Dostoevsky crime and punishment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Dostoevsky crime and punishment - Essay Example The wise saying goes—howsoever powerful may be the waves of an ocean their real nature is mere water! Once the crime is committed, a series of thought-currents related to the incidents begin to tax the brains of the perpetrator of the crime. They challenge his decision. In the introduction to the book it is observed, â€Å"†¦.it is precisely from such an attempt to grapple with the moral implications of the social and cultural realities of the day that Dostoevsky produced a work whose timeliness increases rather than diminishes with the years.†(Introduction vi†¦) All murders are not calculated. Most of them are done at the time when one is seized with spontaneous anger and loses the mental equilibrium. As a consequence, the murderer has a life-time to regret. Even after undergoing the legal punishment for the heinous act committed, the trace of that action remains within the portal of the mind. For every murder, it is possible to detail the negative and positive consequences. The consequences of murdering a known criminal, the doer of many dastardly acts, can not be compared to the murder a Professor by a student, who failed him in the paper. Utilitarianism intervenes in such cases and makes an attempt to differentiate between right and wrong by measuring a decision based on its calculated worth. Having murdered the landlady, Raskolnikov tries to reason out the positive benefits that her money would do to the society. But this is just wishful thinking. Murder is a murder and the one who does not have the capacity to give life, has no right t o stifle out any life. The one who understands the concept of utilitarianism in its true spirit, would find it difficult to accept and will resent the claim of Raskolnikov that his action of murdering the old woman can be accepted as morally right. A performer of the action can not be the judge of the merits/demerits of that action. One can’t be the lawyer and the judge for the