The killiing of Kitty Genovies
...hine to thee; his will is as full of struggling desires, of hard problems, of fateful decisions; his pains are as hateful, his joys as dear(Royce 40)." If Raskolnikov had thought of himself as the old lady he would not have killed the old lady. He would have realized Royce’s quote: "As the prudent man, seeing the reality of his future self, inevitably works for it; so the enlightened man, seeing the reality of all conscious life, realizing that it is no shadow, but fact, at once and inevitably desires, if only for that one moment of insight, to enter into the service of the whole of it...Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away and forget it as thou canst; but if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty(Royce 41,42)." Raskolnikov had never thought of the lady as his future self and did not realize his duty. Mill’s five principles of justice would tell Raskolnikov not to murder Alena because it infringes on her protection of freedom, infringes on her rights, and just desserts. Mill's first principle of justice says that: “just to respect, unjust to violate, the legal rights of anyone(Mill 170).” The murder of Alena infringes on her protection of freedom because the student in the story talks of killing and robbing her without a single twinge of conscience(Dostoyevsky 112). The principle of just desserts talks of not returning good for evil. This goes into not making the innocent suffer, and that punishment should be proportional. “Speaking in a general way, a person is understood to deserve good if he does right, and evil if he does wrong(Mill 170, 171).” Murdering Alena because she was a damned old woman does not justify killing her; she never did anything to receive that punishment form Raskolnikov. She helped many people by loaning money to them to purchase items, or bought items from people so they could have extra money. She kept to her end of the arrangements and expected people to keep up to theirs. Raskolnikov uses utility as a means for murdering Alena; however, Williams would have told Raskolnikov that this is not always the right way to go. One problem of utilitarianism is that the sense can be deceived. Raskolnikov's senses were deceived by what he had previously heard of Alena and by what the student was telling the officer. His data was not kept up to date by his own feelings and thoughts of her, but his data was distorted due to what he had previously heard of the old women. He did not go by what he had thought of her when he went to trade the ring with her. Raskolnikov also suffered from the physiological impact. At the end of the story, it says, “He did not sleep, but lay there in a stupor. If anybody had entered the room he would have sprung up at once with a cry(Dostoyevsky 128).” Raskolnikov ha...