The question to which this article addresses itself may seem to some misguided, focusing as it does on the notion of prudential rationality where this is understood as a matter of doing what one reasonably supposes is in one's self-interest.Footnote ¹ One of the referees who kindly commented on the article for this journal was of the opinion that the view that ‘personal cost-benefit considerations of the sort prudence might otherwise suggest should not tip the scale when it comes to religious/moral dilemmas’ would be axiomatic to all religious believers as such; in my terms, this referee's opinion was that to be a religious believer is in part to adopt Billy's approach. Thus the question to which this article addresses itself cannot be relevant to any religious believers. I disagree. The topic of this article parallels the topic of amoralism as it has long been discussed in secular moral philosophy: in the absence of religious assumptions, is it prudentially rational to be an amoralist?Footnote ² A disputant in this secular moral-philosophical debate (or rather someone who absents themselves quickly from it) has been the sort of moralist who is of the opinion that it's clearly not morally rational to be an amoralist and, as moral rationality has trumping value over prudential, so whether or not it is prudentially rational to be so is an irrelevance as we decide how we have most reason to live. But (a) this trumping view of moral reasons is not held by all who count themselves as moralists (and nor is the parallel trumping view of religious/moral reasons held by all who count themselves theistsFootnote ³) and (b) even if we assume it is the correct view to hold, the question of whether we can be reasonably confident that prudential reasons align with moral reasons may still be of interest. It is true that, on this assumption, it cannot be of practical interest in that the answer to it cannot on this assumption affect how we have most reason to behave. But even on this assumption it may be of theological/moral interest: do the prudential and moral reasons we ordinarily take ourselves to have for and against actions ultimately point in the same direction or in different ones? On certain religious suppositions, it can look as if they point in opposite directions; rather than underwriting the moral project with a system of rewards and punishments, a forgiving God can seem to undercut it in that adopting a policy of sinfulness now, with planned repentance later, can seem prudentially justifiable.

In this article, therefore, I wish to draw out these suppositions and ‘lightly’ defend them. I say ‘lightly’ as I am not convinced that on balance one has more reason to accept than reject many of them, let alone all of them. But I am convinced that there is at least some reason to accept each of them and that exploring how one might prudentially justifiably go about life were one to accept these suppositions has implications relevant to the lives of those of us who do not accept all of them but do accept some of them and do accept some things which are very close to those which we reject; and this is the position that many of us who are traditional theists will find ourselves in.

It'll be most useful, I think, to call these suppositions ‘premises’ and to think of them as they might be used as building blocks for an argument for the rationality of following a Bartian injunction which we might express – supplementing the wisdom of Bart Simpson with some of the phrasing of Martin Luther – as ‘Be a sinner and sin boldly, but, more latterly, repent.’Footnote ⁴ To be more precise, Bartianism, as I shall be understanding it, is the thesis that it is in one's best interests to follow the two-stage plan of (1) looking to sin whenever doing so would produce greater net ante-mortem benefit than not doing so and (2) repenting of sins on one's deathbed so as to avoid what would otherwise be the due punishment for them, perhaps superadding to the repentance due for one's sins per se suitable repentance for these sins having been committed in the spirit of ‘gaming the system’ in which they would have been committed. In each pre-deathbed choice then, the view suggests, one is prudentially rational in doing a self-interested cost/benefit/risk analysis and picking the highest-ranked option, regardless of how sinful it might be; and then – the second stage of the plan – on one's deathbed one is rational in repenting of all sins committed prior to then. Bartianism, so understood, is prima facie appealing in that it promises us ‘the best of both worlds’, this world and the next. But there also seems to be something paradoxical about it, even from the get-go. How is one actually going to ‘pull off’ stage two of the plan if one has hitherto been acting in the manner of stage one? And what if one dies before one gets even to attempt stage two?

In the scene a quotation from which I gave earlier, after the Preacher has told Bart that Bartianism is not ‘God's angle’, he then encourages Bart to eschew sin altogether; as, if he does so, then he's ‘covered’ in the event of sudden death. Bart, assessing what he's been told as one might an insurance policy, is in turn impressed ‘Full coverage, eh? Hmmm.’ And one must concede that the sudden death issue is an issue for Bartianism, but it is not as such decisive against every Bartian position in every circumstance. It may well be that the probability of one's death prior to being able to repent is sufficiently low as to mean that the net ante-mortem benefit of a particular sin is still worth the risk; it will depend on how big a net benefit the ante-mortem sin brings relative to what would be brought by one's other options and how big the post-mortem punishment for this sin would be (should one die prior to repenting of it), as well as how likely one is to die before the necessary repentance has been accomplished. Obviously the harm of the punishment may be greater than the benefit, but in talking of prudential rationality we are talking about maximizing expected benefit, so if the potential gains to losses come out in a steep ratio and if the probability is really low that one will die prior to repenting, the risk may still be one it would be prudentially irrational not to take. We make these sorts of decisions every day. Nobody thinks that the ‘But what if you died in the next five minutes?’ question shows it to be the case that one should only perform actions which are such that were one to die in the next five minutes, they would have been objectively the most prudent actions one could have performed. And the same applies here. But obviously as one gets older, ceteris paribus, the risk increases; what would be a prudentially rational sin for a twenty-year-old whose recent thorough medical has told them they are in perfect health would not be one for an eighty-year-old who's been told that they are likely to be taken off by a heart attack at any moment.Footnote ⁵

Let us see then what can be said for Bartianism.

