Table Of ContentThe author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use
only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright
infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you
are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher
at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
To Jennifer
Unsterbliche Geliebte
Immortal Beloved
Forever thine
Forever mine
Forever us
∞
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Bending the Moral Arc
PART I: THE MORAL ARC EXPLAINED
1. Toward a Science of Morality
2. The Morality of War, Terror, and Deterrence
3. Why Science and Reason Are the Drivers of Moral Progress
4. Why Religion Is Not the Source of Moral Progress
PART II: THE MORAL ARC APPLIED
5. Slavery and a Moral Science of Freedom
6. A Moral Science of Women’s Rights
7. A Moral Science of Gay Rights
8. A Moral Science of Animal Rights
PART III: THE MORAL ARC AMENDED
9. Moral Regress and Pathways to Evil
10. Moral Freedom and Responsibility
11. Moral Justice: Retribution and Restoration
12. Protopia: The Future of Moral Progress
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Also by Michael Shermer
About the Author
Copyright
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for
dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any
question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any
errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the
only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to
be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what
they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom
can never be lost, and science can never regress.
—J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, 1949
PROLOGUE
Bending the Moral Arc
Sunday, March 21, 1965. Selma, Alabama.
About eight thousand people gather at Brown Chapel and begin to march from
the town of Selma to the city of Montgomery, Alabama. The demonstrators are
predominantly African American and they’re marching on the capitol for one
reason: Justice. They want simply to be given the right to vote. But they’re not
alone in their struggle. Demonstrators of “every race, religion, and class,”
representing almost every state, have come to march with their black brothers
and sisters.1 And at the front of the march is the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., Nobel Prize winner, preacher, and civil rights activist, leading the
march like Moses leading his people out of Egypt.
In the teeth of racial opposition backed by armed police and riot squads, they
had tried to march twice before, but both times were met with violence by state
troopers and a deputized posse. The first time—known as Bloody Sunday—the
marchers were ordered to turn back but refused and, as onlookers cheered, they
were met with tear gas, billy clubs, and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire.
The second time they were again met by a line of state troopers and ordered to
turn around, and after asking for permission to pray, King led them back.
But not this time. This time President Lyndon B. Johnson, finally having
seen the writing on the wall, ordered that the marchers should be protected by
two thousand National Guard troops and federal marshals. And so they marched.
For five days, over a span of fifty-three miles, through biting cold and frequent
rain, they marched. Word spread, the number of demonstrators grew, and by the
time they reached the steps of the capitol in Montgomery on March 25, their
numbers had swelled to at least twenty-five thousand.
But King wasn’t allowed on the steps of the capitol—the marchers weren’t
allowed on state property. Sitting in the capitol dome like Pontius Pilate,
Alabama governor George Wallace refused to come out and address the
marchers, and Dr. King delivered his speech from a platform constructed on a
flatbed truck parked on the street in front of the building.2 And from that
platform, King delivered his stirring anthem to freedom, first recalling how they
had marched through “desolate valleys,” rested on “rocky byways,” were
scorched by the sun, slept in mud, and were drenched by rains. The crowd,
consisting of freedom-seeking people who had assembled from around the
United States, listened intently as Dr. King implored them to remain committed
to the nonviolent philosophy of civil disobedience, knowing that the patience of
oppressed peoples wears thin and that our natural inclination is to hit back when
struck. He asked, rhetorically, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of
men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred
throne?” And “How long will justice be crucified and truth bear it?” In response,
Dr. King offered words of counsel, comfort, and assurance, saying that no matter
the obstacles it wouldn’t be long before freedom was realized because, he said,
quoting religious and biblical tropes, “truth crushed to earth will rise again,” “no
lie can live forever,” “you shall reap what you sow,” and “the arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”3
It was one of the greatest speeches of Dr. King’s career, and arguably one of
the greatest in the history of public oratory. And it worked. Less than five
months later, on August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the voting rights act
into law. It was just as Dr. King had said—the arc of the moral universe is long
but it bends toward justice.
*
Dr. King’s reference—the title inspiration for this book—comes from the
nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker, who penned this piece
of moral optimism in 1853, at a time when, if anything, pessimism would have
been more appropriate as America was inexorably sliding toward civil war over
the very institution Parker sought to abolish:
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little
ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it
by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.4
In The Moral Arc my aim is to show that the Reverends Parker and King
were right—that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice.
In addition to religious conscience and stirring rhetoric, however, we can trace
the moral arc through science with data from many different lines of inquiry, all
of which demonstrate that in general, as a species, we are becoming increasingly
moral. As well, I argue that most of the moral development of the past several
centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most
important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment
are science and reason, terms that I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning
through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true
through empirical verification.
Further, I demonstrate that the arc of the moral universe bends not merely
toward justice, but also toward truth and freedom, and that these positive
outcomes have largely been the product of societies moving toward more secular
forms of governance and politics, law and jurisprudence, moral reasoning and
ethical analysis. Over time it has become less acceptable to argue that my
beliefs, morals, and ways of life are better than yours simply because they are
mine, or because they are traditional, or because my religion is better than your
religion, or because my God is the One True God and yours is not, or because
my nation can pound the crap out of your nation. It is no longer acceptable to
simply assert your moral beliefs; you have to provide reasons for them, and
those reasons had better be grounded in rational arguments and empirical
evidence or else they will likely be ignored or rejected.
Historically, we can look back and see that we have been steadily—albeit at
times haltingly—expanding the moral sphere to include more members of our
species (and now even other species) as legitimate participants in the moral
community. The burgeoning conscience of humanity has grown to the point
where we no longer consider the well-being only of our family, extended family,
and local community; rather, our consideration now extends to people quite
unlike ourselves, with whom we gladly trade goods and ideas and exchange
sentiments and genes rather than beating, enslaving, raping, or killing them (as
our sorry species was wont to do with reckless abandon not so long ago). Nailing
down the cause-and-effect relationship between human action and moral
