Robert Sawyer - Wonder

“But, um, Helen’s dad… before the war ended, he kept slaves,” Caitlin said.

Her mother nodded. “I know.”

“But he seemed like a good man. How could he have done that?”

“Well, not to forgive him, but we have to judge people by the morals of their time, and morality improves as time goes by.”

“I know it changes,” Caitlin said, “and for sure freeing slaves was an improvement. But you’re saying it generally improves?”

“Oh, yes. There’s a definite moral arrow through time—and, as a matter of fact, it’s all due to game theory.”

They were passing a giant truck. “How so?” asked Caitlin.

“Well, remember what Webmind said at the UN. There are zero-sum games and nonzero-sum games, right? Tennis is zero-sum: for every winner there’s a loser. But a cooperative venture can be nonzero-sum: if we hire a contractor to finish the basement”—Caitlin knew this was a sore point between her parents—“and we’re happy with the work that’s done, well, everybody wins: we get a finished basement, and the contractor gets paid fairly for his work.”

“Okay,” Caitlin said.

“Clearly, cooperation is all for the good. But members of primitive societies rarely cooperated with anyone outside their close personal circles; they saw anyone else as not fully human—or, to put it more technically, as not worthy of moral consideration. When the Old Testament said, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ it only meant Israelites should get along with other Israelites; it didn’t mean you should accord moral consideration to non-Israelites—that’d be crazy talk. But as we move forward through time, we see a widening of who deserves moral consideration until today most people in most places agree that all humans, regardless of geographic location, ethnicity, religion, or what have you, deserve it. Like I said, a definite moral arrow to time.”

“But what’s that got to do with nonzero-sumness?” asked Caitlin. They were exiting Milton now.

“Oh, sorry: that’s the point. The trend toward nonzero-sumness affects our morality toward others. When we think of somebody as having rights of their own, we say we’re giving them moral consideration, and, well, it turns out we mostly only consider worthy of moral consideration those with whom we can envision nonzero-sum interactions. And, over time, we’ve come to consider such interactions possible with just about everyone on Earth. In fact…”

“Yes?”

A car sped past them. “Well, remember back when I was teaching at the University of Texas—filling in for that lecturer who was on maternity leave?”

Her mother had spent most of Caitlin’s childhood volunteering at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, but Caitlin vaguely recalled the period she was alluding to. “Uh-huh.”

“Well,” her mother went on, “I got in trouble back then, because I used a B.C. strip during one of my lectures.”

“A what?”

“Sorry. You know newspapers run comic strips, right? Well, there used to be a popular one called B.C., about cavemen; it’s still being done, actually, but the guy who created it, Johnny Hart, is dead. Anyway, he used to do humorous dictionary definitions as part of the strip: ‘Wiley’s Dictionary,’ he called it. And one year on December 6, he defined ‘infamy’ as ‘a word seldom used after Toyota sales topped two million.’ ”

“I don’t get it,” said Caitlin.

“December 6, 1941, was the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt called it, ‘A date which will live in infamy.’ The San Antonio Express-News refused to run that particular strip, saying it was offensive. But I thought it really showed the point I’m making: we’d shifted, in just sixty-odd years, from a totally zero-sum relationship with Japan to a nonzero-sum one, and that had happened because of economic interdependence. The more ties you have with someone, the less you are able to view them with hate.”

“But that’s not morality; that’s just business,” Caitlin said.

“No, it is morality,” her mother replied. “It’s the groundwork for reciprocal altruism, and it’s the basis for granting rights—and we’re improving in that area all the time. It wasn’t just Colonel Keller who had slaves, after all. Thomas Jefferson did, too. When the Founding Fathers said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ they still hadn’t expanded that community of moral consideration to include blacks. But you saw that display at the UN about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was written later, in, um…”

“ ‘Nineteen forty-eight,’ according to Webmind,” Caitlin said, reading the text he’d just sent to her eye.

“Right. And they explicitly removed any ambiguity about who was a person, saying, um, ah—”

More text appeared in Caitlin’s eye. “Webmind says it says, ‘Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion.’ ”

“Exactly! And, despite the Founding Fathers having seen nothing wrong with it, the UN went on to specifically ban slavery.”

“ ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.’ ”

“Right!” She changed lanes. “That’s not mere economics, Caitlin; that’s moral progress, and despite occasional backsliding, there’s no doubt that our morality hasn’t just changed over time, it’s measurably improved. We treat more people with dignity and as equals than ever before in human history; the progress has been measurable even on time scales as small as decades.

“Think about all that brouhaha in the news the last couple of days about the Little Rock Nine. Setting aside what that awful woman said, to most people segregation is inconceivable today—and yet, more than a hundred million Americans alive today were alive then, too.”

They were passing Cambridge now. Her mother went on. “I’ve got some great books on this you can borrow, once your visual reading gets a little better. Robert Wright writes a lot about this; he’s well worth reading. He doesn’t talk about the World Wide Web, but the parallels are obvious: the more interconnections there are between people, the more moral we are in our treatment of people.”

“There are—or at least, there were —a lot of con artists online,” Caitlin said.

“Yes, true. But they’re anonymous —they don’t really have connections. And, well, that’s the good that’s coming out of Webmind’s presence. You might not know who someone is under an online name, I might not know who the anonymous reviewer on Amazon.com is—but Webmind knows. Even if you don’t interact with Webmind—even if you choose not to respond to his messages or emails—the mere knowledge that someone knows who you are, that someone is watching you, is bound to have a positive effect on the way most people act. It’s hard to be antisocial when you are part of a social network, even if that network is only yourself and the biggest brain on the planet.”

“Okay,” said Caitlin, “but I—oh, hang on. Webmind has a question for you.”

The song changed on the radio, Blondie giving way to Fleetwood Mac. “Yes?”

“He says, ‘So are you saying that network complexity not only gives rise to intelligence, but to morality? That the same force—complexity—that produces consciousness also naturally generates morality, and that as interdependence increases, both intelligence and morality will increase?’ ”