Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: The Relief of Obedience and the Limits of Responsibility

The literature on obedience treats as a single block, under headings such as escape from freedom, two effects that this article separates. Decisional relief is the exemption from the work of deliberating; imputational relief is the exemption from understanding oneself as the normative source of the act. It is argued that these are distinct states, and the proof is the difference of their defeaters, that is, of the operations capable of dissolving them: the first dissolves when the decision is returned to the agent, even if he remains convinced that the responsibility belongs to someone else; the second dissolves when he is shown that the transfer did not occur, without any part of the deliberation being returned to him. It follows from the distinction that only the second contains an assessable normative claim, which transfers it from moral psychology to moral philosophy. Once that claim is assessed, three results are established. First, it is false where the incapacity at stake is moral, in Edwards’s sense, and true only to the extent of the epistemic conditions that the agent could not have altered. Second, there is a structurally non-transferable residue, which lies not in the decision but in the judgement by which the authority was recognized, since delegating it would require exercising it; it is argued, on independent grounds and in dialogue with the device of tracing, that obligation derives from the position occupied and not from present capacity. Third, once liability to consequences, transferable by convention, is distinguished from blameworthiness and from answerability, it turns out that responsibility is not a conserved quantity: a third party’s willingness to answer for the act adds what he has to answer for without subtracting what the agent has. The episode of the Grand Inquisitor, in Book V of The Brothers Karamazov, is used as an exemplary case, since in it the offer of transfer is explicit and accompanied by a declared justification.

DIETRICH, Pablo; DIETRICH, Maurília Gabriela da Silva. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: The Relief of Obedience and the Limits of Responsibility. Zenodo, tradução dos autores, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23821032.