This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, – often the surfeits of our own behaviour, – we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!…I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising.

– William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act 1, Scene 2. The amoral Edmund has nothing but scorn for people like his father who blame higher powers when things go wrong. He ridicules the foolishness of those like Gloucester who blame the sun, moon and stars for their fate. He believes that the motion of the heavenly bodies has nothing to do with determining human actions, including having a depraved nature. And he should know! He admits that his own evil is self-taught, indicating that he has a deep level of self-knowledge.