Fyodor Dostoevsky Conflicts

The novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky draws two impossible scenarios that together highlight the everyday reality of the potential conflicts between one's own happiness and the happiness of others. First imagine a world that is a utopia except that it is built upon the suffering of a single child. Then imagine a person who is willing to sacrifice the rest of the world in order to secure his own well-being. The question, one we face on a daily basis whether we contemplate it or not, is how we experience and value our own happiness in relation to the happiness of others.

Dostoevsky indicates, through the tone of these passages, that any person willing to sacrifice others for his own benefit must be in the wrong--be it everyone in the world sacrificing