The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

by Michael Shermer

Overview

Bestselling author Michael Shermer's exploration of science and morality that demonstrates how the scientific way of thinking has made people, and society as a whole, more moral

From Galileo and Newton to Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., thinkers throughout history have consciously employed scientific techniques to better understand the non-physical world. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy.
In The Moral Arc, Shermer will explain how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism--scientific ways of thinking--have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805096934
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/20/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	558
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Michael Shermer is the author of Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, and eight other books on the evolution of human beliefs and behavior. He is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, the editor of Skeptic.com, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Southern California.

Read an Excerpt

The Moral Arc

How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

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By Michael Shermer

Henry Holt and Company

Copyright © 2015 Michael Shermer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9693-4

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CHAPTER 1

Toward a Science of Morality

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world.... For this is the lesson of science, that the concept is more profound than its laws.

—Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values, 1956

The metaphor of the bending moral arc symbolizes what may be the most important and least appreciated trend in human history—moral progress—and its primary cause is one of the most understated sources: scientific rationalism.

By progress I accept the Oxford English Dictionary's historical usage as "advancement to a further or higher stage; growth; development, usually to a better state or condition; improvement." By moral I mean "manner, character, proper behavior" (as from the Latin moralitas), in terms of intentions and actions that are right or wrong with regard to another moral agent. Morality involves how we think and act toward other moral agents in terms of whether our thoughts and actions are right or wrong with regard to their survival and flourishing. By survival I mean the instinct to live, and by flourishing I mean having adequate sustenance, safety, shelter, bonding, and social relations for physical and mental health. Any organism subject to natural selection—which includes all organisms on this planet and most likely on any other planet as well—will by necessity have this drive to survive and flourish, for if they didn't they would not live long enough to reproduce and would therefore no longer be subject to natural selection.

Because I include animals (and, perhaps one day, extraterrestrial life-forms) in our sphere of moral consideration, by moral agent I mean sentient beings. By sentient I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and therefore able to feel and to suffer. In addition to using criteria such as intelligence, language, tool use, reasoning power, and other cognitive skills, I am reaching deeper into our evolved brains toward more basic emotive capacities. Our moral consideration should be based not primarily on what sentient beings are thinking, but on what they are feeling. There is sound science behind this proposition. According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness—a statement issued in 2012 by an international group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists—there is a convergence of evidence to show the continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, and that sentience is the common characteristic across species.

The neural pathways of emotions, for example, are not confined to higher-level cortical structures in the brain, but are found in evolutionarily older subcortical regions. Artificially stimulating the same regions in human and nonhuman animals produces the same emotional reactions in both. Further, attentiveness, sleep, and decision making are found across the branches of the evolutionary tree of life, including mammals, birds, and even some invertebrates, such as octopodes. In assessing all the evidence for sentience, these scientists declared, "Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness." Whether nonhuman animals are "conscious" depends on how one defines consciousness, but for my purposes the more narrowly restricted emotional capacity to feel and suffer is what brings many nonhuman animals into our moral sphere.

Given these reasons and this evidence, the survival and flourishing of sentient beings is my starting point, and the fundamental principle of this system of morality. It is a system based on science and reason, and is grounded in principles that are themselves based on nature's laws and on human nature—principles that can be tested in both the laboratory and in the real world. Thus I take moral progress to mean the improvement in the survival and flourishing of sentient beings.

Here I am specifically referring to individual beings. It is the individual who is the primary moral agent—not the group, tribe, race, gender, state, nation, empire, society, or any other collective—because it is the individual who survives and flourishes, or who suffers and dies. It is individual sentient beings who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, and suffer—not populations, races, genders, groups, or nations. Historically, immoral abuses have been most rampant, and body counts have run the highest, when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group. It happens when people are judged by the color of their skin—or by their X/Y chromosomes, or by whom they prefer to sleep with, or by what accent they speak with, or by which political or religious group they belong to, or by any other distinguishing trait our species has identified to differentiate among members—instead of by the content of their individual character. The Rights Revolutions of the past three centuries have focused almost entirely on the freedom and autonomy of individuals, not collectives—on the rights of persons, not groups. Individuals vote, not races or genders. Individuals want to be treated equally, not races. Rights protect individuals, not groups; in fact, most rights (such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution) protect individuals from being discriminated against as members of a group, such as by race, creed, color, gender, and—soon—sexual orientation and gender preference.