I want to start by drawing attention to the fact that premise 1 makes a very minimal claim. Premise 1 might be true and yet it also be true that most of the sinful actions which we may perform would not produce as great net ante-mortem benefit as would a goodly number of the alternative non-sinful actions open to us at the relevant moments of choice. Premise 1 might be true yet it also be true that the vast majority of sinful actions we might ever perform are net ante-mortem harmful to us. And premise 1 might be true and yet it also be true that sinful actions are always in themselves ones which, due to their sinful aspect, harm the perpetrator, even if premise 1's being true would of course entail that that harmful aspect is not in all cases one that outweighs any beneficial aspect. Given philosophers’ understanding of ‘some’, as meaning ‘at least one’, we should also read premise 1, despite its use of plural terms such as ‘occasions’, as being such that it is sufficient for it to be true that a single person at one stage in the history of the universe had, has, or will have available to them a single sinful act which, were they to perform it, would bring them greater net ante-mortem benefit than would any non-sinful act available to them at that moment. So, if there is even a single example of this phenomenon affecting someone somewhere in the universe at some time, premise 1 is true. And in fact – let me chance my hand here – it is plausible that the phenomenon is widespread; its being so would go a long way to explaining the breadth and depth of humanity's sinfulness. Why would there be so much sin about if it were not the case that sinning was often beneficial (at least ante-mortem) for the sinner?Footnote ⁶

Morality quite often demands of one that one does something not for one's individual benefit, but for the benefit of others, and, when it does so, there is often an alternative action to that which morality demands of one, an alternative that would be more to one's individual benefit (ante-mortem at least) than would the action which morality demands. One often has duties to others which morality instructs one to fulfil, but often in fulfilling such duties one would be failing to avail oneself of some benefit that one might otherwise have brought to oneself (and doing so with no compensating benefit coming to one through dutiful action, at least ante-mortem). One is often in a situation where the virtuous person would clearly behave in a particular way and yet one can see that that way of behaving would not actually bring to the virtuous person as much benefit as he or she might otherwise have obtained, at least ante-mortem; thus, as one decides what to do in such a situation, one will know what it would be virtuous for one to do; one will know what it is which would bring one most benefit, at least ante-mortem; and one will know that they are not the same thing. In the last three sentences, I have cast what is fundamentally the same point in consequentialist, deontological, and virtue theoretic terms so as to reveal – I hope – its plausibility to the reader, regardless of which of the main three branches of normative theory he or she finds most plausible.Footnote ⁷ Now let me go on to give a putative example of a situation which shows premise 1 to be true.

Doug is at the last stage of getting some building work done on his house and he is worried that the final bill, when it comes from his builder, Bob, will push him significantly over budget. He is apprised by Bob of what the total amount of this final bill will be and his worst fears are confirmed: Doug instantly realizes that paying that amount would push various aspects of his precarious finances past their tipping points, forcing Doug and his family to make deep and broad cuts to their quality of life for years to come; the costs would not be ruinous, but they would be close to it. Doug asks Bob if there's anything that can be done to bring the bill down – even 10 per cent or so would do it. Bob replies, with a wink, ‘Bob the builder; can he fix it? Bob the builder; yes he can!’ Bob explains that if Doug were to give him a sufficient amount cash-in-hand (‘call it a “gift”’), then he would be ‘minded’ to bring the final bill down to such a level that the total cost (gift plus bill) to Doug would be less than 90 per cent of the amount originally projected. Although Bob doesn't explain his rationale, it is clear that paying Bob in this fashion would mean that Bob could evade some of his tax responsibilities and that it is this which explains the ‘fix’. Doug quickly realizes then that accepting Bob's offer would mean that none of the tipping points in his financial affairs would be reached; no reductions in quality of life at all would be entailed. Additionally, Doug realizes that any guilt he might feel about taking Bob up on his offer (and he would feel some guilt; he is not an amoralist) would be swamped by the feeling of relief that he hadn't ‘let his family down’; and, as Doug reflects, there's no way he could ever be convicted of any offence; after all, what cash he offers as a ‘gift’ to Bob the day or so before Bob draws up his final bill is nobody's business but his own; and what Bob does or doesn't ultimately declare on his tax return is Bob's business.

I take it that it is clear that Doug is under a moral obligation to eschew Bob's offer; receive the bill for the amount as initially projected; pay it; and make the cuts to the quality of life that are thereby entailed. However, I also take it as plausible that it would benefit Doug more (at least ante-mortem) were he to take Bob up on his offer, paying Bob the smaller amount that the cash-in-hand and smaller bill would total and thereby not needing to make any cuts to the quality of life that he and his family enjoy.

If so, this is plausibly a case where a sinful action brings to the agent committing it more net ante-mortem benefit than would any alternative non-sinful action available to that agent. And, as mentioned earlier, if there's one case of this phenomenon, premise 1 is true.

Now of course the notion of benefit which pulls this train of thought along in the direction of Bartianism may be contested and if it is simply rejected in the following fashion then the train of thought won't even depart, let alone reach its final destination. If we replace the notion of benefit on which the example relies (if it is to be taken as an example of the phenomenon in question) with a sufficiently morally inflected or theologically inflected notion of benefit, the argument can't even get up steam. ‘What has lexical priority when it comes to assessing what it is to someone's benefit to do is the effect that the doing of that thing would have on the person's soul; would a given action sully it or would it not?’, one can imagine someone influenced by Socrates (and, terminologically, by Rawls) saying. Such a notion of what's truly a benefit to a person (as opposed to what they may foolishly take to be a benefit to them) can, I concede, put the kibosh on premise 1. And, to reveal why I am only ‘lightly’ defending this premise, it does seem to me that there is much to be said for the view that benefit is morally and theologically inflected. But even if benefit is inflected in one or both of these ways and even if we therefore allow that acting immorally is intrinsically harmful to the person who does so, this type of harm is not obviously the lexical-priority sort of harm it is being taken to be by the person whose opinion I have just put into words; and thus it is an open question whether or not the benefits in non-moral terms that acting immorally may bring to the person who is, for the sake of argument, necessarily harmed in some respect and to some extent by acting immorally may not yet outweigh this harm in some cases. Imagine meeting Doug ten years after the choice in question, which choice, further imagine, he made in favour of taking Bob up on his offer; and imagine hearing Doug reflect on that choice in the following fashion.

‘Sure, I sullied my soul that day. That was a harmful aspect to the decision. But it didn't dispose me to more sin later; if anything, it had the opposite effect. Though I didn't anticipate this benefit at the time, it led me to re-order my finances so that no such future temptation would arise. And now – as I reflect on the happy and untroubled family life that I have thus been able to enjoy over the last ten years – I conclude that while what I did that day was morally wrong, it was what net benefitted me most (at least ante-mortem).’ Are we really confident that Doug must be wrong in his assessment? Well, I am not.Footnote ⁸

Premise 1 looks at least somewhat plausible.

