Argument

The Cold Case Argument

Intro

Some murders are never solved. Some massacres left no survivors, and the people who did it died old and unpunished. Every witness is gone. The bones are dust. Yet almost everyone still thinks two things. First, it really happened: the victim really was killed, even if no record of it survives anywhere. Second, it still matters. Something is still owed to that victim, and the world is worse for the debt being unpaid.

Those two beliefs sit oddly in a universe of matter alone. If the past no longer exists, what makes it true that the killing happened, once every trace is gone? And if no one remembers, who is the debt owed by, and who could ever pay it? A debt that nobody can know about and nobody can ever settle starts to look like no debt at all.

The Cold Case Argument says the beliefs are right, and that they make the most sense if there is a Judge who keeps the whole past and will one day answer for it. The Bible says exactly that: "God will bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing" (Ecclesiastes 12:14, ASV). This is not proof. It is a claim that our deepest sense of justice fits theism far better than it fits a world where the past simply evaporates.

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In full

The Cold Case Argument is a likelihood argument from the moral status of the unremembered past. Its explanandum is the conjunction of two widely held and reflectively stable judgments: that truths about past wrongs remain true when every witness and physical trace is gone, and that justice for such wrongs remains objectively owed when no living person knows of them. A deductive spine (P1 to P5) closes on a confirmatory conclusion: the standing of these owed-and-unknown debts is far more expected on theism, where an omniscient Judge both grounds the truth of the past and can discharge its moral debts, than on naturalism, where the past has at best a tenseless or brute ground and its unremembered debts can never be paid by anyone. Each premise is supported by a different kind of evidence: the metaphysics of truth (the truthmaker debate over presentism), the history and law of atrocity (no statute of limitations for the gravest crimes, the Horkheimer and Benjamin exchange), and the psychology of memory and desert (forgetting experienced as a second injustice; punishment intuitions that track desert rather than deterrence). The strongest rival, moral error theory joined to an evolutionary account of retributive emotion, is answered in the defeater gate. The argument is honest about its weakest point: on an eternalist view of time the truth of the past needs no God, so the weight falls on the owed justice, not on the truthmaker alone.

Format note

This is a braided case, the house format for new Ris3n Arguments: a valid spine whose premises each rest on their own strands of evidence, a knot that checks the strands are independent, a likelihood ledger, and a defeater gate. It braids four fields. Objective truth contributes the question of what makes past-tense truths true once their traces are gone. Justice contributes the legal and moral judgment that the gravest wrongs never expire. History contributes the cases, atrocities with no living witness, and the philosophers who argued over them in the shadow of the 1930s. Psychology contributes the evidence that people feel forgetting as a second wrong and punish by desert, not by usefulness.

The spine

Validity. P1 and P2 together establish the datum: there are real, standing debts of justice about a past that no finite mind holds. P3 says such debts are far more expected given a Knower and Judge than given none. P4 assigns theism to the first case and naturalism to the second. So the datum is far more expected on theism, and by P5 it confirms theism. The form is a likelihood comparison closed by modus ponens on the likelihood principle.

Strength of the conclusion. Confirmatory, not demonstrative. The argument does not show that owed justice logically requires God. It shows that a world containing such debts fits theism much better than naturalism. A naturalist can accept P1 and P2 and pay the price of an unpayable moral universe; the ledger says how high that price is.

P1, Past truth

Inductive strand

1. Ordinary and legal practice. Courts reopen cold cases decades later because the question "did he do it?" has had a definite answer all along. The Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, was identified in 2018 through genetic genealogy for crimes committed in the 1970s and 1980s, and pleaded guilty in 2020. No one thought the crimes had become untrue in the intervening forty years.
2. The philosophers' version. Max Horkheimer wrote to Walter Benjamin in March 1937 that past injustice has happened and is closed, and that the slain are really slain (Die Erschlagenen sind wirklich erschlagen). Benjamin copied the passage into his Arcades Project (Convolute N8,1), and both took the completedness of the past as the hard fact any theory of history must face.
3. The truthmaker question. D. M. Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge, 2004), defends the principle that every truth is made true by something that exists. Theodore Sider, Four-Dimensionalism (Oxford, 2001), argues that presentists, who hold that only the present exists, cannot supply truthmakers for past-tense truths without "cheating" by positing primitive past-tensed properties of the present world.

