Crime and Punishment

After he first pawns some items off to the old woman, Raskolnikov overhears a student and an officer speaking in a tavern about her. To Raskolnikov’s surprise, the student claims that he would murder the pawnbroker without remorse, making an argument that employs logos to grave ends: 

A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings that could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery! Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from destitution [...] Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime? For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption. One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic!

Cite this Quote

While Raskolnikov pretends to sleep in bed, disinterested, he listens carefully to Razumikhin and the doctor Zossimov as they discuss the arrest of two painters for the murder of the pawnbroker and Lizaveta. Though they have been arrested after being found in possession of the old woman’s earrings, which were taken from her apartment, Razumikhin uses logos to argue that they are not responsible for the murder: 

If they killed them [...] then allow me to ask you just one question: does such a state of mind—that is, squeals, laughter, a childish fight under the gateway—does it fit with axes, with blood, with criminal cunning, stealth, and robbery? They had only just killed them, only five or ten minutes earlier—that’s how it comes out, since the bodies are still warm—and suddenly, abandoning the bodies and the open apartment, and knowing that people have just gone up there, and abandoning the loot, they go rolling around in the street like little children, laughing, attracting everybody’s attention, and there are ten unanimous witnesses to it!”

Cite this Quote

In a scene that satirizes the individualistic, rationalist worldview that Dostoevsky critiques throughout Crime and Punishment, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin uses logos and fallacy while arguing in favor of his market-based worldview. Confronting the suspicious Raskolnikov and the hostile Razumikhin, Luzhin makes a case for pursuing self-interest: 

[Science] says: Love yourself before all, because everything in the world is based on self-interest [...] 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.

Cite this Quote