The singular and separate organism is to biology and society what the atom is to physics—a fundamental unit of nature. (Here I am not including social insects such as worker drone bees, whose members are genetically nearly identical.) Thus the first principle of the survival and flourishing of sentient beings is grounded in the biological fact that the discrete organism is the principal target of natural selection and social evolution, not the group. We are a social species—we need and enjoy the presence of others in groupings such as families, friends, and assorted social consortia—but we are first and foremost individuals within social groups and therefore ought not to be subservient to the collective. Making sacrifices for one's social group is not the same as being sacrificed for the group.

This drive to survive is part of our essence, and therefore the freedom to pursue the fulfillment of that essence is a natural right, by which I mean it is universal and inalienable and thus not contingent only upon the laws and customs of a particular culture or government. Natural rights theory arose during the Enlightenment to counter the belief in the divine right of kings, and became the basis of the social contract that gave rise to democracy, a superior system for the protection of human rights. This is what the English philosopher John Locke had in mind in his 1690 Second Treatise of Government (written to rebut Sir Robert Filmer's 1680 Patriarcha, which defended the divine right of kings) when he wrote: "The state of nature has a law to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." The social contract entered into freely, Locke argued, is the best way to ensure our natural rights.

In rights language, the individual is imbued with personal autonomy. As a natural right, the personal autonomy of the individual gives us criteria by which we can judge actions as right or wrong: do they increase or decrease the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings? Morality is not arbitrary, relative, or completely culture-bound. Morality is universal. We are all born with a moral sense, with moral emotions that guide us in our interactions with other people, and that are influenced by local culture, customs, and upbringing. Nature endowed us with the capacity to feel guilt for the violation of promises and social obligations, for example, but nurture can tweak the guilt dial up or down. Thus morality is real, discoverable, "out there" in nature, and "in here" as part of our human nature. From these facts we can build a science of morality—a means of determining the best conditions to expand the moral sphere and increase moral progress through the tools of reason and science.

SCIENCE, REASON, AND THE MORAL ARC

Understanding the nature of things and the causes of effects is what science is designed to do, and ever since the Scientific Revolution there has been a systematic effort by thinkers in all fields to apply the methods of science—which include the philosophical tools of reason and critical thinking—to understanding ourselves and the world in which we live, including and especially the social, political, and economic worlds, with an end toward the betterment of humanity. This effort has produced a worldview known as Enlightenment Humanism (or secular humanism, or simply humanism), which, unlike most other worldviews, is more a method than an ideology; it is a means of solving problems more than it is a set of doctrinaire beliefs. Humanism, as its name implies, is—and ought to be—concerned with the survival and flourishing of humans, and its methods of reason and science are directed at figuring out how best to do that. Thus the goal of a science of morality is—and ought to be—to determine the conditions under which humans and, by extension, other sentient beings best prosper. To that end I need to define what I mean by science and reason.

Science

Science is a set of methods that describes and interprets observed or inferred phenomena, past or present, and is aimed at testing hypotheses and building theories. By set of methods I mean to emphasize that science is more of a procedure than it is a set of facts, and to describe and interpret them means that the facts do not just speak for themselves. Observed or inferred phenomena means that there are some things in nature that we can see, such as elephants and stars, but other things that we must infer, such as the evolution of elephants and stars. Past or present means that the tools of science can be used to understand not only phenomena occurring in the present, but in the past as well. (The historical sciences include cosmology, paleontology, geology, archaeology, and history, including and especially human history.) Testing hypotheses means that for something to be truly scientifically sound it must be testable, such that we can confirm it as probably true or disconfirm it as probably false. Building theories means that the aim of science is to explain the world by constructing comprehensive explanations from numerous tested hypotheses.

