Instead, Fernandez treats us to an overview of the 1866 novel
Crime and Punishmentby Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He focuses on the main character of the novel, a young man named Rodion Raskolnikov who believes himself superior to the bourgeois moral values of society and whose conviction of his own moral superiority leads him to murder an old hag of a woman whom he thought detestable. In the course of committing the crime, though, he also finds it necessary to murder the old woman's sister.
In any case, Raskolnikov's rationale seems not too unlike that of Luigi Mangione who murdered health care CEO Brian Thompson last week.
Here's Fernandez:
When Feodor Dostoevsky wrote the novel "Crime and Punishment" in 1866 to describe a world made possible by Russian nihilism, he was describing not only a literary character, Rodion Raskolnikov, but a whole future philosophical point of view. Raskolnikov, who regards himself as a well-educated and superior but powerless person, asks himself: “Why not kill a wretched and ‘useless’ old moneylender to alleviate human misery?”Dostoyevsky could've been writing about the events in the wake of Thompson's murder. The last paragraph included. One of the sickening aspects of this crime has been the reaction of some on the left who have actually applauded and laughed about Thompson's murder. These people's behavior is beneath contempt, but it's not surprising that a secular society produces such soulless individuals.
What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? … One death, and a hundred lives in exchange--it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm.
He convinces himself the answer is "nothing" prevents such an act. It surely cannot be God (who does not exist) nor conventional morality (which is humbug) that forbids killing the moneylender. The only problem is how to escape detection for the "crime." As Dostoevsky formulated the situation in another novel, "Brothers Karamazov," those of great will and intellect can do whatever they can get away with....
A world where you can enact your own morality is one in which superior people are all-powerful. Getting caught is all you have to worry about. One only has to fear the mindless wrath of the cops. But the superior men, the men like you, will understand that killing the moneylender was a cool thing and give you their tacit, coded approval.
Fernandez mentions Piers Morgan's interview of Taylor Lorenz, a former Washington Post and Daily Beast reporter, who was on the show to defend controversial social media posts that appeared to celebrate the killing of Thompson. Lorenz, now a podcaster for Vox Media, admitted on the panel that her reaction to the killing was “joy.”
It's astonishing that the New York Times had to bring in an ethicist to write a column declaring that killing Thompson, who left behind a wife and two small children, was wrong. Why do we need a philosopher to tell us that? The crux of his argument is that murder is wrong, therefore, if killing Thompson was murder then it was wrong.
Have we sunk so far into moral illiteracy that we need to be told this? Apparently the NYT thinks we have and they're probably right.
After all, as has been argued on this site for over twenty years, a society that has abandoned God no longer has any basis for distinguishing between right and wrong. Indeed, the ethicist might well be asked why anyone in our relativistic society should accept the first premise of his argument. Why is murder wrong? The ethicist simply assumes we all agree that it is, but as Fernandez notes, in another novel by Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov - the atheist Ivan Karamazov declares that if there is no God, everything is permitted. There's no objective moral wrong.
Ivan Karamazov was right. If there is no God then what Mangione did was legally wrong but not morally wrong. If there is no God there just is no moral wrong. There are just behaviors of which some people approve and others disapprove.
