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So, I'm trying to get back in the habit of writing every day, and I'm easing myself into it by starting with a couple of short stories that I'm not as heavinly invested in as some of my larger projects, in the hopes that my perfectionist tendancies won't get in the way and I'll actually end up finishing something for once.

The short story I'm working on right now is called Heaven or Hell. A book in which the main character dies and upon entering the afterlife, she finds that God has abandoned heaven, leaving no one to judge the souls of the dead. Since the angels are forbidden from judging humans, they decide that the only way for the humans to pass into the next life is to have them judge each other. And so, a jury of 9 humans will stand in judgement over 9 souls and decide between themselves who will go to heaven and who will go to hell, after which they will be judged themselves.

What I'm struggling with is coming up with ideas of the nine souls that the protagonist has to judge. The idea is that judging the souls will get progressively more difficult as the story goes on.

I do have a few ideas for some of the chracters. For instance:

First soul will be a little boy who maybe stole some money from his mother's purse for sweets. Unanimously gets sent to heaven.

One soul is a nun who dedicated her entire life to God, but she was part of one of those homes for unwed mothers churches who essentially imprisoned unmarried pregnant women, used them as slave labour and then sold their babies to rich families. Till the end she's convinced she was doing "God's work".

Another soul is a doctor who saved a lot of lives and tried his best to provide a good life for his wife and children. He generally considers himself a good person, but there is one incident from his frat boy days that he tries his best to forget about where he took advantage of and raped a very intoxicated girl. Obviously, rape is evil, but does the one act that happened years ago when he was young and stupid cancel out all the good that he did with the rest of his life.

Then there's a lawyer who worked as a defendant. She got a serial killer aquitted and that person went on to kill again. On the one hand, she didn't commit the crimes herself and she was just doing her job. On the other hand, she knew her client was guilty and she knew that there was a high change of him killing again if he was released. Should she be punished for that?

I have a few other ideas for souls to be judged. A prostitute, a suicide victim, an absentee father, maybe throw in a nazi? These are all characters I could use, but not characters that I will definitely use.

Basically, I wanted to ask you guys for ideas on characters that it would be morally difficut to judge. Characters who maybe 50% of people would think should be sent to heaven and 50% of people would think deserve to go to hell. Doesn't matter if the scale is more 75/25 as I want the characters to get gradually more difficult to judge over time, but you get the idea.

What are some ideas you have of people that would be difficult to judge whether to send them to heaven or hell? Answers can be as detailed or vague as you like.

This is interesting.

A soldier deployed in a war that she fundamentally doesn't believe in. It's against a country that's significantly weaker and suffers from more poverty than the soldier's home country. The war is justified by some flimsy attempts towards jingoism and vague accusations that the weaker country is harboring some sort of weapon or a fugitive that needs to be brought to justice.

However, soldiers like her are few and far between.

Should she defect?

If she defects, she's doing a good thing by avoiding participating in something that's inherently evil and she's staying true to her beliefs.

But then, she may be replaced by another soldier who, based on the laws of statistics and probability, would more than likely be a lot more sympathetic to the war effort, possibly even overzealous in their patriotism(the rhetoric of this fictional fantasy country's military training program definitely tries to select for these traits).

If she stays, she's knowingly participating in evil.

But maybe she could minimize harm. If she sticks to the letter of her job, maybe by her being there, that's automatically one less soldier that doesn't hesitate to go above and beyond.

Maybe she could affect change, change the system from within.

So is it more morally right to avoid a cause you don't believe in, or stay and try and do something about it? But there's no guarantee you actually could do something about it, and odds are, by staying, you'll just become another cog in the machine and continue to perpetrate the atrocities that you internally hate.

This is definitely the sort of complex scenario I'm looking fro, but in this scenario, the question is whether or not the soldier should defect, and which would be the moral decision.

In my story, the soldier would already be dead and awaiting judgement for her sins. The question is not whether or not she should defect. She can't defect now. She's dead. The question is whether or not she should be sent to hell for her part in a war she didn't agree with. She knew the war was morally wrong. She chose to fight in it anyway. Should she be judged for that? Or should the judgement be solely for the people who started the war?

