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“Moral Skepticism” names a diverse collection of views that deny or raise doubts about various roles of reason in morality. Different versions of moral skepticism deny or doubt moral knowledge, justified moral belief, moral truth, moral facts or properties, and reasons to be moral.

Crime and Punishment also portrays the dilemma of the Russian intellectual in the nineteenth-century. Dostoyevsky shows how Raskolnikov is corrupted by moral scepticism. The novel exposes the bankruptcy of intellectual or ideological arguments which lack moral concern or compassion.

Raskolnikov is a young ex-student of law living in extreme poverty in Saint Petersburg. He lives in a tiny garret which he rents, although due to a lack of funds has been avoiding payment for quite some time (he claims the room aggravates his depression).

Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, with an axe he stole from a janitor's woodshed, with the intention of using her money for good causes, based on a theory he had developed of the "great man". Raskolnikov believed that people were divided into the "ordinary" and the "extraordinary": the ordinary are the common rabble, the extraordinary (notably Napoleon or Muhammad) must not follow the moral codes that apply to ordinary people since they are meant to be great men.

One of the most striking facts about the recent Oslo massacre and bombing by an extremist 32-year-old Norwegian was the sheer amount of pre-meditation that went into the grisly act.

There is somehow an unsettling notion that all of these senseless deaths could have been prevented had all the facts been considered ahead of time.

If Dostoevsky were to have written his masterpiece Crime and Punishment in the 21st century, Fyodor Mikhailovich - himself accused of a crime and sent to a firing squad in Siberia - would surely have reversed the plot line of the story. The inspector Porfiry would surely have detected Raskolnikov hours - if not days - before his murder of the old pawnbroker in her St. Petersburg apartment. Instead of Raskolnikov slowly but surely submitting to the guilt and terror of having commited the crime after the fact, he would have surely posted his Nietzschean superman manifesto online -- and maybe even tweeted about it -- a few hours beforehand. Without a single violent act being committed, the police authorities would have initiated his arrest and put his eventual Siberian exile into motion. But at what cost to the moral fabric of society?