Raskolnikov's justification for murder and what that may mean today

By the end of Part 3 of F Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), the protagonist and murderer, Raskolnikov, engages in a long discussion with Porfiry, a police official of some sort (not sure his precise position in the department), who is related to his best friend, Razumikhin. Porfiry notes that he has read Rask's recent magazine article on justified killing; this comes as a shock to R, who didn't even know his article had been accepted and published. In the article, R argues that there are two kinds of people, ordinary people and the exceptional, and the exceptional - geniuses and independent thinkers - have rights, he believes, that the plebes don't have - notably, the right to kill for their own good and for the greater good of society. We can see how this line of thinking led R to kill the pawnbroker and her daughter in order to get money to pay his bills and help his family. We can also see why this article, along w/ R's erratic behavior, have led Porfiry to suspect R of the killing; their discussion of R's ideas and his publication is filled w/ subtle tension and provocation. What are we to make of R's theories? Obviously, FD is not in sympathy, and in fact no reader then or today is likely to be drawn in by R's arguments. How can we not, today, see in his justification of the killing of the innocent not see a parallel w/ all kinds of terrorism and murder: taking thousands of innocent lives in service of a political cause, shootings at churches and temples and schools. Those, we almost universally condemn. But isn't in just another step to justified killings in war, and to capital punishment? The main difference is that those as sanctioned by the state as a whole, as an entity, whereas R talks of an act by an individual, whose rights to kill are entirely self-anointed. But perhaps the distinction between personal killings and station killings is not as profound as it at first appears.