Woody Allen's movie Crimes and Misdemeanors depicts Martin Landau's character, Judah Rosenthal, as literally getting away with murder. The woman he has been having an affair with is threatening to tell his wife about it, plus a few dubious old business dealings for good measure. He hires a hitman to kill her. Initially plagued with guilt, Rosenthal learns to ignore it. Allen repeats this general scenario in a later movie called Match Point. A wealthy man, Chris Wilton, gets his girlfriend pregnant and asks her to have an abortion. She refuses, so he murders her; this time up close and personal, not using a hitman. He later tells the ghost of his victim that it is necessary to suppress feelings of guilt to continue living and that if he were caught and punished it would be only fitting, "at least there would be some small sign of justice, some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning." The repetition of the word "small" suggests that his being caught would not amount to much anyway. The fact that he is not caught suggests there is no justice and no meaning if we are supposed to take his character as authoritative on this matter and depending on whether this reflects authorial intention.
Plato argued against the point of view of Allen's characters more than two millennia ago, contending in the Republic that a good person with a reputation for corruption is in a better position than a corrupt person with a good reputation. Gorgias addresses a similar topic, with Socrates arguing that being an all-powerful tyrant does not mean you have the power to be happy. If a tyrant's desires are expanded maximally, for the joy of satisfying them, the tyrant will not be master of himself, he will never be satisfied, and will find it impossible to live a well-regulated life, and to do his duty concerning his friends and the gods. He will, as a tyrant, be forced to pander to the public in order to stay in power, and to do what they want and not what he wants. At one point, Socrates says that he too can murder anyone he wants.
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