In order to shield ourselves from the true awfulness of horrific crimes, we distance ourselves from the perpetrators, putting them into a category separate and isolated from ourselves, the category of the “evil man.”
Great art resists this tendency, making it impossible for us to neatly categorize the perpetrator. We cannot help but sympathize with Roskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
Contemplating horrific crimes without our protective distance forces us to imagine ourselves in the place of the criminal, and to imagine what we would think and feel in his position. What we feel is often a remorse so intense that it cannot possibly be explained by the conventional notion of morality, the notion of following rules. One just doesn’t feel this much remorse for breaking rules. Works like Crime and Punishment teach us that a rule-based morality can never be an inadequate description of the moral universe.
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