“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” said Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. This quote is the inspiration behind the title of this nearly 500 page tome on moral progress in which Michael Shermer aims to establish that the moral arc does indeed bend towards justice and morality. The book is both descriptive and normative and the overarching thesis is that “we are living in the most moral period in our species’ history” and that “in general, as a species, we are becoming increasingly moral”. Aimed at a wider audience than the professional academic community, Shermer synthesises significant results from a wide range of scientific disciplines and presents them in an accessible manner.

Taking account of data from various sources, he documents that authoritarianism, war, homicide and rape, are all trending downwards, while liberal democracy, economic prosperity, health and longevity, judicial equality, individual freedom and rights, are on the rise. This is not the story that you get from the news which often leads one to believe that things are going from bad to worse. But as Shermer explains, the media is heavily biased in favour of reporting bad news. This in turn is connected to the fact that it is in the nature of human psychology to pay more attention to and remember immediate and emotionally salient events affecting identifiable individuals rather than probabilities and long-term trends.

The Moral Arc is divided into three main parts. The first part includes chapters on what drives moral progress, which according to Shermer is not religion but science and reason. One significant way in which science is taken to drive moral progress relies on the plausible contention that many moral issues are, in part, debates over non-moral facts. Shermer exemplifies this phenomenon with an in-depth discussion of witch hunts and how these were fuelled by mistaken believes about causation. To the point of how reason has made us better morally, Shermer argues that the rise in general intelligence plays a key role. As documented through the so-called Flynn effect (that average IQ has increased continuously with 3 points every decade for the past century), people are getting smarter, and particularly so when it comes to abstract reasoning. This is essential to moral thinking, argues Shermer, since morality involves the “interchangeability of perspectives”: the ability to put oneself in the shoes of others, which requires abstract thinking. Shermer has gathered data from a wide range of sources indicating that intelligence is negatively correlated with violent crime, racism, and desires for punitive justice, while positively correlated with cooperation in prisoner’s dilemma-type situations, openness to immigration, and endorsement of free trade.

This argument was also made by Steven Pinker in his magisterial The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. In general, there is a significant overlap between that book and Shermer’s. Like Pinker before him, Shermer also makes use of Peter Singer’s idea of the “expanding circle”: The general trend seems to be one toward inclusion of more beings into our sphere of moral consideration: from our own genetic relatives to our in-group, to members of other groups, to all members of our species, and ultimately to all sentient beings.

In part II of the book, the demise of slavery, the rise of women’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights, are given their own separate chapters as historical case studies of moral progress. Though some forms of slavery still exist today, our attitudes towards it have changed profoundly. Shermer is at his best when he is discussing issues in psychology, which is the field in which he was trained. In the third part of the book he discusses how our complex human psychology reacts to varying conditions and what can lead people to acts like genocide and terrorism which are instances of the very antithesis of moral progress. One chapter is devoted to questions concerning freedom and responsibility in which Shermer defends a generic form of compatibilism. Another chapter discusses punishment, where Shermer argues for a victim-oriented criminal justice system centred on restoration rather than retribution. The book ends with a chapter in which the author makes some thought-provoking predictions about our future. He argues that what we ought to strive for is not a utopia but instead a “protopia” – a place where progress is steadfast and measured.

The notion of moral progress is central throughout the book. Progress is reasonably defined in terms of improvement making it clear that it is an evaluative notion; saying that progress has occurred is saying that things are in some sense better now than they were before. “Morality”, Shermer says, “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”. As a moral philosopher, I find this claim problematic for primarily two reasons: it excludes from morality how we ought to think and act towards ourselves and at first glance how we ought to think and act towards entities that are not themselves moral agents. However, Shermer defines moral agent in terms of the capacity to feel and suffer which makes a lot of beings into “moral agents” that we would not normally think of as such. On a charitable reading what he is after is rather a definition of moral subject. Even so, bringing “the capacity to feel and suffer” into the definition brings with it an unwarranted hedonistic bias. That suffering is generally something bad (and that avoidance of suffering is generally good) is a widely shared belief but that it is the one and only thing that matters morally is highly contentious and not something that can be established by definitional fiat.

One of the most problematic aspects of the book is rash arguments like “we are first and foremost individuals within social groups and therefore ought not to be subservient to the collective” and “[the] drive to survive is part of our essence, and therefore the freedom to pursue the fulfillment of that essence is a natural right“. These are precisely the kinds of inferences that David Hume exposed as invalid in the 18^th century. To his credit, Shermer raises for discussion Hume’s well-known observation that prescriptive (ought-) statements do not seem to follow logically from descriptive (is-) statements; or, better formulated, that any argument whose premises consist exclusively of empirical claims cannot validly generate a moral conclusion. Shermer claims to have bridged the gap between is and ought, but he overstates his case as it remains unclear how he has done so.

A common view is that presupposing a general moral principle (for example, Shermer’s: what we morally ought to aim for is that which increases the survival and flourishing of sentient beings), we can then use scientific methods to determine which specific actions or policies are most likely to bring about the assumed moral end. But even though much of what he argues in the book does not require anything more than this common view, this is not enough for Shermer who goes further and states that his system of morality (in which the survival and flourishing of sentient beings is the fundamental principle) is “a system based on science and reason … grounded in principles that are themselves based on nature’s laws and on human nature”. He insists that we can ground values and morals in science. Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us much about how we could go about grounding a fundamental moral principle in nature’s laws (without presupposing a moral starting point to begin from). He claims, for example, that there is “sound science” behind the proposition that “our moral consideration should be based … primarily on what sentient beings are … feeling”. As it turns out, however, what the sound science is actually behind is rather the very different proposition that there is “continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, and that sentience is the common characteristic across species” and not the normative principle that sentience ought to determine the scope of our moral concern.

Shermer not only proposes a normative moral system, he also makes controversial claims about the nature of morality. He argues, for example, that “We are all born with a moral sense, with moral emotions that guide us in our interactions with other people … . Thus morality is real, discoverable, ‘out there’ in nature”. This somewhat baffling argument fails to recognize the crucial difference between the existence of an (innate) moral sense, on the one hand, and the veracity of this sense, on the other. Moral views cannot be taken to validate their own truth any more than religious views can. Moral emotions are surely real and discoverable, but whether moral truths are “out there” in the way that scientific truths are is very much a matter of debate – one that Shermer sweeps under the rug.

Despite containing some problematic moral arguments, The Moral Arc is an engaging read with an important message. Although that message is far from new, we do seem to need to continually remind ourselves that a lot of things are better than we commonly think and that they continue to improve.

© 2016 Fritz-Anton Fritzson

Fritz-Anton Fritzson, PhD. Practical Philosophy