The Tale of the Enormous Speeding Ticket

You’re driving 6km over the limit, get pulled over and receive a ticket for $2,500,000,000,000. You go to court. “I plead guilty, but what’s with the typo?”

“Typo?” asks the judge.

“It says I’ve been fined $2.5 trillion.”

“You have.” You start swearing & are restrained by court staff. The judge explains: by breaking one law, you broke the entire social contract (there are no degrees of breaking it). This most serious crime justifies any fine. “However, since the law is merciful (and it’s your 1st offence), you’re just getting a finite fine”.

“But,” you protest, feeling your sanity slip away, “nobody has that kind of money!”

“You should have thought of that before you broke the entire social contract. Now please pay the fine, I’ve 12 more cases today.” Since you can’t cough up, you go to a labour camp where you work to pay it off. Later, the prison brings in an actuary to help with efficiency. He checks his tables of life expectancies and is shocked that you’ll die WAY before you’re square with the law.

This cannot stand. It’s not just to let you off the hook just because your body will decompose so soon. The government starts Drastic Longevity research. They find a way to let people live for a few billion years. It doesn’t matter that they spent a lot more than your fine on the research: justice is justice. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief — you won’t be freeloading and can serve out the entire sentence!

A follower of a religion that believes in eternal punishment (eg. Islam/Christianity) hears this tale. If they want to avoid contradiction they must accept it as a wonderful example of justice. After all, you didn’t just commit a minor transgression, you sinned against the entire social contract. If anything, the law was too lenient by not fining you $Infinity.

And yet this story seems even more ridiculous than notions of eternal damnation for a finite offence! Why? Firstly we’re more used to the standard idea of eternal hellfire, so it’s almost become an empty phrase. But there’s another reason. Humans have trouble comprehending any large numbers (just try to truly imagine all the creatures that have abounded in the 3 billion year expanse of geological time). The word “infinity” is only 8 letters long. After long use it becomes a word like any other. We don’t imagine how much it truly represents. We can’t. This story on the other hand ties the punishment to a smaller, more manageable amount ($2.5 trillion just under the size of the 2009 US budget).

Hopefully the tale can provide a moral scale for eternal punishment. To figure out how unjust it is, just multiply your moral outrage from the above story by a lot.

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