Good point. Let's change the scenario, to where she chose to stay, and do her best to bring order. It didn't work, because the military-industrial complex is a machine much larger than any one person, and by the time she dies, she has killed at least 50 people. But, there are innumerable instances where she may have chosen to spare women and children, start building projects, try and integrate with the local community, send opinion pieces and advocate for tolerance. So, she put forth her best effort to bringing some good into the world.

When she dies, how would she be judged?

You're a citizen in Salem during the Salem Witch Trials. There's a feeling of paranoia and mass hysteria in the air. Neighbors look at each other with distrust and suspicion in their eyes.

You're an educated businessman. In university, you studied the works of Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, before moving to the small town of Salem, so you've been sitting on the sidelines, watching in horror at this frenzy of senseless killings that seemed to have swept this town out of nowhere.

Knowing a bit about psychology and how people think, you know that there's isn't much time before the town self destructs, people undertake vigilante killings, and personal feuds and grudges inevitably subsume the moral reasons for the witch burnings.

So you organize the townspeople, and you try and pick people as fairly as you could. You pick a young girl, hoping that the horrible murder of a young person would shock the town out of their hysteria, and bring them to their senses. You pick an older woman, thinking that she didn't have long to live anyway, and that maybe the town's thirst for blood will abate. You pick a few people like this, using reasoning that seems somewhat justifiable to yourself, until finally, the killings/hysteria gradually abate.

Once you die, you're judged. Did you do the right thing? What if, by stepping in, you played the role of judge, jury, and executioner? Who gave you the right to do that? What makes you any better than the people whose lives you ended? Yes, you suppose that it could have been someone else who didn't care about minimizing harm and trying to bring an end to this, but you knowingly and willingly participated in an atrocity.

You can't see the future, you had no idea whether your actions really did bring some measure of good into the world, and the people that you killed had lives that, in another reality or timeline, could have been lived out to the fullest.

So, are you a good person or a bad person?

I really like this one! I'm not sure how time will work in my story. Whether the people who died will all have died around the same sort of time, or whether they will be from different time periods. Will decide that later but regardless, I really like the idea of a person who took action for what they assumed was the greater good, but actually ended in disaster. Should they be judged for their intentions or should they be judged for the end result?

This is an interesting scenario because I think to most humans, time smooths out most wrongdoing regardless of whether the person was remorseful or not. The doctor I think would be forgiven because he spent most of the rest of his life helping people, but if it was turned around to a doctor who helped people his whole life but then raped someone a year before he died, more would say he was guilty.

If these scenarios included testimony from victims it could also make things more complicated and emotional.

I'll put up a couple of idea from characters in one of my settings: a woman who intentionally had several children despite knowing they would all die painfully by the time they were 30 (for fantasy reasons in my game but it could easily be something genetic)

And a woman who as a teenager poisoned the "highschool sweetheart" she'd been pressured by her family into marrying and ended her pregnancy, all just as an easy escape from a situation she regretted. And then went on to live into her 80s in a second marriage with a large family of kids and grandkids who all thought of her as a saint and would be devastated if she ended up in Hell.

There wouldn't be testimonies from victims. I think that the way its going to work is that the judges are able to see the memories of the people they are judging. Each judge gets to ask the person one question and they will see the answer to that question in the form of a memory.

     The memory detail was interesting, because I was wondering if you asked the people how they judged the last people for whatever reason then how would they know if they're lying. This measure makes it seem impossible to keep the truth.

I wouldn't trust my afterlife fate to the average jury but this is a fascinating idea. Some other potential souls for judgement:

The person in charge of torturing criminals suspected of terrorism crimes. A classic 'does the end justify the means' moral dilemma. If you want to make it more specific, there could be other factors at play, e.g. the urgency of the situation, the severity of the threat, and how much evidence there is that the criminal is part of the terrorist organization.

An influencer who uses her fame and reputation to sell falsely advertized products to the vulnerable (e.g. a cure for depression) so she can afford a cure for her son's rare medical condition. How far can one go in order to save a life? What if they risk other lives in the process?

The person who ordered the atomic bomb to be set off in Hiroshima during the second world war.

A self-serving, entitled CEO who exploited others his whole life, yet in the final days before his death, he had a change of heart and was on the way to the bank to donate his entire fortune to charity. Does the good deed count if he hasn't carried it out yet? Had he lived longer, he might have done more good, but does that excuse everything else?

