1866: Dostoyevsky's Dark Arithmetic

The moral disaster that emerges from replacing ethical thought with the rigid simplicity of mathematics

“Hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives could be put on the right path, dozens of families rescued from poverty, from ruin, from collapse, from decay, from the venereal wards of the hospitals - all this with her money! Kill her, take her money, dedicate it to serving mankind, to the general welfare. Well - what do you think - isn’t this petty little crime effaced by thousands of good deeds? For one life, thousands of lives saved from ruin and collapse. One death and a hundred lives - there’s arithmetic for you!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment is the tale of a murderer. But this killer is not the villain of the piece, but its protagonist - maybe even its hero. Within this book Dostoyevsky (doss-tuh-YEF-skee), one of the great Russian novelists, crafts a psychological portrait like nothing else in nineteenth century literature. The crime is terrible, yet its aftermath brings the perpetrator even greater suffering. Its burden savages his conscience and drives him to lash out in anger and, paradoxically, to strive towards good actions almost without a thought. As the murderer wrestles with his paranoia and guilt, the reader is swept away by his anguish, all unfolding from a terrible philosophy that will haunt the twentieth century and beyond.

Raskolnikov (Ruh-SKOL-nih-kov) is a failed university student in St Petersberg, lost in delirium and wrestling with the question of whether he should kill a bad tempered old pawnbroker. By stealing her money he can complete his studies and therefore bring about supposedly better outcomes by “serving mankind” and contributing to “the general welfare”. By imagining future consequences of benefit to everyone, Raskolnikov not only finds a way to justify his appalling crime, he allows himself to pretend that what he is doing is for ‘the greater good’, and not merely for his own selfish advantage. What he discovers is that the reality bears no resemblance to the fantasy, and the immoral course of action he chooses leads him only deeper into damnation.

Dostoyevsky was well-versed in the philosophy of his time, and shrewdly recognised that ethical disaster lay down the path of any attempt to calculate the good. This is the dark arithmetic of what Elizabeth Anscombe was to name in 1958 ‘consequentialism’, a collection of philosophies that began in the late 18th century, and colonised moral philosophy soon afterwards. When Anscombe coined her term for it, she accused all British moral philosophy of having fallen under its spell. Nearly a century earlier, Dostoyevsky worked out these same concerns in his dazzling and disturbing novel. He, like Anscombe, could clearly see that once the human dimension is effaced from moral quandaries, all that is left is a dark arithmetic that can be deployed to justify whatever you wish to happen.

Near the end of the novel, Raskolnikov becomes delirious with fever, and dreams that a terrible and unprecedented plague has spread throughout Europe. It brings a madness upon those infected, and the victims become convinced of their intellectual power and unflinching correctness. No-one understands anybody else, because each is convinced that “the truth was in him alone”, and nobody can agree what is good or what is evil. Civilisation unravels. All but “the pure and the chosen” are destroyed by this madness, and even these bearers of the last hope of humanity “were not seen anywhere by anybody, and nobody heard their voices or their words.” This apocalyptic nightmare is Dostoyevsky’s vision of a future dominated by insane philosophy, and we only have to squint to see it playing out in the centuries that followed him.

Ethics concerns how we should act towards one another. Outcomes matter for determining how we might live together, but when human excellences (virtue) and shared rules (duty) are excised from our moral calculus, what is left ceases to offer a guide to the good, becoming instead a method of justifying wretched courses of action by claiming they will ultimately be beneficial. Yet no-one can calculate the good, and the moment the complexity of life is crammed into the stark confinement of mathematical precision, we become just like Raskolnikov - unleashing evil while brandishing a naïve faith in our own exceptional importance. Dostoyevsky’s novel warns us of the grave risks to our own souls whenever we trade morality for the numbing illusion of simplicity conjured by the bitter calculations of dark arithmetic.