It seems to me that premise 2 may be taken as being a tautology; that's just what prudential rationality (in conceptually possible contrast to moral rationality) means. I can't think of much more to say about it then, though of course 2 as it stands may be a bit ‘rough and ready’ – perhaps, to be more precise, 2 should tell us that the top-scoring action is ‘maximally’ prudentially rational, but that other actions may be to some degree prudentially rational insofar as they approximate it. Anyway, none of that nuancing makes a difference to any of what follows, so I won't get into it.

3 follows from 1 and 2. 2 is a tautology, so 3 inherits undiminished whatever plausibility 1 has. 1 is, as I put it, ‘at least somewhat plausible’, so 3 is too.

Now, this is not clearly right, for a whole host of reasons. First, and most obviously, it presupposes that God exists; and God's existence is a topic that has not been without controversy in the history of thought. But let's not get into that. Let's help ourselves to a big assumption and suppose that a broadly theistic worldview is right and known to be right with a high degree of rational confidence by the person contemplating the rationality of Bartianism. And let's further suppose that the only way post-mortem harms could come to one would be were God to bring them to one by way of punishment; and again that all this is known to be so with a high degree of confidence. (We shall return to this point later, but the punishment that God brings may best be conceived as a form of punishment intrinsic to one's feeling of remorse, when it comes, for the sins in question; it need not be conceived of as extrinsic, Him say acquiescing to his colleague Lucifer administering of a certain number of prods with a pointy pitchfork or some such, though that is more picturesque.) Even on such a worldview, there are alternatives to premise 4, ones that are close enough to have much of the intuitive pull of 4 for theists and their proximity and gravitational attraction, as it were, will thus pull many who are of this general worldview away from 4 and towards these alternatives to it.Footnote ⁹ The point cogent to our project of seeing what may be said in favour of Bartianism is that these alternatives to 4 won't do the job that 4 can do for the argument which I am seeking sympathetically to develop for it.

For example, one could reject premise 4 but accept a supposition 4* along the lines I'm about to articulate. (I call it a ‘supposition’ rather than a ‘premise’ now as I am suggesting then that it would be ill-fitted to be slotted-in instead of 4 if one's intention were to be to keep the argument for Bartianism going.)

4*, if true, would allow that it might well be the case that God could arrange things in the following way. Those who repent, even if only on their deathbed, do avoid the eternal punishment of Hell, but they do not avoid the finite punishment of Purgatory, which finite punishment is in itself in all cases sufficient to mean that any sinning which brought net greater ante-mortem benefits to the sinner than would have been brought to him or her by any other non-sinful action he or she could have performed on the relevant occasions is overbalanced. While acting in conformity with 4* then, God ensures that all cases of ante-mortem sinning bring sufficiently great punishment harms in Purgatory to mean that creatures would in fact have net-benefitted from refraining from the sinning. Purgatory is God's way of ensuring that an argument such as the one I am seeking to develop for Bartianism won't go through. That's ‘God's angle’.Footnote ¹⁰

So, remembering that we are taking it that a traditional theistic worldview may be assumed, the crucial issue is whether, on such a worldview, 4* is plausible and in particular whether it is more plausible than 4. Even if it's somewhat less plausible than 4, as long as it's not clearly wrong, its availability as an alternative hypothesis will – to the extent that it's plausible – rationally weaken one's confidence in 4 even if one in the end regards 4 as more plausible than 4*. I want to proceed relatively quickly and so I hope I shall be forgiven for painting with a broad brush here, but – broad strokes then – I think that on grounds quite independent of this argument, many Roman Catholics will find 4* more plausible than 4; but on grounds equally independent many Protestants will find 4 more plausible than 4*.Footnote ¹¹

For completeness, I point out that one doesn't actually need premise 4 exactly as stated to get one farther along the road towards justifying the Bartian conclusion at which the argument I am considering is aiming. There are any number of tweaked versions of things along the lines of 4 which can block the problematic ‘outs’ to which 4* points.

Consider the following.

In essence then, premise 4** simply blocks off the escape route from the argument that supposition 4* directed one down. But these sorts of tweaks, while they may succeed in making premises of the 4-type, as we might then seek to slot one of them into the argument at this stage, as ‘weak’ as they can be if the substitution of one of them is yet to support the developing argument, seem to me to make the 4-type premise less plausible than the untweaked and more bold 4 as it stands, due to their complexities and ‘ad-hoc-ery’. So, I suggest, the ‘real’ choice for the traditional theist is between something closely along the lines of 4 and something closely along the lines of 4*.

4* stops the argument in its tracks. So what can be said for 4 over it? In particular can enough be said to mean that the availability of 4*, even if it isn't as plausible as 4, doesn't sufficiently weaken the plausibility of 4 to mean that the argument I am seeking to develop runs out of significant steam at this stage? Well, there are many things that one might say in favour of 4 – theology is full of them. But let me motivate 4 with a story. It is not an original story. You have probably heard it before.

In the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), Jesus’ description of the prodigal son's thoughts as he builds up to his decision to return home so as to throw himself on his father's mercy leads us to consider a number of possible reactions that the father might have. It may of course be that the father will refuse to admit the returning prodigal to his household simpliciter. This then may be taken to be equivalent to God's sending the repentant sinner to Hell or to annihilation. But the son dares to hope for more; he dares to hope that the father will employ him as hired help around the farm; perhaps the father will give him the opportunity to work off his debt and thus raise himself by his own efforts back up towards the level enjoyed by the non-prodigal elder son, a son who has remained an unquestioned member of the household throughout the period of the prodigal son's wanderings. This then may be taken to be equivalent to God's sending the repentant sinner to Purgatory before elevating him or her to Heaven. As the son reflects on the matter, even his father's hired hands are better off than he currently is, him being reduced at this stage to contemplating eating pig food. And so, Jesus tells us, the son determines to return; and so we are led to wonder which of these – exclusion or conditional inclusion – will be his fate. As Jesus unfolds the story, we are given our answer.

