Blog Post 2

In Neil Labute's play The Shape of Things, characters commit many immoral actions.  While it is easy to jump to blaming Eve as the most immoral character in the play we have to further examine the actions of all the characters.  While Eve played with Adam's appearance as if he was a literal piece of art, Adam made very immoral decisions to get himself to where he was at the end of the play, and who he ended up being (by appearance) certainly wasn't representative of the person he actually is, or was at the beginning of the play.

First off, the argument for Eve's immorality is obvious.  She played with Adam's emotions and feelings and coerced him into doing things that added up towards making him a totally different person, and a fake one at that.  She unsparingly used sex to motivate Adam into completing the tasks which she was ever so carefully suggesting and implanting into his brain.  She played with him and crafted him for a year and a half, and maintained no true emotional connection with Adam.  In fact, she constantly lied to him and ended up humiliating him in public during her final art thesis, where she attempted to succeed in a class at Adam's expense.  Evelyn violated the ethic of caring because throughout the entirety of her "art project", she didn't care one bit about Adam or his feelings, and at the end of the play she couldn't have cared less about his reputation.  However it is important to remember that she never outright told Adam to do anything, and every decision was his to make.  With that being said, we can now examine Adam's moral shortcomings

Adam's moral shortcoming is plain and simple, and it sticks out like a sore thumb.  Adam's behavior in the play violates the ethic of justice because he is violating a critical ethical principle of having a sound concept of self.  Adam is not loyal to himself and he is not his own person because he lets others mold his actions.  He allows Evelyn to suggest increasingly drastic alterations to who he is as a whole, and he is more than willing to transform and mold himself at every stop along the way.  By letting others make his decisions for him, Adam robs himself of personhood.  His unfaltering willingness to change, bend and stretch himself in any which way for Evelyn are telling of his critical lack of a sound self-concept.  He can't perceive himself as having preferences or having any sort of taste or quality in life because he lets others define his goals, priorities and appearance.

That being said, it is of my opinion that Adam lacks more in terms of morality than Eve.  Eve manipulated him and lied to him, yes, but none of this would've had any impact or taken root had Adam not allowed himself to be made subject to someone else's desires.  If Adam was able to be happy with who he was and make decisions for himself, Evelyn would not have had the opportunity or the ability to mold him and change him in the ways he did.  I view Adam's moral shortcoming as a prerequisite and an enabler of Eve's immoral actions