#fyodor dostoevsky eventually has the main character give up and turn himself in because he could not move on from killing her | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

inthegardenpraying · 5 months

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“Listen, now. On the other hand, you have fresh, young forces that are being wasted for lack of support, and that by the thousands, and that everywhere! | A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings that could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery! | Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from destitution, from decay, from ruin, from depravity, from the venereal hospitals—all on her money. | Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime? For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption. One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic! | And what does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and wicked old crone mean in the general balance? | No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach, and not even that much, because the old crone is harmful. | She’s eating up someone else’s life: the other day she got so angry that she bit Lizaveta’s finger; they almost had to cut it off!” | Dostoevsky, Fyodor/Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue/Vintage Classics/p. 68

#the truth #Fyodor Dostoevsky #russian literature #psychology #psychology before a kill #psychology during a kill #psychology after the kill #Justifying evil deeds #trade off is one evil deed for a 1000 good deeds #the failure of act utilitarianism as purely used in ethical evaluations #fyodor dostoevsky eventually has the main character give up and turn himself in because he could not move on from killing her #The failure of justifying murder of innocent blood with 1000 good deeds #Jesus dying on the cross and his resurrection show a powerful idea of redemption #murder is pure judgement where redemption does not exist because you can't redeem yourself because they are already dead #their are no justifications for murder #the danger of justification as a means to fulfill that of our confirmation biases #rule utilitarianism would have saved the main character from justifying the killing but not act utilitarianism #the flaws of redistribution and equality instead of equal opportunity #if you can justify degrading someone's existence you can just as easily justify strengthening someone's existence #the flaw in moral relativist thinking #moral objectivism supports humanity as a whole as equally valuable and brings room for reason unlike moral relativism

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