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Robert Louis Stevenson on the Moral Bargain

In my recent article on William James, he taught us How to Know a Good Man, and part of his argument referenced a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson:

Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: “You think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind.”

I was intrigued by that quotation, and I decided to return to the source material to read the entire quotation in context.  Here’s what I found on page 20 of Stevenson’s fine book, Lay Morals:

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The Moral Code of Babies: Hardwiring Good and Evil

We know babies are born selfish and power-seeking — and we’ve met the Kindergarten Contract Killers.  Now we turn our frightened, Panopticonic, eye to the scientific notion that babies are embedded with a moral code:  They are born knowing the difference between good and evil.

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Invoking the Cross and the Gun

We rely on stereotypes a bit too much in the theatre to provide a crafted, but logistical, shorthand for wringing out the emotion from our audiences.  How easy is it to invoke the Angel and the Badge to provoke push-button reactions?  We must always be wary before invoking the Cross and the Gun.

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How to Evaluate Effectiveness

Few of us are taught how to provide effective feedback when we’re dealing with an artistic creation.  In my classes, I do not allow the use of “good” or “bad” in a critique because nobody has any real, shared, sense of what those value judgments mean in the scheme of the overall community.

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From Boy Box to Plastic Man

There is something viscerally pleasing when your fingers have to dig in to the corners of a candy box to lift the flaps to reveal a hidden taste from the void.  Unfortunately, the boxed candy of my childhood has been replaced with the convenience of — and the impossibility of tearing open — a plastic bag.

Continue reading → From Boy Box to Plastic Man