Abstract

What does it mean to understand a murderer? Might it be legitimate to refuse to even try? And is such a refusal compatible with enduring love? I examine Sonia's reaction to Raskolnikov's confession in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. On the one hand, not only does she not abandon him, she devotes the rest of her life to him; on the other hand, she rejects not only his attempted justifications, but even the possibility of justification itself. This is a special kind of moral experience that strikes at many assumptions of analytic moral philosophy and its reliance on thought experiments.

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