Download Dostoevsky's Critique on Self-Interest and Moral Law: Study Questions - Prof. Gina Kovarsk and more Study notes Linguistics in PDF only on Docsity! INTL/FLET 391 STUDY QUESTIONS ON CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (3RD INSTALLMENT OF QUESTIONS) Here are a few more questions on Part II, plus questions on Part III, and Part IV, Chapters 1-4. 1) What clue to R's mental/moral condition is provided to readers by his violent dream of the landlady's being beaten (Part II, Chapter 2, pp. 115-116). 2) Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin expounds on certain "useful new ideas" and "useful new books" that, "in the name of science and economic truth" urge people to pursue their rational self-interest, for the ultimate good of the society at large of course :-)) (Part II, Chapter V, pp. 148-149). Luzhin explains that "science says: Love yourself before all, because everything in the world is based on self-interest. If you love only yourself, you will set your affairs up properly, and your caftan [=Russian word for cloak] will also remain in one piece. And economic truth adds that the more properly arranged personal affairs, and, so to speak, whole caftans there are in society, the firmer its foundations are and the better arranged its common cause. It follows that by acquiring solely and exclusively for myself, I am thereby precisely acquiring for everyone, as it were, and working so that my neighbor will have something more than a torn caftan, not from private, isolated generosities now, but as a result of universal prosperity." Dostoevsky here lampoons the theory of "enlightened self-interest" popularized in Russian by Chernyshevsky and other radical critics indebted to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. He further lampoons economic theories that those of us reading the novel today cannot but find similar to the "trickle-down" theory embraced by President Reagan and others in this country. Dostoevsky hints thereby that both the radical reform-minded theorists who embrace "rational egoism" and the theorists of capitalism who endorse acquisitiveness as the new morality in fact share a common lack of concern for grounding moral life in principles. Instead, utility becomes the watchword of the day, replacing the notion of a moral law. How does Dostoevsky's novel argue for the idea that human beings cannot live without a moral law? Who in this novel has internalized the idea of a moral law and seems to live by such a law most consistently? 3) Why does Raskolnikov challenge Luzhin's indignation at the rise of crime and specifically, at the pawnbroker's murder, by noting that the murder "went according to your theory"? Why does R. tell him: "Get to the consequences of what you've just been preaching, and it will turn out that one can go around putting a knife in people" (p. 151). 4) Why does Marmeladov's wife, Katerina Ivanovna, reject the priest's consolation (pp. 183-184). Why do you think the priest hangs his head and say nothing? (p. 184). What 1
