The Moral Arc | Michael Shermer

This is a book about moral progress that demonstrates through extensive data and heroic stories that the arc of the moral universe bends toward truth, justice, and freedom.

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 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 using the same methods of science.

This led to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, which in turn created the modern secular world of liberal democracies, civil rights and civil liberties, equal justice under the law, and the expansion of the moral sphere to include more people—and now animals—as worthy of moral consideration.