We read that while the son ‘was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him’. Servants were called to get him the best robe; a ring was placed on his finger; shoes on his feet; and the most sumptuous feast the father could manage was prepared. The overtopping of the son's most daring hope is striking. It is not that he was excluded – finding the door resolutely shut in his face. It is not even that he was conditionally included, the father – stony-faced and arms-crossed, as it were – standing on his porch, waiting for the son to make his stumbling way to collapse at his feet and then, with perhaps a polite nod of acknowledgement, directing him in, to the servants’ quarters. Rather, while the son was ‘yet at a distance’ (some translations have this as ‘far off’), the father moves towards the son. And he moves at speed – he runs – and, when he reaches his son, his arms are open. The very fact that the father was at whatever vantage point it was such that he could see the son ‘at a distance’ is itself suggestive of the thought that the father has been actively searching for any sign of his son's return, scanning the horizon and hoping for it; perhaps he has been keeping his lonely vigil ever since the son first left, in which case he would have been keeping it for at least a matter of months, possibly for years. In any case, now the moment the father has been yearning for has finally come – he has seen his son and, even if at this moment his son can only have appeared as a small ‘far off’ figure, the father has recognized him nonetheless. And now he has recognized him, he is closing the distance between them as quickly as he has it in his power to do.

It is impossible to read this story as telling us anything other than that the son's repentance, the moment it has become known to the father, has brought the son immediate and total forgiveness and immediate and total removal of any possibility of punishment.Footnote ¹²

Much more could be said, but 4 seems plausible, to me anyway.

Premise 5 follows from 1–4, so whatever overall plausibility the argument maintained until and including 4, 5 inherits. To get this far, we've had to travel via a couple of premises, which I have tentatively graded as ‘plausible’ and each of which is necessary for the argument to get us this far, so that is hardly going to transpose over into a ringing endorsement of the plausibility of 5. Still, for what it's worth, my own assessment is that the ‘law of diminishing probability’-effect hasn't yet dropped the stage of the argument which we've got to down into the implausible range. One could no doubt seek to be more precise than I have sought to be and assign probabilities to each premise – 1–4 – and thus calculate more precisely where, assuming these were the right probabilities to assign, that leaves the probability of 5. For myself, I am reluctant to do that as it would give a spurious appearance of precision to my judgements on the relevant matters. And so I stick with the vaguer (but more accurate as a reflection of my understanding of things) talk of things being ‘somewhat plausible’ and so on.

6 follows from the definition of prudential rationality given in 2 and – with 5's characterization of maximum benefit in mind – we seem to be getting very close indeed now to our aimed-at conclusion, the vindication of Bartianism.

Now though we come to a sticky patch for the argument; indeed, to announce my own verdict early, I judge that this is where the argument for Bartianism gets stuck altogether. To cover this final distance, the argument needs the policy – life-plan as I have sometimes been calling it – that one is prudentially rational in adopting in the light of what has been established so far (to whatever degree it has been established) to be the self-conscious policy of sinning whenever doing so would produce greater net ante-mortem benefits than not doing so; and then of course repenting at the last moment. But its being this policy which is the most prudentially rational one to adopt is going to be a function in part of how frequent net beneficial ante-mortem sins are and it will be recalled that I was helped in justifying premise 1 (to whatever extent I did manage to justify it) by pointing out how minimal a claim it was, how its truth was compatible with there being only one such sin in the whole history of the universe. Although I went on to ‘chance my hand’, as I put it, that such sins were much more widespread than that, that was something of a throwaway comment. And we can now see that the argument plausibly needs them to be much more widespread than that at this stage so as to justify Bartianism. (More precisely: more widespread, more beneficial, or less likely to be punished severely (if not repented of) would do it.) So, if we're going to keep the argument going, we're going to have to go back and bolster 1 along those lines, or we're going to have to introduce some new premise at this stage that bolsters it (a new premise from which 1 would follow and thus become redundant as one reconfigured one's argument). Why so? Well, consider this.

If – say – there is over the course of an average person's life only one opportunity to sin yet gain greater net ante-mortem benefit than had anything non-sinful been done and if the level of net ante-mortem benefit of this one sin is on average very low, then one would probably, by adopting a policy of self-consciously looking for it throughout one's life (as per Bartianism), miss out on greater benefits that would have come to one had one followed a life-plan other than Bartianism. Here is something I take to be a parallel case which I hope will illustrate the point.

I get lots of generic mass emails from people who announce themselves as having business opportunities which they would like to discuss with me as – so they say – they would be mutually financially beneficial. Perhaps over the course of my life I'll get 10,000 such offers. And let's suppose for the sake of argument that one of these is in fact a business opportunity which, were I to take it, would be financially beneficial to me, say to the tune of several thousand pounds. Still, the fact that I am – as per premise 6 mutatis mutandis – prudentially rational in adopting towards such emails whatever policy it is the adoption of which will give me the best chances of getting the maximum benefit (benefit in this case being of a sort that may be considered solely in financial terms) does the opposite of licensing me in studying each of these 10,000 emails in sufficient detail so that I am able to sift out the one nugget of gold from the huge pile of 9,999 pieces of iron pyrites. That sifting would take an inordinate amount of time and in this context the cogent point to make is that ‘time is money’; clearly, I'd be better-off financially if I adopted a policy of simply deleting/marking as spam all such emails over the course of my life and devoted whatever time I would have needed to devote to the alternative sifting policy to some other more remunerative activity; I could take on a bit of extra teaching, say. In other words, I can be prudentially rational in adopting a policy which I know means that on some particular occasion I will fail to avail myself of the benefit that would have come to me had I looked in detail at the business opportunity that was before me on that particular occasion, as I know that to look in enough detail on sufficient occasions so as to be able to pick out that occasion – the ‘winner’, as it were – would be for me to have failed to do what was to my greater benefit.

This point carries over then, I am suggesting, to the domain of sin and it carries over for the vast majority even if not quite all of us. (Stewart Goetz points out to me that the same may not be true for someone like Joseph Stalin.) It may well be that – as per something along the lines of premise 1 – each of us will sometimes be in situations in which sinning will bring us greater net benefit ante-mortem than not doing so, but, nevertheless it may well be (I am now suggesting probably is) that we benefit ourselves more ante-mortem by adopting a blanket ‘never wilfully sin’ policy than we would do by adopting the more fine-grained ‘Do the cost/benefit/risk analysis in each case’ sifting policy that is Bartianism.Footnote ¹³ (The argument here parallels the considerations which drive some from act consequentialism to rule consequentialism, a parallel to which I shall return momentarily.)

