If you will think for a moment of what you were before you were born, you will come to the rather puzzling conclusion that “you before you were born” are impossible to think about. Before you were conceived by your father and mother in the womb, you can’t remember anything. You don’t even remember darkness, not even a blank. Your background, your past history, right at its beginning, seems to be a state of complete annihilation of your ego, of your personality. And yet, oddly enough, here you are. After you die, you may presumably go again into a state which we can imagine only as complete annihilation, of complete nothingness. And, if so, you will—won’t you?—be in the same sort of condition as you were before you were born. You came out of that state, though. Should you be afraid to return to it?
Surely it’s obvious that our motives are determined by our conditioning, by our environment, our heredity, our social structure. They give us motives, and these motives of the past determine the way in which we act. Now, if my motive for doing good is for the sake of some sort of a reward—whether it’s in the ancient sense of going to heaven, or the modern sense of being a real person or a regular guy, or whether it’s a fear in the ancient sense of going to hell, or in the modern sense of being a cad—I act motivatedly. And therefore, the things which I do by way of moral action are not actually free.