Abductive strand

Convergence

Analytic metaphysics (Armstrong, Sider, Merricks), critical theory (Horkheimer and Benjamin), legal practice and ordinary moral thought all hold that the past is fixed and its truths do not lapse. They disagree about what grounds it; none of them deny it.

Objections and rebuttals

1. "Eternalism grounds past truths without God, so P1 does no work for theism." Rebuttal. Granted for P1 by itself, and the ledger rates P1 accordingly. The argument does not rest on the truthmaker. It rests on the conjunction of a fixed past with a debt about that past that only a Knower and Judge could discharge (P2 and P3). The block universe keeps the murder; it does not keep the account.
2. "Truths about the distant past are not knowable, so they may be indeterminate." Rebuttal. Unknowable is not indeterminate. Either the victim was killed by that man or not. The cold-case detective who finally solves it does not make it true; she finds out what was already so.

See Argument from Irrevocability for the transcendental case built on the fixedness of the past alone. This argument uses that fixedness only as its first premise and builds on the moral debt it carries.

P2, Owed justice

Inductive strand

1. Law that refuses to forget. Article 29 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) provides that crimes within the Court's jurisdiction "shall not be subject to any statute of limitations," following the United Nations Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity (1968). Many national systems, including England and Wales, the United States and Germany, likewise allow no limitation period for murder. Law expresses the judgment that the gravest debts do not expire with time.
2. Truth commissions. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, took testimony about killings and disappearances whose victims could no longer speak. Its premise was that the truth about the dead was owed to them and to the living even where prosecution was impossible.
3. Forgetting as a second injustice. Elie Wiesel, in the preface to the 2006 translation of Night, wrote that for the survivor who bears witness, "to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time." Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Harvard, 2002), argues that humanity as a whole carries an obligation to remember radical evil and its victims. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, 2004), examines the "duty of memory" as a duty of justice to the victims.
4. Desert, not usefulness. Kevin Carlsmith, John Darley and Paul Robinson, "Why Do We Punish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, 2002), found that ordinary people's sentencing judgments track the seriousness of the wrong (just deserts) far more than factors relevant to deterrence, even when participants said they valued deterrence.

Abductive strand

Convergence

International criminal law, transitional justice, Holocaust testimony, moral philosophy (Margalit, Ricoeur) and experimental psychology (Carlsmith, Darley and Robinson) reach P2 by different routes and for different purposes. The lawyers wanted prosecutions, the philosophers wanted an ethics of memory, and the psychologists wanted to know why people punish. All found the same thing: the debt is felt and judged to be owed to the victim, not merely to future society.

Objections and rebuttals

1. "The duty of memory is a duty to the living, to prevent future crimes." Rebuttal. That is part of it, and Wiesel says so. But the same people insist that something is owed to the dead themselves, and the desert-tracking data show that people judge punishment by what the wrongdoer deserves, not by what it would prevent.
2. "Moral facts are queer." Rebuttal. That is Mackie's argument, answered at Moral Anti-Realism Defeater. If it succeeds, the conclusion is that the victims of Srebrenica are owed nothing, strictly speaking. Few will pay that price, and the argument asks only that the reader notice it.

P3, The keeper principle

Inductive strand

1. Debts need a creditor's record and a court. In every ordinary case, a real debt is one that can in principle be recorded, recognized and settled. A debt that no one could ever know of and no one could ever discharge has no place in the practice that gives "debt" its meaning.
2. Kant's postulate. Immanuel Kant argued in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) that because the moral law commands us to seek the highest good, in which happiness is proportioned to worthiness, we must postulate a holy, omniscient and all-powerful Judge who can make that proportion real, since nature has no tendency to do so. See Argument from Justice and Immanuel Kant.
3. Benjamin's answer to Horkheimer. Benjamin replied, in the same Arcades Project note, that history is not only a science but also a form of remembrance, and that remembrance gives an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as "fundamentally atheological." The secular critic who felt the debt most keenly reached for theology to keep it open.