Given this problem for the argument for Bartianism as it stands, then, as I have already indicated, one might consider going back to ‘bolster’, as I put it, premise 1 with consequent reconstruction of the argument elsewhere. If one substituted something like premise 1* as I am about to give it for premise 1 as it stands now, that would provide enough impetus – if it is acceptable – to keep the argument moving forward over the ground that I've latterly mapped and have suggested premise 1 is insufficient to propel it past.

But I take it that premise 1*, whatever jet-power it could impart to the argument if it were to be accepted, will not be accepted as it is plainly false. There are other options here: replace the ‘every’ in 1* with something a bit weaker, and so on. But – to cut what could be a long story short – I don't think any of them are going to work. I think the reasons given mean that we need to abandon the project of arguing in this general fashion for Bartianism as stated; and we need to move to consider a more modest Bartian view.

One could call this more modest view ‘Tactical Bartianism’, by way of contrast with the ‘Strategic Bartianism’ which has hitherto been in view, but I shall actually call it ‘modified Bartianism’. Modified Bartianism doesn't encourage one to go through life actively looking for opportunities to gainfully sin (as per unmodified Bartianism), far from it; but it suggests that on, no doubt rare, occasions, one will nevertheless be prudentially rational in taking such opportunities for gainful sinning as one suddenly notices have presented themselves.

As I mentioned parenthetically a moment ago, there are parallels with discussions had about consequentialism. Let us step back for a moment from the topic of this article and sketch some of these discussions, before drawing the material thus sketched over to help us with our issue; I shall contend that the considerations presented against rule consequentialism apropos of situations where certain calculations have already in effect been done can be used to justify us in thinking that a modified Bartianism has more hopes of success than Bartianism as originally formulated. Here are the considerations. (To get to the most relevant, we need to start from a bit further back.)

One of the attractions of rule consequentialism over act consequentialism is that it seems to offer the promise of allowing its proponents to avoid certain counterintuitive implications of act consequentialism. We'll all be familiar with the (hackneyed but cogent) objection to act consequentialism that in the right thought-experimental conditions, it renders it morally obligatory for a doctor to murder one hospital patient so as to harvest their organs and use them to save the lives of five others; but that action of murder seems obviously wrong; and that obvious wrongness is evidence that act consequentialism is wrong. Rule consequentialism can seem to offer one a way around this sort of objection. Plausibly the rule ‘Don't kill patients’ is a rule the following of which would (in conjunction with appropriate other rules) produce more good than would the rule ‘Do whatever it is which you calculate in each individual case would maximize the good’, which latter decision-procedure is the one licensed by act consequentialism. And, if so, then it is plausible that rule consequentialism is a view the adoption of which will have better consequences than would Act. If all of that is so, then – skipping along a bit too briskly perhaps – if consequentialism is true as a theory of the good, rule consequentialism is the version of it which should be adopted as a theory of the right; and, if it is adopted as such, then, given that the rules to be followed will include the ‘Don't kill patients’ rule, so one's adopted decision-procedure will in fact prohibit one from doing just the thing that it was intuitive to think morality does prohibit one from doing. One up for rule consequentialism over act consequentialism, then. However, as Williams among others has pointed out, this cannot work for a situation in which the results that would have been obtained had one performed an act consequentialist calculation have forced themselves on one's consciousness, as then one is in a position where one must either knowingly fail to produce as much good as one could and thus fail to be a true consequentialist or produce as much good as one could but thereby abandon the rule.Footnote ¹⁴

So, how does this apply to our considerations of Bartianism? It seems to me that the arguments of the previous paragraph show that even if the original Bartian position, which was the analogue of the act consequentialist one with regard to one's own benefit maximization, cannot be upheld for the reasons I have said it cannot be upheld, there will still be scope for defending a modified Bartianism, which focuses on situations where one has in effect already done the relevant calculations.

On a modified Bartianism, one will have adopted the general rule of avoiding sinfulness in deference to the points that have been made against unmodified Bartianism to date; one will not then be looking to assess one's options in each case of choice to see if any of the sinful options available to one would bring one more net ante-mortem benefit than would any non-sinful action one might perform instead. No, one will in general be following the rule ‘Don't sin’ for all the beneficial consequences one correctly sees following this general rule will bring to one over those that would have been brought to one had one calculated the benefits of each option available to one in each situation of choice. One will in effect be sending every email that one sees coming from sin straight to the rubbish bin/spam folder. Nevertheless, in a situation where the fact that one of one's options does meet the description of being a sinful action which would bring one more net ante-mortem benefit than would any other non-sinful action has made itself known to one's consciousness entirely unbidden, it would be prudentially irrational to ignore this fact and go on doing what one full-well knew would be sub-optimal in term's of one's self-interest.

The modified Bartian we are now imagining is inclined to say something like this: ‘Sure, it's not prudentially rational for me to go for a “life of sin”; far from it. It's not even prudentially rational for me to allow myself to think on any occasion whether or not a particular sinful action may be one of those that would bring me greater net ante-mortem benefit than would any non-sinful action available to me. Rather, the very fact that I notice of something that it would be a sinful action were I to perform it is sufficient for me to rule it out. My prudentially rational policy is, so to speak, to keep the door resolutely shut to sin whenever it comes knocking announcing itself as such. But today, perhaps because I didn't immediately notice that a particular action would be a sin were I to commit it, I realized of a particular action, which only a moment later did I conclude would be sinful, that it was one that would bring me net much greater ante-mortem benefit than would any other non-sinful action. So, that has meant that today prudential rationality has compelled me to sin, planning of course to repent later and thus (given 4) get, as it were, ‘the best of both worlds’.

This modified Bartian view is harder to argue against than the unmodified Bartian view. I have suggested that one can defeat unmodified Bartianism without considering the nature of repentance, but to defeat modified Bartianism, one needs to consider the nature of repentance.Footnote ¹⁵ And it's not clear it can be defeated even then. Let's see.

Let's consider then what must be involved in repentance for 4 (or anything functionally like it) to be true. For 4 (or anything like it) to be true, the repentance needed cannot be founded on a regret which in turn is based solely on prudential reasons, that is reasons to do with the net benefits/harms that will differentially be coming to one as a result of the action depending on whether or not one does in fact repent of it. We can see the paradox that would be generated were God – per impossibile – to hinge his decisions about whether or not to punish on the presence solely of this sort of prudential regret by imagining a deathbed conversation along the following lines.

