“But some people do change their characters for the better,” Frigate said. “They do it consciously and with effort. Their will manages to overcome their conditioning and even their basic temperament.”
“I’ll admit that free will sometimes plays a part in some people,” Burton said. “However, only a few do use their free will effectively, and they often fail. Even so, most people are, in a sense, robots. The nonrobots, the lucky few, might be able to exercise their free will only because their genes allow them to. Thus, even free will depends upon genetic determinism.”
“I may as well tell you now, perhaps I should have told you sooner,” Frigate said, “but I’ve asked the Computer if the Ethicals had done any work on free will and determinism. Not in a philosophical but in a scientific sense. The Computer told me that it had an enormous amount of data because the first Ethicals, the people preceding Monat’s, had worked on that subject as had Monat’s people and their successors, the Earthchildren raised on the Gardenworld. I didn’t have time to review all the data or even a small part of it, and I probably wouldn’t have understood it if I did have time. I asked for a summary of the conclusions. The Computer said that the project was still going, but it could give me the results as of now.
“The Ethicals long ago charted all chromosomes, fixed their exact function, and analyzed the interrelationships of the genes. Charted their individual and interacting fields. Which is why, when they resurrected us, our malfunctioning genes had been replaced with healthy ones. We were raised in perfect physical, chemical and electrical condition. Any faults from then on were psychological. Of course, our psychic and social conditioning was not removed. If we were to get rid of these, it was strictly up to the individual. He or she had to use free will, if he or she had any or wished to use it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” Burton said.
“Don’t get angry. I just wanted you to express your opinion and then show you the truth.”
“You wanted me to go out on a limb so you could cut it off!”
“Why not?” Frigate said, smiling. “You’re such an overpowering talker and so opinionated, so dogmatic, so self-righteous, that… well, I thought that for once I could make you listen instead of trying to dominate the conversation.”
“If it helps you get rid of your resentment,” Burton said, also smiling. “There was a time when I would have been very angry at you. But, I, too, have changed.”
“Yes, but you’ll make me pay for this sometime.”
“No, I won’t,” Burton said. “I’ll use my free will to learn this lesson, I’ll keep and treasure it.”
“We’ll see. Anyway …”
“The conclusions!”
“I’ll try to put them into plain English. We are not complete robots, as Sam Clemens and that writer I told you about, Kurt Vonnegut, claimed we are. They said our behavior and thoughts were entirely determined by what had taken place in the past and by the chemicals in our bodies. Clemens’ theory was that everything that happened in the past, everything, determined f everything in the present. The speed with which and the angle at which the first atom at the beginning of the universe bumped into the second atom started a chain of events in a particular direction. What we were was the result of that primal collision. If the first atom had bumped into the second at a different velocity and angle, then we would be different. Vonnegut said nothing about that but claimed that we acted and thought the way we did because of what he called ‘bad chemicals.
“Both Clemcns and Vonnegut railed against evil, but they ignored the fact that their own philosophies removed blame for evil from evildoers. According to them, a person couldn’t help the way he or she acted. So, why should they write so much about evildoers and condemn them when the evildoer was not at all responsible? Could murderers be held responsible, could the rich help themselves if they exploited the poor, could the poor help it if they allowed themselves to be exploited, could the child-beater be blamed for his brutality, the Puritan for his in- j tolerance and narrow and rigid morality, the libertines for their sexual excesses, the judge for his corruption, the Ku Klux Klanner for his racial prejudice, the liberal for his blindness to the openly declared goals and obvious bloody methods of the communists, the fascist and capitalist for using evil means to achieve supposedly good goals, the conservative for his contempt for the common people and his excuses for exploiting them? Could Ivan the Terrible and Gilles de Rais and Stalin and Hitler and Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat and Genghis Khan and Simon Bolivar and the IRA terrorist who drops a bomb into a mailbox and blows legs off babies, could any of these be blamed? Not if you accept Clemens’ and Vonnegut’s basic philosophy. The murderer and child-abuser and rapist and racist are no more to blame for their actions than those who do good are to be praised. All behave the way they do because of genes or their chemical or psychosocial conditioning. So why did they bother to write about evils when they themselves could not blame the evildoers?