The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People

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Michael Shermer, a professor, column writer for Scientific American, longtime public champion of reason and rationality and author of, “The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People,” claims that we are living in the greatest moral period of our species’ history. “The Moral Arc” is about moral progress that made evident through widespread data and epic stories that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, freedom, and truth. It is difficult to imagine how the arc of morality can bend toward justice without rational examination of the consequences of one’s actions. Of the many factors that have come together over the centuries to bend the arc in a more moral direction, science and reason are foremost.
The Scientific Revolution …show more content…

In “The Moral Arc”, he takes on skeptics who belittle science, who claim it has no moral focus and produces nothing but hopelessness and loss. He makes the astounding claim that science, specifically because of its rational, emotionless, and progressive attitude towards revealing the truth, has helped to lay the moral groundwork for modern society, pointing the way to a more objective and decent world. He starts the book with a story of Martin Luther King Jr. and explains how his famous speech in Washington DC which proved that the Moral Arc itself does indeed bend towards justice. Shermer explains that the term “The Moral Arc”, which is the title of title of this book as well as the reference that King used in his speech, is from a 19th …show more content…

Shermer finds lessons in an episode of "Star Trek" (the power of mercy) as well as on a trip he took to the Galápagos Islands (the complexity of ecological tradeoffs) and finds inspiration in sculptures of strong women carved by his aunt that sit near him as he writes. "The arc of the moral universe is long," Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1965, "but it bends toward justice." Long indeed. In retrospect, it seems remarkable that arguments against now-obvious injustices, such as slavery and women's subjection, had to be made repeatedly over centuries before they finally "took." Yet, even with such data, the thesis of Shermer’s work remains solid. Even though science has brought us the atomic bomb, it is also a tool that can teach us about well-being and offer us moral progress. "The Moral Arc" presents an impressive account of how far we have come but it reminds us that reason will need a lot of help to make our moral progress

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