 So, our first speaker to kick off this fantastic bunch of speakers is, of course, Michael Schermer. One of my personal heroes, the reason I call myself a skeptic, he of course is the publisher of Skeptic Mag. His talk is called The Science and Morality. Science and Morality, how science can determine right and wrong. And this year, we're not doing songs for each speaker, we're doing haikus. So Michael's haiku is, oh Michael Schermer, on your bike you once met God, or was it ET? Please welcome Michael Schermer. Right. Good morning, how are we doing? Nice to see you all. Very good. Would you do me a favor at some time this weekend if you'd stop by the booth and say hi to Pat Lindsey and Daniel Lockston and all the crew that handles our Skeptic Magazine. Skeptic Magazine, if you could put the first slide up there, I'll just show you just some of our more recent covers of both Skeptic and Junior Skeptic Magazine. We get that slide show working there. So Daniel runs, he does illustrates and writes Junior Skeptic Magazine. And then Pat Lindsey, are those up there? Can you see them? No? Alright, we could go ahead and turn the slides on anytime you're ready. Yeah, there we go. I guess I can't see them here. That's alright. So anyway, so all this happens, does not happen in a vacuum. There's a whole staff of people that make Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine run, and it's always nice when they get a little appreciation there. So the talk I'm giving this morning is sort of the second half of what I did for you last year on the subject of my next book entitled The Moral Arc of Science, has bent the arc of the moral universe, which of course comes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous quip about that. And I showed you a slide last year about how we can actually measure moral progress. For example, here are the number of states, both worldwide and within the United States, that have decriminalized homosexuality from the 18th century to 2009. So this is a chart graphing the moral progress there, or anti-gay attitudes in the United States from 1973 to 2010. The downward sloping trend is the percentage of respondents giving less tolerant responses to questions like, is homosexuality wrong, morally wrong, is it legal, should it be legal, equal opportunity, and so on. And as you've seen in the news recently, of course, we're making progress in gay marriage, with the nuns leading the charge. That is the religiously unaffiliated, as you know, is the fastest growing religious group in America. It's one out of five. It's 20%. That's 48 million voting adults. We are a powerful voting bloc. And so as I'll show in my book in more detail, it's not religion leading the moral progress charge. They're always about 50 years behind. So as I like to say in the case of gay marriage, in a few decades from now, we'll be looking back on this, like we now look back on black and white drinking fountains. But the other thing is that the Christians will take credit for the gay marriage revolution. You know that Episcopalian minister? That was our guy. And in fact, as you can see now, there's 12 states that have passed gay marriage laws and one more, Washington, D.C., in which there was a recent marriage which you'll be hearing more about at lunch today in the conversation with the amazing one. Still, there's a lot of people that believe that gay marriage is immoral. Can we say that they are wrong? Yeah. But I mean really wrong, not just I think you're wrong or in Western culture you're wrong, but really wrong, objectively wrong, absolutely morally wrong to believe that gay marriage is immoral. The problem is that there's a lot of philosophers that technically speaking think that well nothing is written in stone and that although they may support gay marriage or say yes, in the United States I think it should be legal or within Western culture I think it's morally acceptable, but of course there's no outside source. There's no Archimedean point outside of the earth that says that's a true moral value or that's a true immoral value, something like that. So what I want to talk about today is what makes something right or wrong. Now most of us of course reject what's called divine command theory or what might be called the ask God principle because the problem is if God does not decree something immoral, does that make it moral? If the Seventh Commandment was not in there, which a lot of congressmen wish it weren't, now shall not commit adultery, if God had not included this would that make adultery immoral or moral? Now shall not rape is not in the Bible. In fact it's in many cases the opposite, the rape pillage and destroy and it's one of the benes of being a warlord. Does that make it okay? In effect how are we supposed to know God's moral commands? Do you read it in the Bible? Do you ask him? Do you pray? Do you just sit there and think and see what pops into your head? And if you read the Bible of course it doesn't give us much moral guidance. Now the problem with absolute morality is that most of us reject it. Moral principles are not absolute where they apply to all people in all cultures in all circumstances all of the time. Yes as a matter of fact I do have to take everything as black or white. The problem with absolute morality is that great moral philosopher Maxwell Smart said don't be silly 99 we have to shoot, kill and destroy. We represent everything that's wholesome and good in the world. But yet neither are moral principles relative determined by only circumstance, culture and history. I don't care what your lawyer said they're not called the ten recommendations. And of course the problem with that is that then people think that anything goes. So often I'm accused as an atheist of saying well so you think anything goes? You can do anything you want? You know Hitler got away with it and that's fine? No I don't believe that. So what I'm trying to work on is a response to theists essentially. In which they came up with what I call provisional morality. That is moral