A Rhetorical Analysis Of Adventures In Good And Evil By Sharon Begley

The article “Adventures in Good and Evil,” written by Sharon Begley explores the rationale behind people’s altruism. She references a study that determined most people would shock an innocent person past the point of extreme pain when told. She then attempts to explore the bias of those who shocked compared to those who refused to shock. She finds: our will to forgive or to seek vengeance roots in our evolutionary history with similar behavior also found in other primates; however, these evolutionary roots fail to explain those who refused to shock. To explain these people, she explores how these people achieved their level of indiscriminate compassion, finding that what you see, your life experiences, and emotional stability shape your level of altruism. Her last point explains the benefit of law to compassion; for example: people who trust the law give more compassion than those who distrust the law.
The experiment on the monkeys that the author referenced surprised me. The experiment consisted of two monkeys, each in a different cage. In one

Shylock rhetorically asks, “If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge!” (3.1.68-70) This question and answer fits in perfectly that our compassion stems from our experiences. The Christians all exemplify revenge to Shylock, so when they now want to wrong him, he states he should give the revenge, not them. His ideas of revenge likely stem from his past experience of Christian revenge. Portia states, “It is twice blessed: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” (4.1.192-193) Her statement exemplifies the author’s idea that people who receive more mercy will also give more mercy in her reference to people’s social class affecting their altruism. While the mercy talked about in The Merchant of Venice may not exactly resemble the mercy given in the article, there still exists many links between the