

And please don’t do conceptual default and think that “sedation” is anything other than the name given to the reversible but toxic impairment of organs in the body. Please don’t credit the term “sedation” as a natural state, as the doctors credited it.

Thinking about this: This would probably also require a view of the Fall as a “moral” fall, but not necessarily an “ontological” fall.

I think this would be the part, Jeremy Pierce, that you would disagree with?

For example, Jesus said, “Let the little children come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of God.” I know that could be interpreted in different ways, but surely the most obvious interpretation is the literal one: that little children are in the kingdom of God.

When would that change? Only God could know for sure, of course, but probably there is for each of us some sort of age of accountability at which we are morally responsible for our spiritual condition.

And I am assuming at this point that we are all in agreement that it is wrong to use sensation or lack of sensation as a criterion for the permissibility of abortion.

If what they deserve is not the pain that results but the simple separation from God, then the historic doctrine of all of Adam’s descendants deserving separation from God can be preserved without adopting the unbiblical notion of an age of accountability but without the implication that it’s pain that fetuses deserve.

This is not to say that God does send all or any infants or fetuses who die to hell. I have no idea. It’s well within the realm of possibility that God graciously gives to them all or to many of them the gift of regeneration, which will manifest itself very differently in someone with diminished capacities. I’m agnostic on that issue, since scripture has no clear teaching on it. But I don’t think it’s compatible with the gospel to claim that infants and fetuses don’t deserve separation from God.

(And to be clear, I’m not saying you can’t be a Christian and believe such a thing. You can believe both the gospel and something that contradicts it, as long as you don’t see the contradiction. Once you see the contradiction, you have a choice between giving up the gospel or giving up the thing that contradicts it, but most who hold such views don’t see the contradiction.)

Doctor’s are saying that there is strong evidence that foetuses don’t develop connection between their periphery (where they sense) and the cortex (where they can perceive pain) until after 24 weeks. They don’t mention ‘toxic sedation’ or anything else, except as an alternative that would be offered before when we thought that foetuses could feel.

They may have the ability to be distressed, I’m not sure that has been looked at.

We don’t need to experience pain from physical extremities to feel distress or even pain itself. I gave well-known, simple, examples.

I just thought that someone would have got it. I keep getting the feeling that people aren’t getting it, but my point was really simple. Maybe if I told anti-abortionists and others that I am a scientist (which I am) they might listen.

I suspect these researchers would be happy to concede that fetuses under 24 weeks only experience the kind of pain they cannot feel. Hehe.

And I also suspect that some folks here still think that it is good and appropriate for fetuses to suffer for all of eternity the kinds of hellish torments that they can feel.

I am ringing the alarm! didn’t anyone, even the anti-abortionists, realise that pain need not be felt to be experienced?!

The fact that there are no nerve connections between a brain and body doesn’t rule out the experience of pain at all. Witness phantom pain, pain from toxic injury, distress from physical injury… witness the fact that people who have strokes can become very distressed, witness also how psychedelics can bring experiences of intense pain in the absence of sensory stimulation, witness how the distress that accompanies knowledge of imminent death can be triggered by the slightest sign, even a non-sensory sign.

And what is this state of foetal “sedation”? Are the doctors really telling us that the toxic effect of sedatives is a natural experience?

Come on boys and girls, you’ve all been hoodwinked. I suspect that our awe for science has sent us scurrying into a corner, and stunned us into accepting the doctors conclusions.