 Goed ja, Mike Sherman's The Moral Ark, de lezing van vanavond, was eigenlijk een soort van samenvatting heel snel van wat hij in zijn boek uiteenzet. En wat denk ik heel erg goed is dat er ook eens een keer gezegd wordt dat iemand dat ook doet met alle argumenten en alle empirische taten, alle wetenschappelijke studies achter de hand. Alles netjes uiteen gezet, dus heel dik boek geworden. Precies daardoor is dat de wetenschap een samenleving voor de huidelijkheid. Ik ben in m'n hoofd, en het stond binnen de schaduw. Kieping woont op m'n hoofd. Ik ben in m'n hoofd, en ik ben in m'n hoofd. In m'n hoofd, en ik ben in m'n hoofd. Dat phrase is de inspiratie voor m'n title van de boek. Oftentimes moral revolutions doekturn, at least in part on the power of one speaker, one person, one revolutionary to stand up and say, that's enough, we're not going to put up with this anymore. En dat is how it begins with the protests. King was a Baptist preacher and he got this phrase from a 19th century unitary abolitionist named Peter Parker, who said in the moral universe, I cannot calculate its curve, but I can divine by conscious that it's bending toward justice. That's where king got this in the first place, hardly copyrighted in any case. We don't have to depend on divine conscious. We couldn't actually calculate it with data. We now have 118 democracies, that's 48 or higher on the poly scale of 196 countries. So that's real moral progress, as I've defined it, which I'll come back to at the end of the talk, of why I think democracies are objectively morally better than other forms of governance. Part of the controversial part of my vote, at least America, is that religion is not the major driving force of moral progress. En, of course, we want to counter this, we'll put the Quakers and the Mennonites agitated for the abolitionist slavery, if that's true. William Wilberforce stood up in parliament and agitated for decades for the abolitionist slavery, if that's true. He did it deeply religious now. But who were his primary opponents? Who was he fighting against? It was his fellow religionists, his fellow Anglicans, who had tons of theological and biblical arguments in favor of the slave trade. Same thing with the Quakers, they were agitating for a century before before anything actually happened. It didn't happen until the majority of people started adapting the kind of rights language that people used, started to use at the time. People should never be treated as a means to an end, but are an end in themselves. That's a manual con. People should be treated equally under the law. John Law and so forth. These are ideas that were created by enlightenment philosophers, not theological moralists, who then later adopted those ideas. Like Dr. King said, his biggest influence was the most liberal theologians and Gandhi. You would not consider Gandhi really just in any western sense. And then finally we're also in the middle of another rights revolution, animal rights. I would really begin with Jeremy Bentham's question. Really, it's just a footnote in one of his great works. The question is not can they reason or can they talk, but can they feel, can they suffer? Can they suffer? I begin with this idea of the survival and flourishing, the non-suffering of sentient beings. This should be our consideration. This is our starting point, we build from there. I use the phrase sentient beings because after all, we are findings, we are grades. The givens, gorillas, chimps, bonobos, and us. We are one of them. So what's been happening then for the last several centuries is that moral arc has been vending. How far? I claim that everyone today, conservatives included, are more liberal than liberals were in the 1950s. You don't see sides like this anymore. If you analyze literature and novels, pop culture, editorial cartoons and so forth, it's all shifted. Nobody talks about Jews and Blacks and women and so forth. Today, like they did half a century ago. So the whole point of what I'm calling enlightenment, humanism, the stuff that's been happening over the last couple of centuries is that instead of moralizing about evil, we use science to reason solve problems. That is, how can we get grades upon a side down? How can we stop wars and things like that? And against the scientific revolution, at least that's what I think of the story, that is, the scientific revolutionaries, Bagan, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, they discovered that the universe is governed by natural laws that we can understand right about mathematical equations, make predictions based on those predictable hypotheses, test them and see if it works, and then use that knowledge to change the world. And that's what's happened ever since. So again, the formula is, democracies are better than autocracies, it's often to be, we ought to spread democracy wherever we can. Why does democracy's place more emphasis on individual rights and individual liberty than any other form of governance and thus they promote the survival and flourishing of sentient beings. So that phrase, that's my starting point. The survival and flourishing of sentient beings is the basis for establishing values and morals, which I claim, I'm now back on page one of my books, I've come back. We've made evolution thou safest, with an instinct to survive and thrive, and that that's where natural rights come from. And that, so determining the conditions by which sentient beings messengers should ought to be the goal of science, morality. We aren't that made from the stars. Our atoms were forged in the interiors of ancient stars that ended up on us in spectacular paroxysms of supernova explosions that dispersed those atoms into space where they coalesced in new solar systems with planets, life and sentient beings capable of such-and-like knowledge and moral wisdom. We are stars. We are golden. We are a billion-year-old carbon. Morality is something that carbon atoms can embody given a billion years of evolution, the moral art. Thank you. Het is altijd leuk om Michael Sherman te zien. Hij is super rationeel. Hij brengt het dan altijd heel charmant, en dat is wel echt een prestatie. Geen cynicus, heel betrokken met zijn onderwerp, met zijn publiek en gebracht op een manier waar wij nog aan heel behoefd kunnen leren. Dus absoluut, ik vind het leuk. Ik vind het leuk. Ik vind het leuk. Ik vind het leuk. Dus absoluut aanraad.