Defining the scientific method is not so easy. The process involves making observations and forming hypotheses from them, then making specific predictions based on those hypotheses, then making additional observations to test those predictions to confirm, disprove, or falsify the initial hypotheses. The process is a constant interaction of making observations, drawing conclusions, making predictions, and checking them against the evidence. But note that data-gathering observations are not made in a vacuum. The hypotheses shape what sort of observations a scientist will make, and these hypotheses are themselves shaped by education, culture, and the particular biases of the observer. Observation is key. The British astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington employed a legal metaphor to capture the sentiment: "For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme court of appeal." All facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge and change, therefore science is not a "thing" per se; rather it is a method of discovery that leads to provisional conclusions.

Reason

Reason is the cognitive capacity to establish and verify facts through the application of logic and rationality, and to make judgments and form beliefs based on those facts. Rationality is the application of reason to form beliefs based on facts and evidence, instead of guesswork, opinions, and feelings. That is to say, the rational thinker wants to know what is really true and not just what he or she would like to be true.

However, as several decades of research in cognitive psychology has shown, we are not the rationally calculating beings we'd like to think we are, but are instead very much driven by our passions, blinded by our biases, and (for better or worse) moved by our moral emotions. The confirmation bias, the hindsight bias, the self-justification bias, the sunk-cost bias, the status-quo bias, anchoring effects, and the fundamental attribution error are just a few of the many ways that our brains work to convince us that what we want to be true is true—regardless of the evidence—in a general process called "motivated reasoning." Nevertheless, the capacity for reason and rationality is within us as a feature of our brains that evolved to form patterns and make connections (it's called learning) in the service of survival and flourishing in the environment of our evolutionary ancestry. Reason is part of our cognitive makeup, and once it is in place it can be put to use in analyzing problems it did not originally evolve to consider. Pinker calls this an open-ended combinatorial reasoning system that "even if it evolved for mundane problems like preparing food and securing alliances, you can't keep it from entertaining propositions that are consequences of other propositions." This ability matters for morality because "if the members of species have the power to reason with one another, and enough opportunities to exercise that power, sooner or later they will stumble upon the mutual benefits of nonviolence and other forms of reciprocal consideration, and apply them more and more broadly."

Drawing inferences about the movement of animals from their tracks—as hunter-gatherer trackers do—has obvious survival advantages, and we have been able to apply those inferential skills to everything from driving to the store to flying rockets to the moon. Historian of science and professional animal tracker Louis Liebenberg has, in fact, argued that our ability to reason scientifically is a by-product of fundamental skills for tracking game animals that our ancestors developed. Liebenberg's analogy between tracking and the scientific method is revealing: "As new factual information is gathered in the process of tracking, hypotheses may have to be revised or substituted by better ones. A hypothetical reconstruction of the animal's behaviors may enable trackers to anticipate and predict the animal's movements. These predictions provide ongoing testing of hypotheses." Liebenberg distinguishes between systematic tracking ("the systematic gathering of information from signs, until it provides a detailed indication of what the animal was doing and where it was going") and speculative tracking ("the creation of a working hypothesis on the basis of initial interpretation of signs, knowledge of the animal's behavior and knowledge of the terrain" that leads to hypotheses that are tested and, if not confirmed, to new hypothetical reconstructions of the animal's whereabouts). Speculative tracking also involves another cognitive process called "theory of mind," or "mind reading," in which trackers put themselves into the mind of the animal they are pursuing and imagine what it might be thinking in order to predict its actions.

