you do so, there is no question that in nearly every sphere of human endeavor, there has never been a better time to be alive than now.
As for my second thesis about religion, that is very much a secondary issue to the stronger thesis emphasizing the role of science and reason and the Enlightenment. The Moral Arc is not an “atheist” book. It’s a science book. It is about the positive forces that have been at work over the past two centuries to expand the moral sphere—bend the moral arc—and grant more rights and freedoms and liberty and prosperity to more people in more places than at any time in history.
I don’t care what someone’s religion is, as long as they agree that everyone has the natural right to be treated equally under the law, to be endowed by nature and nature’s laws—evolution in my model with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and to honor the Liberty Principle: The freedom to think, believe, and act as we choose, so long as our thoughts, beliefs, and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. I doubt that there are any Jews or Christians who would disagree with this principle, but then they—like me and most everyone else reading these words—are children of the Enlightenment, where these ideas were first articulated.
James Barham: We found ourselves—perhaps surprisingly—in general agreement with much of what you have to say in The Moral Arc. For example, we largely applaud your definition of “moral progress” as “the improvement in the survival and flourishing of sentient beings.” Though we believe that rational beings should take precedence over other sentient beings, nevertheless that is an excellent definition—and one that is very much in keeping with Aristotle, we might add!
You make only one glancing reference to Aristotle in connection with ethics, yet it seems to us that your moral system is clearly a form of eudaimonism—in which morally good or virtuous behavior is grounded in what it means for human beings to flourish as rational animals. If that is right, then aren’t you really an Aristotelian at heart? If not, why not?
Michael Shermer: Yes, I’m an Aristotelian, although I graft onto that parts of other moral philosophies, such as natural rights theory and sometimes utilitarianism and occasionally Rawlsian original position theory. No one moral theory can get it right for all circumstances, so we have to cobble together parts of what our greatest minds have generated before us. All I’m trying to do in The Moral Arc is establish that: (1) there are objective transcendent moral truths—right and wrong—and these are grounded in nature and human nature; and (2) there is no wall separating is and ought. Everyone just repeats the naturalistic fallacy without ever reading what Hume actually said—which I did, and then took my interpretation to one of the world’s leading Hume scholars, Oxford University philosopher Peter Millican, who confirmed that he thinks my interpretation of Hume is accurate. This is all in Chapter 1 of my book.
James Barham: Although you do not discuss Aristotle, eudaimonism, or virtue ethics in any detail, you do spend a couple of pages discussing the concept of “natural rights” in connection with John Locke as the foundation of your individualist approach to morality, which we applaud. We understand why you wish to claim a direct lineal descent from Locke, in accordance with your claim that Enlightenment “science and reason,” not religion, have been the principal drivers of human progress.
Now, natural rights are normally thought of as grounded in natural law—and so ultimately in human nature.3 Of course, we also understand that the view of human nature underpinning your invocation of natural rights is based on the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, as you have explained at length in several of your previous books, as well as in The Moral Arc. We will explore all of this in detail with you in a few moments. However, first we wanted to point out a significant historical connection that you do not mention.
Obviously, Locke himself knew nothing of Darwin. For him, as for the other Enlightenment figures whom you cite, natural rights were principally grounded in the natural law tradition leading back to Hugo Grotius—who lived a couple of generations before Locke—and beyond Grotius to the great sixteenth-century Spanish Scholastics (Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Bartolomé de las Casas, Francisco Suárez, et al.), who in turn based their ethical and political thought on earlier Scholastic philosophy, notably that of Aquinas and Ockham.
In short, the Lockean tradition of human rights which you wish to claim as the offspring of the Enlightenment, we would claim is in reality to a very significant degree the offspring of Scholasticism—i.e., of Christian philosophy. How would you respond?
Michael Shermer: I have taken a number of courses from The Teaching Company on the history of rights and the origin of the concept of natural rights—Rufus Fears’s “History of Freedom,” Dennis Dalton’s “Freedom: The Philosophy of Liberation,” and Joseph Koterski’s “Natural Law and Human Nature”—all of whom take the concept back to the ancient Greeks. So, you have to start the historical timeline somewhere, or else we’ll end up with all ideas as footnotes to Plato, as Whitehead said—wrongly, I might add.
I begin with Locke because that was the most influential source for the founding of America and the modern concept of natural rights as it is understood and practiced today. Certainly, the Scholastics were hugely influential in their time, as were the Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus in their time. But The Moral Arc is not a history book meant to convey the full and rich history of ideas, but rather, as you properly discerned, a work with a central thesis in the spirit of what I call Darwin’s Dictum: “All observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.”
James Barham: Here is another problem we find with your general approach to morality in The Moral Arc: You quite rightly point to the importance of what you call “the principle of interchangeable perspectives” as absolutely fundamental to human morality. Your principle appears to mean more or less the same thing as Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator,” Kant’s “categorical imperative,” or simply the Golden Rule. That is, in our dealings with others, we ought to give much, though not necessarily overriding consideration to their interests, and not just to our own or those of our family, friends, tribe, etc. With all of this, very few would disagree.
But then you go on to say the following:
Reason and the principle of interchangeable perspectives put morals more on a par with scientific discoveries than cultural conventions. Scientists cannot just assert a claim without backing it up with reasoned argument and empirical data…
But the claim that human morality is closely akin to natural science is problematic, to say the least. For one thing, if it were true, it would suggest that the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived were all egoists blind to the claims of morality—which we take to be an unacceptable consequence of your view.
More seriously still, by assimilating reason to science, you seem to be labeling most of humanity as irrational, conflating a highly refined and specialized form of reasoning (natural science) with the general human capacity to reason (common sense). While common sense undoubtedly has its limits, nevertheless it is a thoroughly rational process. Every time a Paleolithic hunter said to himself, “If I want to be successful in the hunt tomorrow, I must sharpen my spear blade,” that was human reason in action. And it is this universal commonsense form of reason that, in our view, is at the root of the principle of interchangeable perspectives, not science.
In short, we believe that you are confusing science with reason itself in claiming that morals are “on a par with scientific discoveries.” How say you?
Michael Shermer: The Paleolithic hunter who deduces that he must take certain actions to be successful in his hunt is employing a form of scientific reasoning by proposing a hypothesis (“If I want to be successful in the hunt tomorrow, I must sharpen my spear blade”) and then testing it the next day to see if it works. That’s not a moral matter, but once brains evolved the capacity to substitute parts in an equation (“If I try, X then Y will result, and whenever Y happens, I also did X”), then we can employ that same capacity to reason about other people, our actions and theirs, and the consequences for both. As I wrote in The Moral Arc, referencing Steven Pinker’s analysis of the role of reason in moral progress in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature4