Crime and Punishment — Everything wrong with Utilitarianism and Moral Relativism.
The good old Trolley Problem is a super common question/scenario in low-level psychology or philanthropy college classes. Will you let a train hit five unsuspecting people who are on its way, or will you pull the lever to redirect the train to a track consisting of one person?
If you choose the second option, will you kill one healthy man to save five people who are in need of his organs?
How far is utilitarianism reasonable?
Dostoevsky delves into a similar theme and makes a compelling argument against moral relativism. Even though his works converted people to orthodoxy, he did one hell of a job helping us understand why utilitarianism is just a device to cloak moral bias with the guise of mathematical certainty, attempting the impossible task of quantifying and comparing happiness from different sources.
Reading Crime and Punishment at different times in life yields a different book with a slightly different takeaway.
The story is simple (or is it?) A man named Raskolnikov plans on killing a horrible old woman for her money. He wants to use that money to enhance and help the poor students in Russia who are in debt and need the money more than anyone.
He justifies his hypothesis by proposing that Napoleon Bonaparte was a horrible oppressor. But in the end, he was considered to be one of the most powerful revolutionaries and is praised by people, irrespective of all the heinous crimes he committed.
He indeed divides people into two categories: Men and Extraordinary men.
Extraordinary men have the right to commit any crime and transgress the law in any way, just like Napoleon, The Great. He believes he belongs to the latter category and wants to test it. He murders the old lady and her sister (which was unplanned). But he finds very swiftly that he is indeed not an ‘Extraordinary man.’
The guilt and the psychological torment he faces after committing the murder is where we get to unravel the mind of Raskolnikov completely. We see how he represents the danger of taking one’s ideas to the extreme and letting one’s morality become too individual and stubborn. Raskolnikov tried too hard to change who he was, which eventually led to his psychological breakdown and confession of his crimes, thereby facing imprisonment.
Now, personally, I don’t think Dostoyevsky was trying to make a statement. You can’t make a general statement based on one hypothetical human’s experience after committing a crime. Very few criminals face a ‘psychological breakdown’ after committing a crime. He, of course, knew that.
Dostoyevsky’s main focus was to try and weave the emotional distress faced by a guilt-ridden man who is surrounded by fear and anxiety. We get to see Raskolnikov finally at peace after he gets imprisoned. This suggests that Dostoyevsky believed that Raskolnikov’s imprisonment is not the period where he suffered the most. The period of inner turmoil after he committed the murders was the ‘punishment’ for his ‘crime.’
The story doesn’t stop here. I’ve merely scratched the surface. The characters in the book have interesting personalities and are well-written. The dialogue scenes are lively and dramatic yet realistic as well. Each character has their own positive qualities combined with some serious issues that unfold in a tragic yet entertaining way.
The author also discusses how concerning it is the way we see morality, how “creating your own moral values” isn’t as simple as it seems, and how we pass a biased moral judgment between people, based on their status or situation. He also emphasizes the objectiveness of morality, how humans cannot overwrite it with logic and reason, and salvation lies in Christ.
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Romans 6:23
Reading it in your 20s will help you attain a deeper understanding of religion and human nature. Crime and Punishment is not an action novel but a novel about an action. I’d say you need loads of patience, more sophistication, and less greenness in you to enjoy this book.