Based on archaeological and anthropological evidence Liebenberg estimates that humans have been hunting and using systematic tracking for at least two million years (as far back as Homo erectus), and speculative tracking for at least one hundred thousand years. Whenever these cognitive capacities arose, once the neural architecture is in place to deduce, say, that a lion slept here last night, a person can substitute lion with any other animal or object and can swap "here" with "there" and "last night" with "tomorrow night." The objects and time elements of the reasoning process are interchangeable. In a modern example, once you've mastered the multiplication tables and you know that 7 × 5 = 35, you can infer that 5 × 7 is also 35 because 5 and 7 are interchangeable in the equation. This interchangeability is a byproduct of neural systems that evolved for basic reasoning abilities such as tracking animals for food.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer. Copyright © 2015 Michael Shermer. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue: Bending the Moral Arc 1

Part I: The Moral Arc Explained
1. Toward a Science of Morality 11
2. The Morality of War, Terror, and Deterrence 55
3. Why Science and Reason Are the Drivers of Moral Progress 103
4. Why Religion Is Not the Source of Moral Progress 149

Part II: The Moral Arc Applied
5. Slavery and a Moral Science of Freedom 189
6. A Moral Science of Women's Rights 213
7. A Moral Science of Gay Rights 240
8. A Moral Science of Animal Rights 259

Part III: The Moral Arc Amended
?9. Moral Regress and Pathways to Evil 297
10. Moral Freedom and Responsibility 333
11. Moral Justice: Retribution and Restoration 355
12. Protopia: The Future of Moral Progress 397

Notes 441
Bibliography 497?
Acknowledgments 527?
Index 531

Editorial Reviews

To Michael Shermer, science is not a thing. It's a verb: "It's a way of thinking about things. It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena." And according to him, its thoughtful inquiries and the empirical thinking that it engenders provide optimal pointers to true morality, freedom, and truth. A fascinating look at how empiricism, rationality, and skepticism have benefits far beyond scientific research.

12/01/2014
Humanity is creating an increasingly just and equitable world, according to Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things). He argues that this is occurring in large part because our understanding of the natural world has come to depend on reason and science. Shermer ranges broadly—across such fields as economics, philosophy, politics, and biology—to provide evidence for his thesis. An engaging writer, he offers persuasive data to demonstrate the moral progress that has been made with women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, and animal rights. He also documents the abolition of slavery, the reduction in violence (particularly murder rates), and the decrease in war. Shermer is less successful, however, in demonstrating that a scientific worldview should be seen as the cause for all this, and his polemical outbursts detract from the seriousness of his message. More frustrating are his blinkered views on such matters as income inequality and his omission of rampant ecosystem destruction and an increasing extinction rate in his moral calculus. Essentially an apologia for Shermer’s libertarian politics, there is still ample material here that warrants attention. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

This is one of the best recent books that I have read, and it's the one that I expect to re-read most often. It's an honest, clear account of morality and justice that makes those theoretical concepts come alive as ubiquitous real-life choices. In the process of reading it, you'll learn about wrenching moral dilemmas such as paying ransoms to Somali pirates, maintaining nuclear weapons as deterrents, good people becoming Nazis, and the immorality of the Bible and of the Ten Commandments.” —Jared Diamond, Pulitzer-prize-winning author of the best-selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, and The World until Yesterday

“I suspect that people will be arguing with Michael Shermer's premise before they read a page: ‘The moral arc is bending toward truth, justice, and freedom? Is he hallucinating? Just look at...' In these cynical times, where right and left foresee disaster and despair (albeit for different reasons), Shermer's monumental opus, spanning centuries, nations, and cultures, is bound to provoke debate and open minds. Exactly what an important work of skepticism, science, and reason should do.” —Carol Tavris, Ph.D., social psychologist and author of The Mismeasure of Woman and coauthor of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

“A thrilling and fascinating book, which could change your view of human history and human destiny. If you wanted a sequel to The Better Angels of Our Nature, one which explored all of our spheres of moral progress, not just the decline of violence, this is it.” —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of The Blank Slate and The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“It is difficult to imagine how the arc of morality can bend toward justice without rational examination of the consequences of one's actions. As Michael Shermer passionately describes in this ambitious, thoroughly researched, yet remarkably accessible work of scholarship, the fabric of modern morality derives not from religion, but in large part from secular notions of rational empiricism. This message needs to be shared more broadly for the good our society, and hopefully this book will do just that.” —Lawrence M. Krauss, Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and bestselling author of A Universe from Nothing and The Physics of Star Trek