Abductive strand

The rival to P3 is that real debts can exist with no possible creditor's record and no possible discharge. That position is coherent, but it makes the moral universe contain debts that are, in principle and forever, unpayable and unknown. The more one believes the debt is real, the more one has reason to expect a keeper; the less one expects a keeper, the more pressure there is to say the debt was never real.

Convergence

The principle is shared by legal thought (no right without a remedy is an old maxim of the common law), Kantian moral philosophy, and Jewish and Christian theology of judgment. It is also recognized from the other side by thinkers like Horkheimer, who felt the force of completed injustice and could find no secular power to answer it.

Objections and rebuttals

1. "This is wishful thinking: we want justice, so we invent a Judge." Rebuttal. The argument does not move from wanting to existing. It moves from a moral judgment most people hold true (P2) to what would make it fit the world (P3). Wishing would not explain the desert-tracking data, which show the judgment is about the wrongdoer's guilt, not our comfort.
2. "Ought implies can for agents, not for the universe." Rebuttal. Agreed, and the spine does not say the universe owes us a Judge. It says owed-and-unpayable debts are much less expected without one. That is a likelihood claim, not a deduction from "ought implies can."

P4, The hypotheses

Inductive strand

1. Theism. On Christian theism God knows all things past (Hebrews 4:13), keeps a record of the forgotten (Malachi 3:16, Psalm 56:8), hears the blood that cries from the ground (Genesis 4:10), and will judge every hidden thing (Ecclesiastes 12:14, Revelation 20:12). The debt of the unremembered dead is exactly what this God is said to answer.
2. Naturalism. Physical traces of the past are scrambled and dispersed, the minds that knew the wrong die, and no agent survives to settle it. Even if physics conserves information in principle (see Argument from the Information-Conservation Convergence), scrambled correlations in radiation are not a judgment, a verdict or a remedy. The debt is either unreal or forever unpaid.

Abductive strand

Naturalism's best move is to deny the data its moral reading, which is the subject of the defeater gate. Its second-best move is to accept P2 and call the unpaid debt a tragic brute fact. That is honest, and it is precisely the low-likelihood outcome the ledger records.

Convergence

Christian theologians from Augustine to Immanuel Kant in his moral theology, Jewish thought on the God who remembers, and secular critics such as Horkheimer agree on the shape of the alternative: either there is a final Judge or past injustice is, in Horkheimer's word, completed.

Objections and rebuttals

1. "Many religions promise judgment, so this proves no particular God." Rebuttal. Correct; the argument confirms a Knower and Judge, which is a theistic result. Which Judge, and how justice for the guilty meets mercy for them, is the question taken up in The Justice and Mercy Argument.
2. "Karma would also discharge the debt." Rebuttal. Impersonal karma, as most traditions describe it, settles debts by consequence without a knower. It keeps the account but has no one to whom the victim is known. See Karma.

P5, The likelihood principle

Inductive strand

The principle that evidence favours the hypothesis on which it is more expected is standard in probability theory and scientific confirmation and is accepted by most critics of theistic arguments.

Abductive strand

Its rival, that no evidence confirms anything without known priors, would undercut ordinary scientific and legal reasoning alike, including the forensic reasoning that solves cold cases.

Convergence

Bayesian and likelihoodist approaches agree on this comparative use, whatever they think about priors.

Objections and rebuttals

1. "Theism's prior is too low for any likelihood to matter." Rebuttal. The ledger is prior-agnostic and the conclusion comparative. Priors are argued in the Cumulative Case for Christian Theism.

The knot

The strands are independent in method and source. The truthmaker strand comes from analytic metaphysics with no moral motive. The law strand comes from post-war international law and transitional justice. The memory strand comes from survivor testimony and philosophy (Wiesel, Margalit, Ricoeur). The desert strand comes from laboratory psychology. Two overlaps are counted once: the Rome Statute and the 1968 Convention are one legal tradition, and Margalit and Ricoeur write in the same philosophical conversation about memory. The central datum, an owed and unpayable debt about an unheld past, is the conjunction of P1 and P2, not any single row.

