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

Michael Shermer “The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom,”  Holt & Co., 2015, 439 pp.

Author Shermer claims and demonstrates with data that we are living in the most moral period of our species’ history.  He points to the many factors that have come together over the centuries since the Enlightenment to bend the arc toward truth, justice, and freedom; among those factors is science and reason.  Yet, the author also demonstrates that even babies have a moral sense.

The Scientific Revolution led by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton was so world-changing that thinkers in other fields consciously aimed at revolutionizing the social, political, and economic worlds by employing the same methods used in science. From the Scientific Revolution through the Enlightenment, reason, and science slowly but systematically replaced superstition, dogmatism, and religious authority.  This created the modern secular world of liberal democracies, civil rights and civil liberties, equal justice under the law, open political and economic borders, and the expansion of the moral sphere to include more people—and now even animals—as worthy of moral consideration.

For hundreds of years, people flocked to public hangings as a form of entertainment, many bringing their families, reveling in the carnival atmosphere. Today most people are sickened at the idea of merriment at an execution. (Many are disturbed that executions take place at all.) We recoil from other once-common practices, too: slavery, the mistreatment of children, animal cruelty. Such shifts in attitude or belief surely constitute a form of moral progress and suggest, for once, that civilization is advancing and not receding.

The author defines moral progress as an “increase in the survival and flourishing of sentient beings,” which he illustrates with graphs and charts that reveal, among other things, a decline in war-related deaths, the expansion of the food supply, the reduction in major epidemics, the growth of world GDP and the spread of democracy.

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  Improvements in the domain of morality are evident in many areas of life: governance (the rise of liberal democracies and the decline of theocracies and autocracies); economics (broader property rights and the freedom to trade goods and services with others without oppressive restrictions); rights (to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness); prosperity (the explosion of wealth and increasing affluence for more people in more places; and the decline of poverty worldwide in which a smaller percentage of the world’s people are impoverished than at any time in history); health and longevity (more people in more places more of the time live longer, healthier lives than at any time in the past); war (a smaller percentage of people die as a result of violent conflict today than at any time since our species began); slavery (outlawed everywhere in the world and practiced in only a few places in the form of sexual slavery and slave labor that are now being targeted for total abolition); homicide (rates have fallen precipitously from over 100 murders per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages to less than one per 100,000 today in the industrial West, and the chances of an individual dying violently is the lowest it has ever been in history); rape and sexual assault (trending downward and it is outlawed by all Western states and increasingly prosecuted); judicial restraint (torture and the death penalty have been almost universally outlawed by states, and where it is still legal is less frequently practiced); judicial equality (citizens of nations are treated more equally under the law than at any time in the past); and civility (people are kinder, more civilized, and less violent to one another than ever before).

[Note: also see “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” C2011, by Steven Pinker which I reviewed in 2011]

Pg. 16:  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 research 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.”

Pg. 21:  In the 1980s the social scientist James Flynn discovered that IQ scores have been going up, on average, 3 points every decade for the past century.  This translates into an improvement of two standard deviations of 15 points each from an average IQ of 100 to a score of 130. (IQ test scores remain the same, however, as they are regularly “normed” upward to account for the Flynn Effect.)  The increases in IQ scores have been almost exclusively in the two subtests that most require abstract reasoning: Similarities and Matrices.  The subtests of Information, Arithmetic, and Vocabulary have hardly budged at all.  The improvement in abstract reasoning has translated into a specific improvement in abstract moral reasoning, particularly about other people who are not our immediate kith and kin.  Evolution endowed us with a natural tendency to be kind to our genetic relations but to be xenophobic, suspicious, and even aggressive toward people in other tribes.  As our brains become better equipped to reason abstractly in such tasks as lumping dogs and rabbits together into the category of “mammal,” so too have we improved in our capacity to lump blacks and whites, men and women, straights and gays into the same category of “human.”  Seeing similarities instead of differences. (P. 26)

Pg. 36: Gun Violence.  A 1998 study found that every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.  In other words, a gun is twenty-two times more likely to be used in a criminal assault, an accidental death or injury, a suicide attempt or a homicide than it is for self-defense.  Yet, homicide rates have plummeted over the millennia, from almost 1,000 per 100,000 people per year in prehistoric times, to about 100 per 100,000 people per annum in Western societies through the Middle Ages, to about 10 per 100,000 each year by the time of the Enlightenment, to less than 1 per 100,000 today in Europe (and a little more than 5 per 100,000 in the United States).

