Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

Classics are classics for a reason. Sometimes, there is a lot of wisdom in them. Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment” poses a lot of ethical questions. One of them is: What is a crime?

A crime is by definition “an action that is against a law.” That’s the sum total of the legal side of this question. But I don’t think that the answer to the moral side of the question is that trivial.

Intuitively, it is obvious that not all crimes are alike. Jaywalking and fraud, theft and rape are all crimes, but we would probably not lump them all in the same moral category.

Sometimes following laws themselves can - must - be considered a crime. They are just raw power used to force people to do the bidding of some tyrant, often to the detriment of whole groups (“We will kill you, if you are won’t do what you are told to do”).

Sometimes, actions and situations we intuitively consider as wrong aren’t crimes. Like having to see poverty crippling children, leaving them blind, stunted and full of parasites. It’s the fault of all people that could help, but won’t. (After the paupers have tried their best to get out of the situation themselves)

Laws often try to encode something positive, to enshrine some good, or at least to damn some bad and get the whole power of the state to force society to combat and shun that bad, or do what is considered to be good. At least by those in power.

But if the law becomes tyrannical or protects tyrants? Does crime become a duty?

Does that make “crime” a meaningless term? It seems fitting, if it is used in reference to something like intentionally causing harm or killing people. But is that most of the law? Or is most of it just some powerful people imposing their will?

The book’s protagonist Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov has a theory that certain “distinguished” people are allowed to break the law. These chosen people can and do crush lesser people to gain the means necessary to ascend. Like Napoleon did.

He tries to take the first step to greater heights by murdering and robbing a pawnbroker and her sister. He is devastated by the fact that feeling remorse and doubt makes him unworthy of being one of the chosen people. But what, if he had succeeded? Would that murder have made him a hero? What if that money, like he planned, would have paved his way to becoming person of influence? What if he had done a lot of good after that?

How flawless has the record of a person to be to still consider that person a hero? Do the funding farther qualify, or is the sin of slavery weighing too heavily in the final tally? Is Fritz Haber a hero for saving billions? Or a villain for killing thousands, maybe millions? What great man of history is free of blame? Even religious founders don’t measure up to our current standards. Some people we consider to be heroes today didn’t make the cut in their time.

I don’t think that I will find solutions to these questions here, but it is clear that they can eat away at the foundation of your view on your society and yourself.

Blind obedience to established laws can become as detrimental to the world as raging destruction of the established order. You have to master the law to transgress it for the real benefit of other people.

It is not enough to only act on a low-resolution view on people, processes and the world in general. “The rich”, “the economy”, “the environment” etc. are too coarse-grained to inform meaningful, positive action. It takes excruciating work to build a map that is detailed enough to actually improve even small pockets of the world on the scale of families and companies. Failing to do the necessary work is a sin of omission, sloth, maybe greed and envy. But is it a crime in itself?

Or does this failure only become a crime, if it leads to the death of millions, like during the Great Leap Forward or Holodomor? Or not even then, because the perpetrators claimed to have good intentions? (Who knows, maybe they even did!) But that’s the rub, isn’t it? It’s not enough to have good intentions.

What if those you want to help don’t want it to be better. Or if it is actually you that doesn’t? Maybe you are just envious and self-serving? What if you are delusional and confuse your hatred for other people’s success with love for the downtrodden? Have you made sure that you are stepping on them more lightly than what you replace?

Even if you did, what is the justifiable ratio of harm to benefit that is still acceptable? Who is allowed to get hurt? To what ends? Who is allowed to decide that? Why isn’t that a crime? Hard questions for utilitarianism and related ideologies.

In the end, Raskolnikov could not bear the guilt and burden he had put on other people by confessing his guilt to them and turned himself in to the authorities. He found some relief and redemptions in Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov’s love towards him. At only 18-years old, she used to work as a prostitute to feed her siblings, because her alcoholic farther and consumptive stepmother had failed to do so. She believed that suffering for God is the way to redeem one self. Sofya had her belief in God to keep her sane and sort out what is and isn’t a sin and a crime.

Raskolnikov only had his theory that aggrandized himself.

What mechanism does our secular society have to answer these hard questions and to align its members? Is rationality enough? Did the horrors of communism and fascism prove Dostoyevsky’s (and Nietzsche’s) suspicion that without religion, only wars of ideology fought with religious fervor are ahead of us? Even if they were proven right without a shadow of a doubt, what would that mean for us? Would we impose some religion on all of us? Could we? Which one?

Posing challenging questions is what classics are supposed to do. This one delivered.