Moral Relativism in Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment :: Crime and Punishment Essays

Moral Relativism in Crime and penalisation At the close of Crime and Punishment, Raskolinkov is convicted of Murder and sentenced to seven years in Siberian prison. Yet even before the character was conceived, Fyodor Dostoevsky had already convicted Raskolinkov in his principal (Frank, Dostoevsky 101). Crime and Punishment is the final chapter in Dostoevskys journey toward understanding the racks that ram gloomy objet dart to sin, suffering, and grace. Using ideas developed in Notes from Underground and episodes of his life put down in Memoirs of the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky puts forth in Crime in Punishment a stern defense of natural law and an irrefutable mountain of evidence condemning Raskolnikovs actions (Bloom, Notes 25). Central to the prosecution of any crime, murder in particular, is the idea of motive. Not only must the prosecutor prove the actus rectus or censurable act, but also that the criminal possessed the mens rea or guilty mind (Schmall(a)eger 77). Th e pages of Crime and Punishment and the philosophies of Dostoevsky provide ample proof of both. The send-off is easy Dostoevsky forces the reader to watch firsthand as Raskolnikov took the axe all the way out, swung it with both hands, scarcely aware of himself, and almost without effort, almost automatically, brought the butt-end down on her head (Crime and Punishment 76). There is no doubt Raskolnikov caused the stopping point of Alena Ivanovna and, later, Lizaveta, but whether he possessed the mens rea is another matter entirely. By accentuation the depersonalization Raskolnikov experiences during the murder, the fact that he was scarcely aware of himself and acted almost mechanically the sympathetic reader might conclude that some unknown force of nature, and not the person Raskolnikov, is to blame for the death of the usurer and her sister (Nutall 160). Dostoevskys final result to this is contained not in Crime and Punishment, but rather in an prior work, Notes from Under ground. The entire story of the Underground Man was intended to parody the whole shebang of Nicolai G. Chernyshevsky, and thereby prove that mans actions are the result of his own free-will. The idea that man is alone responsible for his actions is central to proving that Raskolnikov is really to blame for his crime. For under the Chernyshevsky-embraced school of thought of scientific determinism, Raskolnikov cannot be held accountable for his actions. Rather, scientific determinism holds that whatever actions men lot are inevitable and unalterable because they are totally determined by the laws of nature.