God: ‘Excuse me for intruding, but I thought you'd like to know: your time on Earth is about to be up. Quick question: do you repent of all your sins?’

Sinner: ‘Indeed I do. I sincerely repent of all of them.’

God: ‘Very well, then I shall not punish you for your sins. Enter thou the Kingdom, as I like to put it. (Peter, open ye that pearly gate wide.)’

Sinner: ‘Enter me the Kingdom, eh? So, I got the net benefits ante-mortem of various sins and won't now be getting the harms by way of punishment that would have cancelled them out; I'm now on track then to get “the best of both worlds”; I gambled and I won; naturally then I don't regret having gambled. Now I know I'm not going to be punished for them, I don't repent of all my sins (in particular I don't repent of those that did contribute positively to this pay off).’

God: ‘Hang on a minute; in that case, punishment is back on the table. (Peter, shut the gate!) The punishment was only taken off the table on the presumption that you were repentant of all your sins and now you're not, well then here comes my colleague with the pitchfork . . .’

Sinner: ‘No, you hang on a minute; at around the moment you said “here comes my colleague with the pitchfork” I reverted back to my fully repentant state, as per my first answer. Of course I did, for it is precisely the prospect of punishment when it is on the table which is sufficient (and necessary) to make me genuinely regret what I have done in this regard; and, trust me, I'm doing that repentance right now – boy, that pitchfork looks pointy.’

God: “Ah well, in that case, off the table punishment goes.’

Sinner: ‘And in that case, off the table repentance goes.’

God: ‘Hang on a minute . . .’

And the loop continues ad infinitum.

So, to avoid this paradox, God cannot premise the lifting of punishment (or even the diminution of it beyond a certain point) on repentance if the regret element of the repentance is based solely on these self-interested reasons.Footnote ¹⁶ One's regret for one's sin has to be based on its immorality, not on its imprudence as its imprudence is precisely the moving part of the machine of justice, the part which moves depending on whether one may pull the lever of repentance in the right sense. And to give one the power to pull that lever (repentance understood as it must be being understood in a 4-type claim), the moral wrongness of the sin has to be the grounds of the regret. So, it's not enough to be ‘genuinely’ or ‘sincerely’ sorry for sinning for the attitude that is then engendered to be repentance in the sense operative in premise 4 (or any variation of it); it's what grounds that sorrow which is important. If there isn't enough moral regret on these grounds, then no amount of amoral regret can make up for it. One sometimes comes across cases of the phenomenon of poor grounding in earthly justice systems. An example may help to illustrate the point.

A case recently in the articles at time of writing quoted a convicted murderer expressing his apparently sincere and deep regret for his having murdered the young couple who had lived next-door to him and with whom he had had disputes about parking places; as far as one could tell, this young man really and deeply did wish he had not killed them. But his regret was apparently based solely on his now being sentenced to whatever punishment it was to which he was being sentenced. It was a sort of ‘And now I hear that the parking at the prison in which I'll be spending the next thirty years is even worse, you can imagine how much I'm kicking myself!’ response. It wasn't moral regret, but self-interested regret. And that can't ground repentance in the sense that must be being intended in a 4-type truth. Although the terms are contested, we may perhaps express the point by saying that he felt plenty of regret but no remorse (or not enough remorse, anyway). Repentance of the sort that 4-type truths must (to avoid the paradox sketched above) be referencing needs the moral sort of regret – remorse as we are calling it. Well, I say this.

Stewart Goetz has raised with me the possibility that what is crucial to whether or not one counts as repenting in the right sense (or perhaps repenting per se) is not what grounds any feeling of regret for having committed the sin in question, but rather what reasons one acts on in performing the action which, if the right reasons are acted on, constitutes the action of repentance (and if not, then not). For simplicity, let us consider the thing the doing of which is a contender for being an act of repentance the (possibly illocutionary) act of saying ‘I repent.’ With that detail added, the view under consideration now then is that, if one utters this sentence due to the reason that it is the morally right sentence to utter, then one repents by uttering it; if one utters it for self-interested reasons, one does not. If one then adds the thesis that one may act on the reason that uttering this sentence is the morally right thing to do even without remorse for the sin it references, then it is thus possible to repent in the sense relevant to premises of the 4-type without remorse. However, I am not myself sure how or whether this could work. Is this not the morally right sentence to utter only if it is a true sentence to utter? God isn't wanting an insincere uttering of ‘I repent’, I take it. But, if we grant that, then isn't what makes the sentence ‘I repent’ true the fact one's managed to get into a state of repentance prior to uttering it, not something which one accomplishes with the uttering of it? And, as I think about what that state is – how it seems to me from the inside when I take myself to know that it is present – it does seem to me to involve feeling the appropriate remorse for what it is one is about to have in mind when one then utters the sentence, ‘I repent.’

Perhaps there are some psychopaths who never feel any remorse for anything they do, however heinous. But most of us are not like that; we have a capacity for remorse and we utilize it; we feel some remorse at least (even if not enough?) for many (even if not every?) wrongs we believe ourselves to have done. And sometimes the amount of remorse we anticipate feeling (ante-mortem) if we commit a sin is sufficient to stop us going ahead and sinning in that particular. But sometimes of course it is not.

So, what must be going on in a particular situation if the modified Bartian approach is going to be prudentially justified in that situation is that one is correctly calculating that the net ante-mortem benefits of a sinful action available to one are greater than those which would come to one from any non-sinful alternative, giving one then prudential reason to sin in this particular way on this particular occasion, presuming one may avoid the post-mortem punishment that would come to one were one to die unrepentant. One may in doing this calculation anticipate some remorse being felt immediately after the sin, but presumably not so much that one will instantly regret doing it altogether. Otherwise, one wouldn't be about to do it. Thus, one must be anticipating that one will (or at least it's sufficiently likely that one will), prior to one's death, feel sufficiently more remorse than the amount, if any, one is predicting feeling in the short-term, so that one may ultimately repent (sufficiently more so that one does repent, but not so much more that its painful nature cancels out the benefit the sin brought).

It looks then as if such a modified Bartian approach to an individual decision could be adopted. It is not psychologically impossible to think this way, nor is it obviously confused to do so (presuming one may predict at least one's probable future free choices). But there's something a bit odd going on here.

