I have to make a confession here, at the beginning of this post I fully intended to pull Zosima out of the extremes of ethical altruism and place him firmly in the midst of something with less reckless disregard for the self. I say “intended” because as I began reading and probing more deeply, I realized that Dostoevsky had already done it! Zosima wasn’t the monk I thought him to be. There are many facets to this revelation, but we can clearly see the most relevant one above. We don’t end with losing the self, we end with fulfilling it!

One might ask Zosima, how he knows we can be convinced. He gives us no reasons to attempt it. Sure he says it has been “tested,” but how, by whom, and with what (56)? We don’t know, and except for personal experience we don’t find out. Zosima is a Monk, not a philosopher like Galt and thus cannot be held to the same standard of critique. But we can ask for some sort of proof. What we get is an argument from experience, in the case of madam Hohlakav, and speculation, in the case of his description of Hell. In short, we need more evidence to build a proof, but as Zosima says, we can be convinced. Let’s suppose we have been. Let’s suppose we grant that active love toward another does bring fulfillment and joy. If we do, what would be a mutually agreed upon ethic between Galt and Zosima.

At the foundation of these two ethics is a completely different metaphysic. For Galt, there is Reality; what you see is what you get, cause and effect. And for Zosima there is God, purpose, and love. If the two of them met and discussed, this is where they would begin to disagree. They wouldn’t, at first, spend their time debating ideas of selflessness and selfishness, but of Reality and God.

The goal of this post has been to discover if there is any compatibility between these two ethics. But we have discovered that without a great change to the metaphysic of at least one of them, there is not.

Works Cited

Dobson and Taylor. Rhymes of Robyn Hood; Sutton Pub,1997. Print.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov; Trans. Richard Pevear. New York, Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

Nozick, Robert. Socratic Puzzles; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged; New York, New York: New American Library, 1957. Print.