Moral choice versus inherent nature

Moral choice versus inherent nature is a recurring argument between Thobela Mpayipheli and Zatopek van Heerden, and a test of whether Thobela can become someone different from the man his past has made. Van Heerden doubts that people can change their basic nature; Thobela fears that such a belief can excuse harmful conduct. Their disagreement becomes more than philosophy when Thobela finds himself ready to use violence again: the question is not only what impulses a person inherits, but whether those impulses determine what he does.

Two Accounts of Human Nature

Van Heerden describes people as programmed, shaped in sinew and bone, and increasingly formed by the processes that preserve the species and its gene pool. He argues that natural selection has shaped bodies, thoughts, and behaviour. In his view, the existence of good and evil, or at least the potential for both, belongs to human nature; a person cannot simply remake that nature. What can change, he maintains, is perspective: people can acknowledge what is within them and alter how they understand it.

His account also extends from individuals to groups. He uses the defensive posture of the Boers of Orania to illustrate his belief that racism arises from an inherent human urge to protect one’s genes and seek one’s own. For Thobela, this explanation is too empty and too easy. He does not deny that Van Heerden has identified something real, but he cannot accept it as the whole truth. If inherited impulses explain behaviour, he asks in effect, what remains of responsibility for acting on them?

The Test of Reversion

The dispute acquires personal force in the aftermath of Thobela’s confrontation with two soldiers. Lying awake on a mattress in the Karoo, he replays the scene and searches for the moment when the person he wanted to become gave way. The account records how swiftly battle readiness returned: his hands were prepared to kill, while his mind supplied knowledge of the soldiers’ vulnerable points. At the same time, he struggled against that readiness and felt deep disappointment in himself.

The imagined judgment of Miriam and Pakamile sharpens that disappointment. Thobela wonders how shocked they would be if they could see him. His desire to reinvent himself, therefore, is not an abstract wish to adopt a new identity; it is measured against the conduct he fears would betray the people he loves and the person he hopes to become. The incident does not establish that he has abandoned his aim of change. It exposes how difficult that aim is when his old capacities remain immediately available.

The words he had spoken during the confrontation return to him as a second, more troubling instance of reversion: he recognizes that he had displaced blame. He had needed a sinner outside himself, but now understands that responsibility lay within. The recognition does not prove that instinct can be erased. Instead, it changes the moral question: even if an impulse is deeply rooted, blaming someone else for acting on it is itself a choice. His repeated question about what a person can do carries both the pressure of Van Heerden’s argument and the possibility of refusing it.

Choice Without Excuse

In a separate conversation, Thobela rejects genetics as a final answer to human behaviour. He concedes that Van Heerden’s account contains some truth, yet insists it cannot account for everything people do and experience, including love and other capacities that do not fit neatly into a theory of biological preservation. The difference between them is not simply whether biology matters. It is whether a partial explanation can become a complete moral permission.

Thobela connects that danger to a history of excuses. He places evolution or genetics alongside Christianity, colonialism, Herrenvolk, communism, apartheid, and democracy as ideas that can be invoked to justify doing as one wishes. His point is not that these doctrines are identical, but that a powerful explanation can be turned into a rationale for avoiding responsibility. He declares himself tired both of his own excuses and of other people’s. His alternative is to take responsibility for what he does and recognize that both he and others have choices about how to live.

That commitment has immediate force in the scene: travelling at 160 kilometres per hour, Thobela feels elation about what he must do, not only concerning the thing in the bag but also the life that must follow. The evidence does not specify here what the object is or detail the later course of that life. It does establish the direction of his resolve: change must begin with himself, through responsible conduct rather than an excuse grounded in nature.

Change, Continuity, and Responsibility

The argument remains unresolved between the two men. When Thobela leaves the hospital, he is enthusiastic about reinventing himself, and Van Heerden takes his hands and encourages him, while sounding personally invested in the outcome. Yet Van Heerden’s encouragement does not signal that he has withdrawn his belief that inherent nature cannot be changed. Their earlier disagreement is left standing: they accept that they see the matter differently.

That unresolved contrast gives the concept its force. Thobela’s return of violent readiness lends weight to Van Heerden’s claim that old capacities persist; Thobela’s recognition of displaced blame, and his decision to live responsibly, resist the conclusion that persistence means inevitability. The text does not offer a simple victory for either man. It presents moral change as a struggle between what a person may be predisposed to do and the responsibility to choose how to act. For Thobela, becoming different does not require pretending that the past or his impulses have vanished. It requires refusing to let either serve as his excuse.