principles are provisionally true. They apply to most people in most cultures, most circumstances, most of the time. I got this idea from one of my heroes and friends Stephen Jay Gould who defined a fact in science as something confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold our provisional assent. Apples may start to rise tomorrow but we don't really need to deal with that in public school classrooms because we know this as a fact. Fact, small f, true truth with a small t. So in provisional morality I'm thinking it along the lines of that things could be moral or immoral in terms of whether to confirm to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent. For example, can we agree and answer about answering the question is female genital mutilation wrong? Is this the best we can do? Yes, but only in western cultures. We should respect other cultural traditions and not judge them. Can we offer our provisional assent that female genital mutilation is morally wrong? Yes, we can. But why? What's the basis of it? How can you know that? Well, I say just ask the individual being mutilated and you'll get your answer and if they can't speak words their screams will give you their answer. Is it absolutely objectively wrong to deface a woman for any reason? Yeah, it is. But why? Just ask the individual being defaced and you'll get your answer. So instead of the ask God principle, I call this the ask first principle. If you want to find out whether an action is right or wrong, just ask first. Who do you ask? The individual moral agent upon that's being acted upon. So like back to the adultery question, the adultery question. If you're not sure if this is right or wrong, don't ask God. Ask your intimate partner and they'll tell you. Or you don't really even need to ask, you already know. Okay, so why the individual? Why start there? Well, I claim that the individual is the primary moral agent because the individual organism is the principle target of natural selection and social evolution. This is not group selection, this is natural selection. Natural selection targeting the individual and it still works. Darwin awards are being given out regularly still. Thus the survival and flourishing of individuals is the basis for establishing values and morals and so determining the conditions by which humans best flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality. So we can say that female genital mutilation is wrong because it permanently robs individuals of their evolved sexual nature that enables them to flourish. Just think of it this way, ask yourself this. If female genital mutilation did not exist as a cultural practice and we caught a person inflicting it on a little girl would we view it as a cultural practice to be tolerated? Hell no. So, thank you. So you'll recognize this as the is-ought fallacy. I'm committing the naturalism fallacy or the is-ought fallacy which I think is itself a fallacy. The argument goes the way something is in nature like predation or parasitism or slavery is not the way it ought to be. Yes sometimes that's true but this does not mean that we should always negate the is for the ought. Since the individual is the primary moral agent and since the survival and flourishing of individuals is the basis for establishing values and morals determining the conditions by which humans best flourish ought to be the goal of our science of morality and the aim of a civil society. Let's go back to where we started. If homosexuality is natural which it is then gay rights ought to be supported. A couple of examples here, the rest of my talk will just be example after example of this. Just take the research from Chris Bohm and his new book Moral Origins in which he makes an is-ought argument. That is the way a thing is like bullying and free-riding in hunter-gather community, small groups for any kind of society destroys cooperation and altruism. That is humans by nature have a propensity to be nice and cooperative and altruistic. Yet there are still within all communities there is a handful of psychopaths, bullies, free riders, nasties, meanies and we have to deal with them because if we don't they are going to disrupt the group. So we ought to employ certain social technologies to deal with them like social pressure, criticism, shaming, ostracism ejecting them out of the group or even as Bohm shows in many cases capital punishment. Yeah, they just take these guys out for a hunt hey let's go for a hunt and then they come back without him. So in other words we need a shadow of enforcement over us in many cases. Or take Franz DeVall's research in his latest book the Bonobo and the Atheist quote is and ought are like the yin and yang of morality we have both we need both they're not the same yet they're also not totally separate they complement each other values are embedded in the way we are. So for example to survive and flourish organisms animals ought to feed themselves escape predators, find mates and so on and social animals ought to get along in other words it's our nature to need to eat it's our nature to need to get along so that's the way things are and therefore the way things ought to be is that we should structure things in such a way that we are better able to do that survive and flourish. Or take Patricia Churchill's new book Brain Trust from a biological point of view basic emotions are mother nature's way of orienting us to do what we prudently ought to do the social emotions are a way of getting us to do what we socially ought and the reward punishment system is a way of learning to use past experiences to improve our performance in both domains. In other words what's the reason we have emotions I mean they evolve for a reason emotions drive behavior they cause us to act in a certain way to eat, to be hungry so the motion of hunger pushes you to want to consume calories because you need to to survive the emotion of arousal and sexual attraction leads you to reproduction say or social emotions like guilt and shame so I'm not interested in why