Pg. 68:  Only 9 of 194 world countries have nuclear weapons.

Pg. 101: Ned Lebow in his 2010 book Why Nations Fight delineates four motives behind wars of the past 350 years, all of which are in decline: fear, interest, status/standing, and revenge.  None of these motives is any longer effectively served by going to war. 

Pg. 117:  The shift to application of reason and science to all fields, including governance and the economy was the result of two intellectual revolutions: (1) the Scientific Revolution, dated roughly from the publication of Copernicus’s heliocentric theory in 1543 to the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687; and (2) the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, dated approximately 1687 to 1795 (Newton to the French Revolution).

Pg. 134:  Whatever your view of human nature—blank-slate, genetic determinism, or a realistic nature-nurture interactive model—it is human action that should most concern us when it comes to morality.  The way in which people interact with others is what ultimately matters and, when it comes to conflict, at long last we are beginning to understand the conditions under which we can drive war into extinction.

Pg. 137:  The hypothesis that reason-based Enlightenment thinking leads to moral progress is one that can be tested through historical comparison and by examining what happens to countries that hold anti-Enlightenment values.  Countries that quash free inquiry, distrust reason, and practice pseudoscience, such as Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and, more recently, fundamentalist Islamist states, stagnate, regress, and often collapse. 

Pg. 141:  The origin of the modern labels of left and right can be traced to the French Assembly of 1789 on the eve of the French Revolution, in which the delegates who favored preservation of the Ancien Regime (the Old Order) of France sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. Since then, the terms left and right have stood for liberalism and conservatism, respectively.

Pg. 205:  Even though moral arguments undermined slavery, it was not enough to bring about the abolition of it.  Even after Britain outlawed slavery in 1807, the British Navy had to patrol the African coast for more than sixty years, until 1870, seizing nearly 1,600 ships and liberating more than 150,000 slaves in the process.  Also, it took the deaths of 650,000 Americans in the Civil War to end slavery in the U.S.

Pg. 302:  Our moral nature is not composed of discrete good or bad bins.  Our nature is on a continuum which includes a propensity to be sympathetic, kind, and good to our fellow kith and kin and friends, as well as an inclination to be xenophobic, cruel, and evil to tribal others. And the dials for all of these can be adjusted up and down depending on a wide range of conditions and circumstances, perceptions, and states of mind, all interacting in a complex suite of variables that are difficult to tease apart.

Pg. 353:  The vast majority of violent offenders everywhere in the world are men, and in most countries, males represent more than 90 percent of prison populations.  Mostly, they kill other men: some 80 percent of all homicide victims and perpetrators are men.  The global homicide rate for men is 11.9 per 100,000 compared to 2.6 per 100,000 for women.  (The 15-29 age group is the most lethal).

Pg. 362:  The moral emotions are a proxy for a moral calculation evolved through natural selection that leads us to assume not only that others of our group are really moral, but that we are as well.  Morality is a real, biologically-based phenomenon, and the desire for moral justice is as concrete an emotion as love.

The fact that both modern humans and present-day primates have a sense of fairness and justice points to a common response to unfairness and injustice that evolved in our distant past as a conflict-resolution tool, without which the members of such social species would be less likely to survive and flourish.  The sense of justice evolved to deal with conflict resolution and to keep bullies, abusers, and murderers from overrunning a society and thereby decreasing the evolutionary fitness of everyone in the group, which otherwise could threaten extinction. 

Pg. 407:  Nearly every political institution and principle we have today—representative democracy, political parties, independent judiciaries, judicial review, civil rights—were all invented in the eighteenth century. 

Pg. 412:  Groceries today cost 13 times less than 150 years ago in inflation-adjusted dollars.  Standard of living: 95 percent of Americans now living below the poverty line have electricity, Internet, water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, and a television.

Pg. 422:  A 2013 study found that people’s perception of income inequality is largely overinflated when compared to data on actual income inequality.  Study participants believed that on average, about 48 percent of households make less than $35,000 year, when in fact census data show that 37 percent actually fall under that number.  Also, 32 percent of households make $75,000 or more, not the 23 percent believed.  Additionally, people believe that the average annual income of the richest 20 percent of Americans is $2 million, whereas in fact it is $169,000.

Pg. 438:  The data trends for our species for the past half-millennium are encouraging: colonialism and slavery are dead, the percentage of populations that perish in wars has dramatically declined, crime and violence are way down, civil liberties are way up, and across the globe the desire for representative electoral democracies is skyrocketing, along with literacy, education, science, and technology.