Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson slips a moral landmine under Victorian self-certainty: you recoil at cannibalism because your culture has trained you to, not because disgust is a reliable compass. The sentence is engineered as a bait-and-switch. It opens with the easiest imaginable consensus - cannibalism, obviously vile - then pivots to a comparison that feels at once absurd and uncomfortably plausible. By the time he lands on “babies,” he’s turned the reader’s stomach using the same tool he’s interrogating: visceral reaction.

The barb is aimed at ethical parochialism, the way societies smuggle local habits into the category of “human nature.” Stevenson’s “Buddhists and vegetarians” aren’t random; they signal moral systems that many 19th-century Europeans treated as quaint, foreign, or soft. He weaponizes that outsider gaze to reverse the ethnographic lens: the civilized West becomes the strange tribe with its own taboo-blindness.

“Though not our own” is the dark punchline, exposing how quickly moral reasoning can collapse into technicalities. We don’t eat our children, we reassure ourselves; we eat other creatures’ young and call it dinner. The subtext isn’t that meat-eaters are literally cannibals, but that the architecture of justification is identical: distance the victim, normalize the practice, treat revulsion as proof.

In an era of empire, “civilizing missions,” and confident hierarchies of taste, Stevenson offers a compact piece of ethical sabotage. He doesn’t preach vegetarianism so much as he punctures the reader’s right to feel morally obvious.