this culture tells people to feel guilty about that or this other culture has different things you should be guilty about what we want to know from an evolutionary perspective is why would people feel guilty about anything and the reason is because we ought to do certain things and guilt is a way of getting us to sort of push along that direction a nice research on this lots of experiments but this one by Farron Gactor published in Nature so this is a public goods game so let's say there's four of you sitting around a table and I give each of you 20 bucks each of you that in the first round has an opportunity to put some of your ones anywhere between one and 20 in an envelope anonymously and put it in the common pile I'll take all the money that you donated and I'll double it and redistribute it equally among the four of you so ideally we should all put 20 bucks in because we all then have 100% return in our investment but now maybe I'm thinking well it's anonymous maybe I'll put 19 in or maybe I'll put 15 in and hopefully the rest of you put 20 in and if you have the same calculus well maybe I'll put 15 in and maybe I'll put 10 in and maybe I'll put 5 in and pretty soon the whole thing collapses so in the data chart there you can see that without the opportunity for punishment the rates of cooperation go down you can put the slide back up there and with the opportunity for punishment that is in the second round you make it transparent I know how much you put in and you know how much I put in we're going to punish you by taking away some of your money all of a sudden people become very nice and cooperative so in other words humans are by nature naughty and nice so we need social technologies to deal with it okay at this point you might be saying but wait I can think of exceptions where the individual is not as important as the group say you know we need we need you to come in line to a certain way because the group is better something like that so I want to address the problem of what's called lifeboat ethics that is you got a certain number of people in the lifeboats about to sink somebody has to go does your ethical system perfectly deal with lifeboat situations and none of them do so lifeboat ethics is really best for undergraduate philosophy courses to get students to think about all the different philosophical theories but it doesn't do much beyond that because they all have shortcomings so for example does the ask first principle apply to Hitler do we have to ask Hitler is it okay if we kill you or in the case of Chris bombs research that you don't have to ask the bully if it's okay to often do we have to ask Osama bin Laden if it's okay to kill him no the ask first principle applies to most people in most circumstances most of the time even if there are exceptions so all moral systems have shortcomings so why not add one more arrow to the quiver of ethics by adding science without worrying about asking Hitler can we say provisionally that burning this 20 year old New Guinea woman alive on February 6th this year for witchcraft was immoral yes we can why is it wrong because it decreases the survival and flourishing of the woman tortured and torched or if the survival and flourishing of the individual is the basis for establishing values and morals then this graph tracks moral progress that is the number of people living under $1.25 a day adjusted for inflation since 1990 has decreased by half that's moral progress how do you know it's moral progress you just ask the people that are starving would you rather have more than $1.25 a day or less than $1.25 a day or as Bill Gates shows the number of cases of polio has decreased from 350,000 in 1988 to 222 in 2012 is that a moral good well just ask the 349,778 non polio victims how they feel about that and they will tell you or ask the 5.1 million children under the age of 5 who didn't die in 2011 who in 1990 would have died according to UNICEF and their data charts there or just go to Africa where much of this progress is being made and the spread of democracy so let's talk about political systems can we say that one political system is better than another political system I think we can the green ones there are varying shades of democracy and the others are coming along slowly but democracy is spreading rapidly in Africa and this is a good thing because more democracy has led to better governance politicians who want to be re-elected need to show results armies mostly stay in their barracks big man leaders are becoming rare warlords like Joseph Coney stand out as an exception today in a downward trend in the decline of power Africans for example no longer have to worry about these war criminals from the Liberian Civil War with their gnomes to gear general Rambo general Jesus general murder general jungle king colonel evil killer and major trouble and my favorite general butt naked so the number of armed conflicts in Africa is down from about 30 a year in 1989 to a little more than a dozen a year today the number of successful coups has fell by two thirds is this moral progress just ask this guy so democracies are better for individuals than autocracies and theocracies and dictatorships and all the other forms because it leads to more peace it leads to the opportunity for people to survive and flourish at a better rate not that they're perfect but the two first thinkers that I came across to put this thesis forward is Kant and his book Perpetual Peace and then Rudy Rommel in the 1960s and 70s and democracy is a method of nonviolence but they didn't quantify they didn't have data sets so last year for example I showed you the data sets from Bruce Russett and John O'Neill to test the democratic peace there you know this is the one where Thomas Friedman says no two countries with McDonald's ever go to war and then of course everybody jumped on and said wait a minute there was a McDonald's in this country and a McDonald's in this country and they had a little skirmish okay it's not perfect we're talking about statistical trends here