In the poem and essay "Compensation," Ralph Waldo Emerson makes a much more cogent and coherent assessment of how perspective seems to determine good and evil. His examples, however, are purely situational and do not adequately support his central thesis. For example, he compares a farmer jealous of power to the President examining what he has had to sacrifice to earn the White House (par. 11). While it is true that what one might see as a "good" here might be seen as an "evil" by the other, this has nothing to do with real morality. It is not what the President sacrificed of himself that determines the evil of this situation, but whether he sacrificed others for his own personal gain.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most well-known pieces of literature in the Western world. Robert Louis Stevenson shows the novels protagonist,...
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