The ledger

Prior-agnostic: the ledger asks only how expected each datum is under each hypothesis. The ratings are reasoned judgments from the sections above, not measurements.

Net. The truthmaker row alone does little, and the argument says so. The weight lies in the moral rows: if the reader holds, as most do, that the forgotten dead are really owed justice, then that standing debt is much more expected on theism. A naturalist can resist only by denying the debt is real, which is the defeater gate, or by accepting an unpayable moral universe, which the ledger prices as low likelihood.

The defeater gate

The Debunked Demand. The strongest objection combines moral error theory with an evolutionary account of retributive emotion. J. L. Mackie (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977) argued that objective moral requirements would be metaphysically "queer" and that our sense of them is a projection. Sharon Street ("A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value," Philosophical Studies 127, 2006) argued that natural selection shaped our evaluative attitudes for fitness, not truth, so the realist cannot explain why our moral judgments would track mind-independent moral facts. Joined together: the demand that the dead be answered is a retributive impulse that protected cooperation among the living; it is not a perception of a debt.

The reply has three steps.

1. The impulse misfires exactly where the argument starts. A retributive instinct tuned for deterrence among living cooperators predicts strong concern for wrongs whose punishment will deter, and weak concern for wrongs whose perpetrators and victims are long dead and unknown. The data show the reverse pattern for the gravest cases: no limitation periods, truth commissions for the voiceless, and desert-tracking that ignores deterrence.
2. The debunker must say the judgments are false, not only explained. If the argument succeeds, "the murdered of Srebrenica are owed justice" is, strictly, untrue. That is a large bill, and the debunker must pay it for every victim, not only for God.
3. Parity. If evolved origin debunks moral judgment, the same reasoning threatens the reliability of the judgments the debunker uses to assess evidence. See Evolution and Empathy Ground Morality (Defeater) and Genetic Fallacy.

What the gate concedes: a debunking story explains why we feel the demand. It does not show the demand is mistaken, and the argument rests on the judgment's truth, which the reader must decide. See Sharon Street.

Concessions

• Grant: eternalism can ground past truths without God. Now collect: then the argument's weight sits on the moral debt, and the block universe has no one in it to whom the debt is owed or by whom it is paid.
• Grant: memorials and trials serve the living. Now collect: they also claim to serve the dead, and people who punish by desert show they mean it.
• Grant: the ledger's ratings are judgments. Now collect: then the objector must say which rating is wrong, and the most direct way is to say the forgotten victims are owed nothing.

Cheatsheet

The 30-second version (read aloud). Think of a murder no one will ever solve. Every witness is dead. Two things still seem true: it really happened, and the victim is still owed justice. If the universe is only matter, no one knows that past and no one can ever pay that debt. A debt nobody can know and nobody can pay is a strange thing to believe in. But if God keeps the whole past and will judge it, the debt is exactly what you would expect. The Bible says God hears the blood that cries from the ground. Our sense of justice says the same thing.

Fast facts:

1. Rome Statute, Article 29 (1998): the gravest international crimes "shall not be subject to any statute of limitations."
2. Horkheimer to Benjamin (1937): past injustice is closed, "the slain are really slain."
3. Wiesel (Night, 2006 preface): to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
4. Carlsmith, Darley and Robinson (JPSP, 2002): people punish by desert, not by deterrence.
5. Sider (Four-Dimensionalism, 2001): presentists struggle to say what makes past truths true.

The closing line. The evidence is gone and the witnesses are dead, but the debt is still on the books, so someone is keeping the books.

Cross-examination

Round 1, Did it happen?

• Q: If a murder left no trace at all, is it still true that it happened?
• If they say yes: then we agree the past is fixed. Now, is anything still owed?
• If they say no: then the past changes when the evidence decays, and history and forensic science lose their subject.

