Can you sell somebody else's soul to the devil?

Based on the traditional beliefs that souls exist, that their ownership can be transferred, and that the devil exists and wants to acquire souls.

So let’s say I go around offering to buy other people’s souls. I claim I’m making a point about skepticism. I offer to buy any soul for five dollars. Some people agree to sell me their soul for the money.

But I have a nefarious plan. I summon the devil and tell him I want to have a three way with Rosario Dawson and Maggie Q. He says he can make it happen but I have to agree to the normal terms and give him my soul.

I tell him I’m not willing to pay the afterlife consequences of selling him my soul. But as he gets ready to leave, I make my counteroffer - I’ll sell him two of the souls I bought from other people.

He’s the devil - he’s looking at the big picture. Why would he want my soul in particular? As far as he’s concerned all souls are good and he’s coming out ahead to get two souls instead of just one. By acting as a middleman, I get my sexual fantasy for an outlay of just ten bucks. And the original owners of those two souls? Nobody twisted their arms, they sold those souls for what they agreed was a fair market value and I never agreed not to resell them.

I tell the devil that I’ve still got plenty of other souls and I’ll be getting back in touch for future deals.

In your opinion, does my plan work?

In what religion would you be allowed into heaven after making a deal like that? Looks to me like he gets your soul anyway.

In order to get what you desire, you have to give up your own soul. Using someone else’s is just like using a counterfeit bill.

I think even the devil would have morals about this.

Yeah, I assume that the very fact that you’re making a deal with the devil means that you’re going to hell.

Yes, I considered that possibility. But I’m not convinced it applies.

There apparently are two different ways in which your soul can be damned. One is through general immorality - you do bad things in life and you go to hell when you die. The other is through a specific exchange of ownership such as we’re discussing here.

The sale of a soul is apparently just a contractual matter not an issue of morality. We’ve all heard numerous examples of people who sell their souls for moral reasons (“I’ll sell my soul if you let my family live”). And we’ve heard of people who beat the devil on some legal technicality even after agreeing to the sale. So you only get damned for selling your soul if it’s within the context of the contractual relationship not merely for the act of entering the relationship. If it was the case that merely agreeing to the sale was sufficient to cause your damnation, why would the devil ever bother fulfilling his end of the bargain? He’d have acquired your soul as soon as you signed and have no need to pay you anything now.

And if this is the case and there’s no general immorality implied in the sale of your soul, it’s hard to see how there can be any immorality in the sale of anyone else’s soul. You didn’t coerce or threaten anyone to acquire their souls. Nor is the price I asked necessarily damning. If I had asked the devil to kill all my enemies, I’d be asking for something immoral in itself. But I only asked for sex - I wouldn’t be damned if I were able to convince Ms Dawson and Ms Q to have a threesome based on my charm rather than on diabolic intervention.

I don’t see that either. The whole point of the selling of souls is that their ownership can be transferred. Otherwise the devil could never buy my soul - it would always belong to me even if I tried to sell it away.

If you repent and ask forgiveness, is it not in God’s power to nullify the deal?

Fear Itself, I was thinking of the repent angle as well.

In a world where you know there’s such a thing as Heaven and Hell, why would anyone agree to that kind of deal? Yes, dying sucks, but if your family was good, they get to go to Heaven. And if they were bad, selling your soul just prolongs them going to Hell. Life just seems too utterly short to make going to Hell worth it for anything–if you just wait and die, you’ll get eternal paradise in Heaven.

One question, though–does the devil only make deals with people who have unblemished souls? I mean, why bother taking a soul from a scoundrel if you know he’s going to Hell anyway?

If this were the case, then why sell any souls at all? Just go out and get your threesome! (Take pictures. Not of you :))

Well, according to this movie it’s possible, in fact, the devil actually encouraged it,

We do see the devil rejecting the protagonist’s initial offerings as tainted, ‘I’ll be getting them eventually, anyway. Bring me innocents,’ although the devil is in a position to drive a hard bargain. Good luck with your quest.