“Michael Shermer makes the astonishing claim that science, precisely because of its rational, dispassionate, and enlightened attitude towards revealing the truth, has helped to lay the moral groundwork for modern society, pointing the way to a more just and moral world. Instead of being a passive observer to the dance of history and the evolution of ethics, Shermer makes the outrageous claim that science has in fact been one of the principle actors. Bravo, I say.” —Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, author of the best seller The Future of the Mind, and Physics of the Future

“Michael Shermer argues that science, reason, and critical thinking come first; these are the ideas that produce stable, peaceful democracies. He documents and assesses society's successes and failures through the troubled history of humankind—and he's relentless. He connects the arc of the rise of reason and science with a country's economic success, and the overall worldwide decline in violence and suppression of our fellow humans, especially women. If you are religious, have a look. Shermer takes your faith to task and celebrates science as a path to the better moral future that citizens everywhere long for.” —Bill Nye, The Science Guy, CEO, The Planetary Society

“The Moral Arc displays the impressive depth of Michael Shermer's scholarship, wisdom and empathetic humanity, and it climaxes in a visionary flight of futuristic optimism. A memorable book, a book to recommend and discuss late into the night.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion

From the Publisher

11/01/2014
Martin Luther King Jr. said that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." Shermer (economics, Claremont Graduate Univ.; Why People Believe Weird Things; The Believing Brain; founding publisher, Skeptic magazine; editor, skeptic.com; columnist, Scientific American) discusses why science and reason are the forces behind that drive toward justice. Though religion is often considered the basis of ethics, Shermer convincingly disputes that idea, noting that organized religious communities have been relatively slow to grant civil rights and that the Bible endorses practices condemned today, such as slavery. Shermer raises uncomfortable questions about humanity's relationship with animals, concluding that the latter feel suffering and must be included in the moral arc toward justice, though it may take much time. Other difficult but important topics the author's narrative explores are the Holocaust, psychopathic behavior, and restorative vs. retributive criminal justice. His prediction that women's rights will continue to expand unabated may seem off-putting and glib in light of current struggles. VERDICT Shermer's thought-provoking, multidisciplinary book will engage anyone who wishes to understand rationalism as a force for morality. This volume discusses many dark pages in human history; the sensitive reader may prefer Patricia S. Churchland's Braintrust, which covers the neurobiological aspects of morality.—Laurie Neuerburg, Victoria Coll.-Univ. of Houston Lib.

Library Journal

2014-10-22
Skeptic magazine founding publisher Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, 2011, etc.) reviews the last 400 years of human history to substantiate his claim that it is science and reason, not religion, that reveal a path to "the betterment of humanity in a civilized state.""The economic problems of today are real but tractable…even in the most impoverished places on earth such as Africa," writes the author. Brushing aside concerns about the environment, the accelerated extinction of species, looming resource shortage and political instability, Shermer predicts that by the end of the century, the levels of wealth and prosperity enjoyed in the developed world will be universal. The author believes that developments in our scientific understanding have created the conditions for an upward trend in morality, which he sees as synonymous with the advance of liberal democracies and a global economy. The author rejects the notion that religion has been the "driver of moral progress," citing superstitious practices such as the burning of witches that were sanctioned until the 18th century. Shermer agrees with the defense of science by avowed atheist Richard Dawkins but also recognizes the positive role of religious leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama in their fight for human betterment. Taking slavery as an example, he attributes its "legal abolition and universal denunciation" to "rational arguments and scientific refutations of slavery," which laid the groundwork for the recognition of the need to protect the rights of blacks, minorities, women, homosexuals and other persecuted groups. Shermer believes that reliance on the scientific method, multiculturalism, the free market and liberal democracy create the conditions necessary for continued progress. A well-documented but perhaps overly optimistic view of a future likely to be challenged by both environmentalists and religious fundamentalists.

Kirkus Reviews