Crime And Punishment Utilitarianism

In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky invites the reader to explore the results of fully embracing utilitarianism as a moral philosophy. The novel does this through Rodya, a character who adopts utilitarianism and acts in unsettling ways. I will argue Dostoevsky does not challenge the core premises of utilitarianism, but instead asks the reader to think about the consequences of this ideology. Rodya, who is the incarnate of this worldview, is both secular as well as utilitarian to the extreme. Rodya’s absolutist commitment to consequentialism is evidenced when he is persuaded, at least in part, to kill Alyona by the conversation he overhears. In this conversation, one of the speakers gives a passionate argument for Alyona’s murder:

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Such a reader might also view Rodya’s ethics as missing a key feature of the reader’s own ethics that would prohibit murdering Alyona but would leave the secular and consequentialist nature of morality intact. For example, rule utilitarians could make a strong case that the greater good is best served by prohibiting vigalantee murders, even if they could sometimes do more good than harm. Such a reader may even accuse Dostoevsky of straw-manning utilitarians as all supporting a type of act utilitarianism that is particularly easy to argue against. However, to do so would be to ignore context, as the distinction between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism was largely not fleshed out at the time the novel was written. A utilitarian reader may also argue that the novel fails to advance any real philosophical argument against utilitarianism. I would agree with them. Crime and Punishment does not attack any supposed contradictions in utilitarian thought or directly challenge utilitarianism’s premises. Instead, Dostoevsky merely presents the consequences of utilitarian thinking in Rodya and asks the reader to consider whether such actions are really the pinnacle of morality. This appeal to moral intuition is not likely to convince someone who has already thought deeply about these issues and come to agree with the

For example, Peter Singer, one of the contemporary world’s leading utilitarians, believes “parents should be given the choice to have their disabled babies killed after they are born.” (ABC News Australia) While such a position will strike most people as terrifyingly immoral, this emotional response does not (in absence of further argument such as, say, a defense of natural law theory) constitute an actual argument against Singer’s (or Rodya’s)