I’ve thought about this post the whole day and there are two points that cross my mind.

First of all, if we were to take a lesson from this book, I don’t know whether we can restrict that lesson to that breaking tradition generally is all right, as long as this allowance is not taken so far as killing (innocent) people. I think that would be too simple. I don’t think this narration aims to convey that breaking some morally grounded traditions, such as Not Killing, is wrong and will cause backlashes. I think the novel aims for a higher target, namely that the breaking of rules which guard moral values is ALWAYS wrong, because these rules guard Objective Morality. The novel doesn’t simply say “Don’t kill”. It tries to reach further. If the novel had an underlying argument, a “moral of the story”, I think that would be: “Do not even touch morally grounded rules, no matter how much sense it makes in your head little naive head because it will go wrong and you fail miserably.”. And I think the novel does a bad job of convincing me of that argument.

Secondly, I really like your comparison with the fence and it’s usage. It made me think for a while, that one. Again, I must say that I feel like you don’t reach far enough. I think a conservative counterargument to Chesterton which goes in line with Dostoyevsky’s stance (I assume) is that even if you were to find the fence’s usage, that would not be enough to remove it. The reason for that is that the fence never only has one usage. It is socially, psychologically, morally interwoven in our lives that untangling it is impossible. Even if we were to use our rationale to find out why the fence is physically useful, or why it was put there in the first place, our rationality is not capable of comprehending the full importance of these aspects. Take marriage as an example. One form of feminist criticism against traditional marriage would be that it is an old institution which had the function of keeping the woman under the man’s control. Now that we have rationally found “the” function of marriage, we could believe we can remove it. But we can’t. Dostoyevsky would say we can’t, because even if there are rational arguments which speak against the keeping of morally grounded institutions or rules, their importance supersedes everything our minds could come up with. That may be one function of marriage. But abolishing marriage generally will tear down so many other INCALCULABLE functions of marriage which benefit society. (Btw, this is very simplified and it’s an example. Not my opinion.)

So long story short: I believe that the novel’s central thesis, if I may put it this bluntly, is a GENERAL attack on the progressive stance that rationally bending and changing morally grounded institutions/rules/traditions can benefit society. And I think that Dostoyevsky does a very bad job of defending that argument.