Or the opposite: a good-natured student who had a terrible year, and on the last day of term, was planning a school shooting. If they had the intention but the crime had yet to occur, does it still count agains them?

When it comes to the last two, I definitely think intention should be counted. If they would absolutely have done it had they not died, they should be judged as if they had. 

Although I do think this is where degree of reward/punishment should come in. A guy who was planning a shooting but didn't get to do it shouldn't be in the same ring of Hell as a mass murderer. And a guy who was greedy most of his life shouldn't be rewarded as lavishly as someone who was completely selfless.

That actually brings up another idea: what about someone who's selflessness actually hurt people? For example, giving all his money to charity only to lose the house and his family dying from hypothermia due to being on the street. Should he be punished when he had good intentions?

Yeah, this is a really good idea. Its like I was saying earlier with RK. Should a person be judged for their intentions or the ultimate result of their actions? Like... I don't know... A guy's wife is in labour, so he's speeding to the hospital. On the way he crashes, killing himself, his wife and the people in the other car. Intention was to get the wife to the hospital as quickly as possible. Result was five people dying.

Slightly unrelated but that last example reminds me of a surgeon who completed the world's fastest surgery! But he killed three people in the process: his patient, his assistant who he somehow sliced a finger off, and a witness (can't remember how he died).

Had to look this up to see if it was real... It was. With the witness, he only cut the guy's coat, but apparently this was so traumatic that it caused the guy to faint and die of shock. (There are doubts regarding the validity of that third death.)

These are all brilliant ideas! Also the last one has me thinking about maybe adding a pedophile who spent all their spare time watching kids in the park and fantasising about them, but never actually molested any kids. I mean obviously fantasising about molesting kiddies all day is fucked up., but should he be judged on his thoughts or his actions?

That's an interesting one. It's safe to assume that wherever he's going he can't hurt kids, and he did control himself during his lifetime and never act on his sickness. Personally, I'd vote for heaven but I can understand it being a difficult choice.

An idea for a twist at the end: you have to be judged yourself. Did you make the right decisions? What were you like in your previous life?
Variables would probably be required for this though, and definitively 'right' and 'wrong' choices.

      That's what I was thinking. The problem with that though, is that the judges wouldn't really know anything. But of course, that's fixed by the memory thing, except that the judges can only ask one question but maybe they can ask "how did you judge your batch," and see the whole thing or something.

     Even if they see it all, the character's thinking I would think is also pretty important (unless in the memories the judges don't know what the character was thinking...). For example, with clear yes or no answers, if you send a person clearly deserving hell to heaven with the thinking that everyone deserves a second chance/ doesn't deserve hell or that you're also evil and think they did a great job or something would most likely make a huge difference in judgement.

      And if you make contradictory choices, or choices with contradictory thinking, then that might be an entirely different crazy thing I don't want to think about right now.

Oh, just to clarify, this is a short story, not a story game.

Yeah, but it's too tempting idea to not make into a game! ><

Oops. Sorry :(

Another idea: someone who abused their workers, committed fraud, basically did whatever it took (lied, stole, cheated) to get the good life. But who never felt their actions were really wrong - they knew society didn't approve, but thought that if it got them happiness it didn't matter. Died peacefully in their sleep after achieving the life they wanted without ever feeling regret. The protagonist's job would likely be to show the person what they'd done, how their actions affected others and their own soul (warped it somehow), and to make them feel real regret.

I'm doing something similar to that with the nun. The nun literally imprisoned pregnant women and stole their babies, but as far as she was concerned, she was doing God's work, because those women shouldn't have been having sex outside of marriage and they needed to be punished for their sins!

That said, the protagonist's job is not to try and show people the error of their ways or make them feel regert. It's literally just to decide who should go to heaven and who should go to hell.

Interesting idea!

- A guy who was just kind of shitty to the people around him his entire life. He never hurt anyone or robbed anyone or did anything majorly bad, but he never did anything good either, and actively made the lives of everyone around him just slightly worse.

- An elected official who genuinely helped the poor and sick improve their lives significantly, but was abusive to his wife.

Might edit this post and add some more later.