The modified Bartian approach to this particular decision strikes me as an analogue to someone thinking, ‘Well, if I am going to be able to resist chocolate cake from next week onwards, then the fact that I'm about to scoff this whole cake today won't have done me any ultimate harm; and I can be tolerably confident that I will indeed be able to resist; so I can be tolerably confident that I'm prudentially rational in scoffing this chocolate cake now.’ That could be a coherent and prudentially rational approach to the decision to eat a particular chocolate cake now. But of course one has to wonder on what basis one could be tolerably confident that one's powers for resisting the temptations of chocolate cake will be greater next week than they are now; and of course one cannot help but wonder if one's not resisting the temptations of chocolate cake now won't, if anything, make it even less likely that one will be in a better position to resist these temptations next week than if one had resisted the temptations now. Incipient alcoholics aren't – one supposes – best advised to drink more now as this will mean that they find their inclination to drink later diminished and/or their willpower in overcoming the desire to drink strengthened. And of course the same applies mutatis mutandis for sinfulness. What would you say as a marriage guidance counsellor to someone who opined, ‘I'm figuring that if I commit a lot of adultery now, just after we've come back from our honeymoon, then I can be tolerably confident that I'm going to have got it out of my system and will manage to be perfectly faithful from then on’? But, notwithstanding these worries about whether or not this sort of tactic is actually likely to work, I take it that it is metaphysically possible that it could work. Here's what seems to me a metaphysically possible way it could work (it might not be a nomic possibility).

A certain conscience-enhancement pill becomes widely available and at negligible cost. The conscience-enhancement pill has the effect of elevating one's moral sensitivity to the necessary level for appropriate remorse (as well as perfecting one's memories of every morally evaluable action one has ever performed). It has no other side effects. Within a moment of swallowing a conscience-enhancement pill, one thus feels sufficient remorse for even the smallest and most forgettable of sins one has committed to mean that one repents wholeheartedly for all of them. Well then, if one keeps one of these pills on one's person and stands ready to swallow it on one's deathbed, the reasons I have been latterly examining against modified Bartianism being likely to actually work fall away. Of course one may ask, just how punishing will the taking of the conscience-enhancing pill need to be to give one sufficient remorse? If it is knowably going to need to be sufficiently punishing to overbalance any prior benefits of sinning, then this is in effect for the argument for even modified Bartianism to be blocked by something along the lines of 4*. This is an issue to which we shall return in considering just how punishing the remorse one will feel at the Last Judgment (on most accounts) will be.Footnote ¹⁷ But it is certainly true that any form of Bartianism needs to bear in mind the anticipated harms (in the sense we are using the term) that attend the planned-for act of repentance and count these against the benefits before forming his/her judgement of net benefit (the act of repentance is after all an ante-mortem event on the accounts we've been considering so far (that will change in a moment)).

The conscience-enhancement pill is a fiction, of course, but those attracted to the theistic worldview might think that there is something functionally similar. So, suppose one has acted in accordance with modified Bartianism throughout one's life and one now gets to what one knows to be one's deathbed, having thus far been unrepentant about the committing of various sins. One could hardly say then that one had put as much effort as one could have done into improving one's character or conscientiousness; one could hardly claim that one's capacity for appropriate remorse had been carefully cultivated over one's lifetime to date. Nevertheless, nor could one truly be said to have let one's character or conscience wither away entirely. One realizes that one now has pressing prudential reasons to grow one's capacity for remorse to the requisite level for one to genuinely repent of all one's sins to date. And one fears that it is perhaps now rather ‘too late in the day’ for one to expect to be able to do so. What can one do? Well, there is no conscience-enhancement pill to help. But there is an omnipotent God and anything that's metaphysically possible (as we have assumed the conscience-enhancement pill is) is possible for Him. So, instead of taking a pill, one may pray. ‘Please Lord, convict me of my sin.’ (A parenthetical note: the word ‘convict’ here is being used in what may be a somewhat recherché theological sense; it means something along the lines of ‘Bring it home to me/help me feel its moral wrongness/discomfort me with myself for being so sanguine about it all up until now/engender appropriate remorse for it in me’ – that sort of thing.) Can one expect one's prayer to be answered in the manner one has asked for it to be answered? Well, it certainly might be. But then again it might not be.

So, what if in general such prayers are ineffective on deathbeds when uttered by those who, prior to then, have been unrepentant sinners? Even so, it seems to me that prayers of this sort, while not themselves acts of repentance may come close enough in moral space to being such so as to make something like 4 go through for them. To illustrate what I have in mind here, let us imagine the following conversation between God and a sinner as held on the latter's deathbed.

Sinner: ‘Okay, so, as we both well know, I don't have it in me to summon up enough remorse for my ante-mortem sins so that I can repent of them in the relevant sense. But I do genuinely regret (though perhaps not feel remorse again) the fact that I have by now made myself into the sort of person who cannot summon up sufficient remorse to repent in the relevant sense. I've prayed that you convict me, and you have not. I cannot then repent in the relevant sense. But the prayer was sincere; I do sincerely wish that I were able to repent and did repent in that relevant sense. Is that enough for you?’

God: ‘You know what? (Drumroll, Peter, please.) . . . It is! Enter thou the Kingdom, as I like to say.’

If that is what God would say, then it seems that something like 4*** is true, where 4*** reads as follows.

Now, I have been relatively sympathetic towards 4*** and some who have been kind enough to offer comments on this article have been far more sceptical, one commenting that the relevant action is not ‘in moral space at all’. So, without wishing to commit to it, let me simply observe that if we swap out the original 4 for 4*** and make some other adjustments to what follows, the modified Bartian approach will potentially be justified. I pass no judgement on how big an ‘if’ that is.

