Loving Sinners to Death

Abstract

If an expression of purported hatred of sin cannot be distinguished by an observer from an expression of hatred for the sinner, there are good prima facie reasons to believe that hatred for the sinner is expressed. In itself, this is a modest claim. But if the modest claim is plausible, it is reasonable to ask whether it implies that counsel to hate the sin but love the sinner is really just dangerous counsel to hate the sinner. People who counsel hating vice or sin, though not the sinner, often claim that doing so is analogous to hating sickness without hating the person who is sick. The reasoning is that if we love someone, then we care about the person’s health or wellbeing, and we will hate anything that compromises the person’s well-being. Arguments for the modest claim, however, imply that this analogy between hating sin and hating sickness is implausible, and in deeply troubling ways. Even so, a sick person who seeks treatment for her illness is never confused about the fact that treatment targets her sickness and never the person as such. But actions that agents claim are motivated by hatred of sin or vice are often indistinguishable in practice from actions that any observer would reasonably think express hatred of the sinner herself. We will consider the modest argument about the practical indistinguishability of hating sin and hating a sinner in light of Aurel Kolnai’s more ambitious argument that it is not possible to hate a sinner’s sin without hating the sinner. Kolnai argues that as an intentional object of hatred as an emotion, the sinner and the sin are simply indistinguishable. He does so by locating three critical and questionable assumptions about reference, the nature of traits, and agent identity, implied in the notion that they are distinguishable. To the degree that Kolnai’s argument is