Yep. These are the kind of ideas I'm looking for. ^_^

I think it depends what religion this heaven is based on. 

But I like the concept of a dog getting judged and people debating whether dogs deserve to go to heaven.

Other groups that would be a topic of debate:

• Women who have gotten abortions
• Mormons
• Pete, who was a very very annoying coworker and is still very annoying during his judgement, but hasn't done anything wrong
• A masochist who really wants to go to hell, but was an overall good natured guy when he was alive.
• That one murder case of a mother who killed both of her sons with Huntington disease, because she couldn't stand their suffering anymore.

 

Christian heaven. So animals wouldn't be judges because according to the Christian faith, they don't have souls.

That said, people's relijious beliefs wouldn't make much of a difference, since you don't need to be part of any religion to make judgement on others. Sure, there would be some people who would make judgements based on whether or not the people they're judging were part of the same religion, but most would just be making judgements based off their own moral compasses.

Might I make a suggestion? A mother who killed her young child (maybe five or six years old). The child has some type of tumor or deformation that causes him severe pain, and but isn't fatal. He would live to be sixty or eighty, but he wouldn't have what we would call "quality of life." Should she be punished for killing her son when she wanted him to avoid suffering? It also raises am interesting question about how many people out there have dehabiliating injuries or terminal cancer. How do we find the balance between the right to life and the right to the pursuit of happiness?

As an added twist, you could make it where about a decade after she did this, medical science advanced enough to where the child could have been operated on and cured, therefore making the murder completely unnecessary. Yet, she had no way of knowing that, and doctors weren't what you'd call "optimistic."

A cool concept, but I personally would find that a bit too easy to judge. A person who killed someone who was living in constant pain in order to end their suffering, I think most people would be sympathetic towards. That said, I could have it as one of the earlier options before the choices start getting really difficult.

This is a cool idea.

How about some who regularly gave to national charities and the like, but regularly ignored individuals begging, and was civily impolite (running red lights, never holding doors, being rude, etc.)? Basically a sinless asshole.

Have you ever played the game Death or Taxes? In it you play a Grim Reaper determining who lives and dies each day. It's a close enough concept that you could probably use some of their "death profiles" as source material.

I have never heard of it, no.I'll look it up.

Yeah, that's a very good idea. A guy who is generally a shitty person but never did anything inherently evil. Like, everybody would agree that they can't stand the guy, but does he deserve to spend an eternity in hell for just being kind of a dick?

Hmm....

- Normally, she was nice. A star student with perfect grades, tons of friends, super friendly, the person everyone wanted to be like. But not always. I'm not so sure what the bad side should be, but two ideas are her venting online and being an annoying troll, and her venting at home therefore being a bully to a little sibling.

- Someone who genuinely thinks they're doing good when they're causing harm. People have already given many examples of this, but here are a few ideas.

a) Fighting for the army with all their heart, when they're actually on the 'bad' side (this is assuming the soldier doesn't think their bad, and it's a more obvious good side bad side fight)

b) Being a doctor or resercher or something helping the government or an organization or something to develope something, they could be told it's a cure or whatever but it's contagious and it's weaponized by the people asking the person to make it. If you want, maybe even throw in that they knew what was going on but needed the money for their family or whatever.

I'll add more ideas when I come up with more.

For option A, I was considering having a Nazi. I mean, Nazi = bad is a pretty universal sentiment, but then, this guy would have been raised in the Hitler youth and taught that Hitler was just the best guy ever and the the Jews were evil and by getting rid of the Jews, Hitler was making Germany a better place. He would have joined the Nazi party fresh out of school and been so proud to serve his country.

Maybe the guy worked as a guard in a consentration camp or something. He witnessed and committed atrocities every day, but also, every day, he was told by literally everyone around him that he was doing great work and he was a good soldier and he was making his country a better place.

So, the question becomes, when a person is raised from birth to believe that good is evil and evil is good, and the more they strive to be good, the more evil they commit, is the fault with them, or with the people that raised them?

The problem with this whole scenario since you've said it's Christian based, aren't humans also forbidden from judging others? The angels would be forcing humans to sin which seems like something they also couldn't do, but it also means anyone who doesn't refuse to take part in this should technically also be judged for that and possibly be sent to Hell for sending other people to Hell.