There is no right or wrong answer to this, as there is no real, substantial tradition of thought in which selling a soul (to the devil, or anyone else) is possible. Even amongst those who believe that both souls and the devil are real, those who seriously believe that the soul is a thing of a sort whose ownership can be sold are probably in a small minority; almost certainly, indeed, just people who are confused about the official dogmas of whatever religion they profess to follow. I am pretty sure that most believers in souls would ay that your soul is the essential you, and you cannot sell it any more than you could sell off, say, your love of chocolate, or your fear of heights, to someone else.

We are in the realms of fiction here. In the fictional story of Faust, and other stories that imitate it, and metaphors based upon it, souls can be sold to the devil. There is no indication that they might be sold to anyone else. Even then (since the story pays some rudimentary respect to traditional Christian ideas of the soul) the best interpretation to put upon the deal is not that Faust’s soul somehow passes into the Devil’s possession as soon as the deal as struck, but, rather, that a contract has been made that upon Faust’s death, his soul will automatically go to hell and will not be considered for heaven. While it is conceivable that the devil (in a Manichean sort of universe) might be able to enforce such a contract, there is no way an ordinary human being could, so I don’t really see how an ordinary person could be said to own another’s soul, let alone be able to trade it. (Where would you keep these souls you had bought?)

But, anyway, the key point is that the buying and selling of souls is something that only goes on in universes that are pretty much openly acknowledged to be fictional, and if you want to create your own fictional universe where not just the buying of souls by the devil, but the trading of souls by people is possible, then you are quite free to do so. It is your story (or fantasy), so you get to make the rules.

I wonder what would happen if you were to try to sell the souls to God.

If you can, start with David Mitchell’s soul.

That is a figure of speech, and should not be taken to imply that the speaker actually believes that their soul can be offered for sale.

We have heard stories in which that happens, stories which are intended to be taken, and almost always are taken, to be fictional. (You won’t find it in the Bible, for instance, amongst the stories there that some people take to be true.)

Fiction writers set their own rules, and different writers can set different rules, as they please, for different stories.

Njtt, I said in the OP “based on the traditional beliefs that souls exist, that their ownership can be transferred, and that the devil exists and wants to acquire souls”. Deals with the devil are a well-established genre of fiction. Work within the context.

Unfortunately, I had to add the qualifier “if” to my hypothetical about charming those fine ladies into bed with me. In the real world, my charm has not caused this to happen (perhaps due to the complete lack of any opportunity to display such charm as I possess to either of them).

I’m not sure what would happen if you’re genuinely repentant later on, but if you go into the deal thinking, “Oh, I’ll just ask for forgiveness later” or later comes, “I wish I didn’t do that, but it sure was fun” that voids the forgiveness asking.

I’m thinking apparently not. In the majority of the “deal with the devil” stories I’m familiar with, the seller always expresses regret and repentance at some point. But it’s never shown as being enough to overturn the deal.

A good point. Because I’ve always said that even if I was theoretically willing to sell my soul to the devil in exchange for something I wanted, the actual appearance of the devil to consumate the deal would be enough to make me renege. The devil’s appearance would prove to me that damnation was a real possibility and would cause me to not only abandon any plans I had for selling my soul but also to give up any sinful activities I was already engaged in. It’s got to be tough for the devil - his attempts to lead people to damnation have probably saved plenty of people who might otherwise have been damned anyway.

Which is the point of my OP. I’ve figured out an angle where I get the benefit and somebody else pays the price.

No, but only because your initial purchase was invalid. You cannot really buy someone’s soul while dressing it up as a comment on skepticism. Your victim would have to take it seriously, or at least do something more binding than laugh and say “Sure, give me the five bucks.”

If you’d really bought your victim’s soul then I’d say yes, you could trade it to the Devil for favours.

I’m not taking a stand on this issue, but I think you need to talk to Inigo Montoya.