Near the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov finds that he alone knows certain facts that would save his brother Dmitri from conviction for the murder of their own father. Unfortunately, to make these facts public would be extremely compromising for Ivan. They would not lay him open to criminal prosecution, but they would doubtless disgrace him and ruin his promising career as a moral authority. Since he also has a hearty hatred for Dmitri, he chooses to keep his knowledge to himself, practically ensuring Dmitri's conviction. Easy enough to do, one would think, since Ivan's moral teaching has regularly alternated indignation at life's injustices with the view that "everything is permitted." But in fact, Ivan cannot permit himself to betray his brother, any more than he can bring himself to save him; and the pressure of this dilemma causes him to lose his sanity.
Ivan ran aground on a value which he did not consent to, and which nevertheless he could not refuse. How can this hidden reef of necessity in values be explained? To most of the generations that preceded ours, the answer was perfectly obvious. Certain values have an authority above our wills, a right to be honored and obeyed regardless of whether a person chooses to do so or not. Only the day before yesterday in the history of philosophy, Henry Sidgwick put it in terms of objective truth and rational necessity: "what I judge ought to be must, unless I am in error, be similarly judged by all rational beings who judge truly of the matter. ''1 And yesterday, Nicolai Hartmann seemed not to have changed the ground: "The universality of value insight means only that whoever is capable of it, that is whoever mentally measures up to understanding it, must necessarily feel and morally judge thus and not otherwise. ''2 However, words like "rational," "error," and "true" are not to be found in Hartmann's discourse. When Marcus Singer returned to the position early this morning, reason was even further from his thoughts: "An earthquake is a disaster; so is a tornado, a ship-wreck; or a plane crash; and so would be a nuclear war; and this does not depend on anyone's theory of value, or anyone's interests or point of view, except in exceptional circumstances. ''3