Round 2, Is anything owed?

• Q: Is the victim of an unsolved murder from 1890 owed justice, or only pity?
• If they say owed: then who holds that debt, and who could ever pay it?
• If they say nothing is owed: then say it plainly about the victims of a massacre with no survivors.

Round 3, The debunker

• Q: If the feeling that the dead are owed justice is only an evolved impulse, is it false?
• If they say yes: then you are an error theorist about the worst crimes in history.
• If they say no, only explained: then the explanation leaves the debt in place, and the question of who pays it remains.

Dodge table

Live-cite kit

Scripture (ASV):

• Genesis 4:10: And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground (Genesis 4:10, ASV)
• Ecclesiastes 3:15: That which is hath been long ago; and that which is to be hath long ago been: and God seeketh again that which is passed away (Ecclesiastes 3:15, ASV)
• Ecclesiastes 12:14: For God will bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil (Ecclesiastes 12:14, ASV)
• Luke 12:2: But there is nothing covered up, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known (Luke 12:2, ASV)
• Hebrews 4:13: And there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do (Hebrews 4:13, ASV)
• Revelation 6:10: How long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? (Revelation 6:10, ASV)
• Revelation 20:12: and the dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works (Revelation 20:12, ASV)

Scholarly:

• Max Horkheimer, letter to Walter Benjamin, 16 March 1937, in Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard, 1999), N8,1: the slain are really slain, so past injustice cannot be undone by any later history.
• Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (2002): an obligation to remember radical evil and its victims.
• Carlsmith, Darley and Robinson (JPSP, 2002): punishment judgments track desert.
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788): the moral law postulates a just and omniscient Judge.

Aphorism: "Every cold case is still open in one courtroom."

Connection to Scripture

• Genesis 4:10, the first murder has no human witness, and God hears it anyway: the blood "crieth unto me from the ground."
• Matthew 23:35, Jesus holds a whole history of shed blood, "from the blood of Abel," as still answerable.
• Hebrews 12:24, the blood of Christ "speaketh better than that of Abel": the cry for justice is met, not silenced.
• Malachi 3:16 and Psalm 56:8, a book of remembrance and a bottle for tears: God keeps what people forget.
• Ecclesiastes 12:14 and Revelation 20:12, every hidden thing judged out of the books.
• Romans 12:19, vengeance belongs to God, which is why the injured need not take it.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• D. M. Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge University Press, 2004). doi:10.1017/cbo9780511487552
• Kevin M. Carlsmith, John M. Darley and Paul H. Robinson, "Why do we punish? Deterrence and just deserts as motives for punishment," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002). doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.2.284 PubMed 12150228
• Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Harvard University Press, 2002). doi:10.4159/9780674040595
• Trenton Merricks, Truth and Ontology (Oxford University Press, 2007). doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199205233.001.0001
• Paul Ricoeur, Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Memory, History, Forgetting (University of Chicago Press, 2004). doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226713465.001.0001
• Theodore Sider, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Oxford University Press, 2001). doi:10.1093/019924443x.001.0001
• Sharon Street, "A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value," Philosophical Studies 127 (2006). doi:10.1007/s11098-005-1726-6

See also

• Ris3n Arguments, the hub of ris3n's original arguments
• Arguments, the master index
• Argument from Irrevocability, the transcendental case from the fixedness of the past, which this argument takes as its first premise
• Argument from Justice, Lewis and Kant on the standard of justice and the final Judge
• The Ought-Owe Argument, the grammar of moral debt and the cross; this page asks who keeps the ledger
• Argument from the Information-Conservation Convergence, the physics of conserved information, distinct from the moral record argued here
• The Justice and Mercy Argument, how a Judge who must answer every wrong can also forgive
• Moral Anti-Realism Defeater, the reply to error theory
• Hell and Eternal Punishment, the doctrine of final judgment
• A-Theory vs B-Theory of Time and Divine Foreknowledge, the theories of time behind P1
• Moral Argument, the family this argument belongs to
• Cumulative Case for Christian Theism, where this argument contributes