On November 11th, 1821 in Moscow, Russia, one of the most renown Russian authors and philosophers was born: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky was raised in a family with good means (as their father was a recognized doctor by the Russian Government) and his family was also extremely religious (especially his father) which shaped his God-centered view of morality from a young age. However, given their situation (living in a poor district on the edge of Moscow in order to live near the Hospital, Dostoyevsky knew second hand what a life of poverty was like, for he was surrounded by it constantly. Although his family was all well-to-do, others around bore the hardships of the Russian Society of the time. As Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his siblings
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Crime and Punishment is about a poor student, Raskolnikov, who lives in a utilitarian government (the government of Russia at the time was developing the thought that any act, whether widely considered to be moral or immoral, must be judged on the basis of the greater good of the people in the society in which they are judged). He decides, because of this worldview shared by his peers, that it would be in the greater interest of everyone in the society if a despicable lady, the "Pawnbroker" who has nasty business tactics, was killed. He devises a plan, arrives at her apartment, and kills her and her sister (who was a witness). He may have had the logistics figured out (how to do it without getting caught and if he were caught, how he would plead to not get a sentence), but what he hadn 't factored in was his conscience. In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky makes a point that the regret of taking a life is eating away at Raskolnikov, and he eventually turns himself in. He ends up facing a sentence too, since he wound up killing the Pawnbroker 's sister, who was innocent simply because she was a witness. They claimed that if he truly believed in what he was doing, she wouldn 't have been killed. Overall, the book goes into great detail about the role of conscience, and how morality, which might seem to be subjective (especially when governments devise laws that abide by their notion of morality), your conscience may really be objective. Dostoyevsky claims that there is some objective truth to morality, and that it cannot ultimately bend to the will of those in power, setting it as their own subjective
Crime and Punishment is about a poor student, Raskolnikov, who lives in a utilitarian government (the government of Russia at the time was developing the thought that any act, whether widely considered to be moral or immoral, must be judged on the basis of the greater good of the people in the society in which they are judged). He decides, because of this worldview shared by his peers, that it would be in the greater interest of everyone in the society if a despicable lady, the "Pawnbroker" who has nasty business tactics, was killed. He devises a plan, arrives at her apartment, and kills her and her sister (who was a witness). He may have had the logistics figured out (how to do it without getting caught and if he were caught, how he would plead to not get a sentence), but what he hadn 't factored in was his conscience. In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky makes a point that the regret of taking a life is eating away at Raskolnikov, and he eventually turns himself in. He ends up facing a sentence too, since he wound up killing the Pawnbroker 's sister, who was innocent simply because she was a witness. They claimed that if he truly believed in what he was doing, she wouldn 't have been killed. Overall, the book goes into great detail about the role of conscience, and how morality, which might seem to be subjective (especially when governments devise laws that abide by their notion of morality), your conscience may really be objective. Dostoyevsky claims that there is some objective truth to morality, and that it cannot ultimately bend to the will of those in power, setting it as their own subjective