From
Can Science Determine Moral Values?
A challenge from and dialogue with Marc Hauser about The Moral Arc
by Michael Shermer
…in the same way that Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist. Just as it was inevitable that Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits-given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could not have discovered anything else-scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these realms. For example, that democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that slaves don’t like being enslaved and oppressed, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that Jews did not cause the Black Death, that blacks are not intellectually inferior to whites, or that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries.
My view is that ever since the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment the idea that individual sentient beings have natural rights has outcompeted other ideas that place the group, tribe, nation, race, gender, or religion above the rights of the individual. These rights have expanded around the globe because individual sentient beings want them, and they want them because it is part of their nature to want them-it is instinctive-and a proper scientific understanding of human nature has revealed this fact. Knowing that, we then have a moral obligation to expand those rights where we can, and to help people whose rights are being violated.