Variations on 4 as discussed so far suppose that one has to get one's repentance (or prayer for conviction/sincere attempt at/wish for it, if one is attracted to something like 4***) done prior to death and the claim that death does constitute the ‘final deadline’, as it were, for the completion of stage two of the plan, as we have sometimes called it, is not entailed by the traditional theistic worldview we have been assuming as the background here. Some theists have held that after our deaths we have another chance at repentance; and one in epistemically and motivationally better circumstances. After death, we appear before God at the Last Judgment; there we are indeed convicted of our sins; that is in part at least what constitutes it as the Last Judgment. So there we shall – all of us – feel remorse sufficient to repent; and, on at least one variant of the account, by repenting we shall – all of us – actually avoid the punishment thereafter that would otherwise have been our due. Such a Universalist picture may be presented then as accepting a version of 4 that simply omits the ‘prior to death’ clause and adds a claim that we shall all as a matter of fact satisfy the condition of which it speaks. Let's suppose that this view is right, and let's say – to push aside certain Pascal's-Wager-type points – knowably right with certainty ante-mortem. This initially looks as if it makes modified Bartianism impregnable. Heaven is guaranteed for all, so everyone is getting the best of that world; Bartianism in its modified form, even if it doesn't ensure that one gets the best of this world too, at least ensures that one never knowingly and wilfully fails to get the best of it; it's an ante-mortem prudentially better approach than any alternative.

So, what, if anything, may be said against the prudential rationality of modified Bartianism on this variant of the theistic worldview? There is something. It's not quite impregnable.

Let's consider how things are going to play out on this view. One gets to the Last Judgment and let's say one hasn't actually repented of one's sins prior to then – on one's deathbed, say – and so one expects God to convict one fully of these sins now, thus completing stage two of the plan for one, as it were. Just how punishing an experience will this conviction be? In particular, will it be a harm (in the sense we are using the term) that outweighs any net ante-mortem benefits that one's modified-Bartian sinning has produced? Can one in fact reasonably expect the Last Judgment to be so punishing that it in effect makes the experience equivalent to the Purgatory of 4*? If something like that is right, and knowably right with a high degree of confidence, then even on this sort of theistic universalism, modified Bartianism is not going to be prudentially rational. But on this crucial matter I find myself uncertain.

It certainly seems that when a sinner is exposed directly to God's glorious presence, the worse and more initially unrepentant they are, the more hellish that refiner's fire will seem to them in the furnace of self-knowledge it brings with it, as it burns away their egotism and raises their remorse for it to boiling point. My phrasing in that last sentence has not been designed to suggest that I think it will be pleasant. But whether it will be sufficiently punishing to be functionally equivalent to the Purgatory of 4* is something which I at least cannot discern with confidence, at least yet. In discussion, my colleague Nick Waghorn has suggested that we can reasonably believe it will be sufficiently punishing; when we look our past sins squarely in the face with the consciences of saints, we will find them objects of ‘screaming horror’; Anselm would no doubt agree. But that seems excessive. When Andy looks back on the fact that he once pilfered a paperclip from work for personal use, surely the remorse he should feel will not be sufficiently great to make that recollected peccadillo the object of screaming horror, rather something more like wincing unease. And perhaps that paperclip brought Andy great ante-mortem benefit, in a reverse ‘For the want of a nail . . .’ scenario. Let me leave that issue hanging for a moment then and say by way of conclusion a few words summing up the journey which has taken us to this point.

In conclusion, the straightforward Bartian life-plan – going through life looking for opportunities to sin and gain net ante-mortem benefit from such sins (relative to the benefit one might have got from the non-sinful options available) while planning of course to repent prior to one's death and thus avoid any post-mortem downsides – can be shown to be prudentially irrational on various plausible assumptions without needing to consider the exact nature of repentance. By contrast, following a policy of eschewing sin – even if one suspects that by doing so one will thereby be missing out on a relatively small number of sins which would, were one to have indulged in them, have brought one slightly greater net ante-mortem benefits than one's other options and which one could in fact have later repented from and thus avoided their post-mortem downsides – is more prudentially rational.

However, the considerations which showed Bartianism not to be a prudentially justified life-plan left a modified Bartian approach to some individual instances of choice apparently prudentially rational. What it is prudentially rational to do in a situation where one realizes that a sin is of the sort such that the net ante-mortem benefits will be greater than those that will come from any non-sinful action and of the sort such that one may later repent of it and avoid punishment, is to commit the sin. Or, in any case, that is what a modified Bartianism seemed plausibly to suggest.

In our attempts to show the prudential irrationality of modified Bartianism, we have latterly needed to consider the nature of repentance and in particular to show that the sort of repentance which is the only coherent basis on which God might waive punishment for sin is one involving what we have called ‘remorse’ in contrast to plain ‘regret’; regret – however sincere – is not enough if it is based solely on prudential reasoning (for reasons to do with the paradox illustrated by our first imagined dialogue between God and a sinner on his deathbed). Even though (given the necessity for a remorse-basis to the punishment-avoiding repentance) the sinning which constitutes the first stage of the modified Bartian plan will itself be doing nothing to improve, rather than reduce, one's chances of becoming by natural means the sort of person who will be able to carry out the second stage of the plan – the repentance stage – it is not metaphysically impossible that one might pull off the second stage even having got to it via the first stage. Certain theological views (involving a post-mortem and universal repentance and salvation at the Last Judgment) guarantee that one does get to the second stage. However, even on these views, it is not clear that the post-mortem experience of the Last Judgment will not in itself be sufficiently punishing to be functionally equivalent to Purgatory as it was conceived by 4*; and, if it is that punishing, it will be making even modified Bartianism imprudent. It is not clear that it will not be that punishing. But it is not clear that it will be that punishing. At least to me. So I am left unsure on this point. The issue I left hanging a moment ago is, as I said, one which I cannot determine, at least as yet.

Is agent A, at some stage in the future, going to feel so remorseful about act s (where s is a particular sin that modified Bartianism enjoins on A) should A indeed perform s, that A will repent of having done s? On this account, assuredly yes. Is it that for all values of s, the feeling of remorse as A will subsequently feel it for the doing of s is going to be so deep/intense that it be a sufficient harm, in the sense we are using the term, to outweigh the benefits that will have come to A between A's committing s and A's feeling this remorse? I do not know.

But this issue may be determined, if not by other means beforehand, then by us waiting and seeing what the Last Judgment brings to each of us. So, I close by saying that I hope you will forgive me if you find me on that last day as we take our places, instead of confidently reflecting on how well things seem to be working out for us all, muttering under my breath something concerning my being about to find out if certain of my chickens are going to be coming home to roost.Footnote ¹⁸