I see where Dostoevsky was coming from. God and religion helped him process the grief of losing his little boy. I cannot possibly speak about how I’d process grief like that.
I feel like I have a set of principles that boils down to “treat people how you would want to be treated”. But those principles don’t cover situations like the one Dostoevsky or his characters found themselves in.
This is a fundamentally gentler world than the one he lived in. Maybe in this world we can rely on the State preventing situations where “Everything is permitted”, as Ivan was worried about. Maybe people aren’t as desperate as the people were in Tsarist Russia. They’re not exposed to as much violence, and so don’t feel compelled to commit that themselves.
I don't think that the State can somehow solve or sidestep the morality problem. The laws of the state are the consequence of beliefs and culture of the citizens (or the elites), not the other way round. Everyone needs to be able tell good from evil in their daily lives, this process can be partly codified in laws but then neither the laws cover it all nor do they work if people don't believe in law.
In that sense very little had changed since Dostoyevsky's time. Or since Homer's time for that matter.
I see where you’re coming from - the state is just the will of the people.
From my perspective, the State’s capacity to enforce the will of the people has improved dramatically. People both then and now would have wanted no indentured servitude, no starvation, better healthcare, safety from violence and so on.
But governments can actually deliver on most of those to a reasonable degree now. In that sense “everything is permitted” is limited by what the state will allow you to get away with. Is murder permitted? Yeah, but you’re probably getting caught. Is littering permitted? Same. We don’t need a belief in God to prevent people from committing crimes against their fellows. Less violence, less starvation, fewer children dying.
People haven’t become better, but the world has become gentler. Whether a person believes “everything is permitted” or not, there’s a lot less permitted now than back then. A simple morality of “I’ll follow the laws of society”, which you have to do anyway, is probably good enough to make a stable society.
On some level, this makes the Brothers Karamazov feel a bit less timeless. It feels like those difficult questions Ivan was grappling with aren’t eternal, just a problem of the circumstances he was living in. If he lived in 2025 he’d probably just be an atheist and he wouldn’t lose his mind over it. It doesn’t matter to me thought, the book is still a masterpiece.
Thank you for discussing this with me. This book is a bit niche so I can’t remember the last time I got to discuss it with someone.
I feel like I have a set of principles that boils down to “treat people how you would want to be treated”. But those principles don’t cover situations like the one Dostoevsky or his characters found themselves in.
This is a fundamentally gentler world than the one he lived in. Maybe in this world we can rely on the State preventing situations where “Everything is permitted”, as Ivan was worried about. Maybe people aren’t as desperate as the people were in Tsarist Russia. They’re not exposed to as much violence, and so don’t feel compelled to commit that themselves.