so what Russett and O'Neill did is they took the correlates of war project tracking 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001 and then used a polity project that assigns each country a democracy score some countries are better at democracy than others some democracies are more or less transparent sometimes their leaders are chosen openly sometimes there's more bribery and so forth and what they found was that when both countries are fully democratic that is they score high and the polity score of democracy disputes fell by 50% and when the last democratic pair member of a pair leaned toward autocracy they pulled the chance of a quarrel so as democracy increases violence decreases and that's a moral good and that's why we've seen moral progress in tracking the number of democracies that have grown since the 1980s more than doubled and the number of autocracies that have collapsed since the 1980s way way down or just take again it's kind of the low hanging fruit but we have to start somewhere just taking per capita GDP in North Korea versus South Korea North Korea it's $1,122 a year that's per capita GDP versus $19,614 which would you rather have it's quite dramatic in satellite pictures between South Korea and North Korea or in the height of about 5 inches difference between North Koreans and South Koreans because of their crappy diets in North Korea so democracies place more emphasis on individual rights and individual liberty than any other form of governance and that's why I think it's moral progress that we can actually say it's really actually absolutely better because because they use the individual more than other forms of governance as the guide for what's the right thing to do in a way so I'm just going to try this out I'm trying out different things by the way so if you want to stop by the booth this weekend and go I didn't like that idea or have you thought of trying it this way or I disagree with that or here's another example or whatever that's all going in the book so you're my database here so I think, so here's an idea I'm trying isn't democracy kind of an ask first principle that is an election is a way of asking voters how you feel about an act of legislation or a representative and they'll tell you at the voting booth of course you might get out voted that's just the way it goes but you get another election and you can throw the bums out and bring some new bums in so in a way I think democracy is a little bit like science and this is the argument nicely made by Timothy Faris yes this is the same Timothy Faris that writes all those wonderful books about astronomy and cosmology his last book is on the science of liberty democracy reason and the laws of nature the new government, our government like a scientific laboratory was designed to accommodate an ongoing series of experiments extending indefinitely into the future nobody could anticipate what the results might be so the government was structured not to guide society toward specified goal but to sustain the experimental process itself so in a way like you have all 50 different states trying 50 different slight variations on on election systems on tax rates and so forth there are little experiments you can run and then other states can try to model after that state and so forth and the idea is that nobody knows how to run a country so let's set it up like a scientific experiment and we'll just run the experiment over and over and over and keep collecting more data and tweak it and refine it and so forth in other words the constitution of human societies ought to be built on the constitution of human nature and science is the best tool we have for understanding the way our nature is so even though a science based moral system is not perfect it complements philosophical moral systems and allows us to employ empiricism and reason to understanding the moral universe so even though we can't do everything we can do something to bend the arc of the moral universe toward truth justice freedom and prosperity excuse me so I'll end this little essay on where we began and the inspiration for my book with who I consider to be the greatest speech writer and deliverer of all time in this his second most famous speech how long not long where he used this phrase I'm asking today how long will it take somebody's asking how long will prejudice blind divisions of men I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment however frustrating the hour it will not be long because truth will rise again how long not long because no lie can live forever how long not long because you shall reap what you sow how on the scaffold how ever on the thorn yes that scaffold sways the future behind the dim unknown stand its guard within the shadow keeping watch above his own how long not long because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice how long not long because my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the law he's trapping out the business of the rapper store he's loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible sword his truth is marching on he has founded force of trumpet that shall never call retreat he is testing out the hearts of men before his judgment seat or be swift my soul to answer him be tubeless my feet our God is marching on glory hallelujah you want to change the world learn to speak like that well obviously Martin Luther King used a lot of literary and biblical and religious references in his time that was fine I think as I'll show as we know religion is always behind the moral progress and the social changes that happen as in the gay marriage example and in fact it's secular values the enlightenment that's really driving this enlightenment is really what science is all about I use the word science in a much broader sense I mean not just empiricism and data collection and statistical tests and experimentation but reason and logic using the human mind and not turning to supernatural forces to bring about these changes we have to bring about these changes and I claim it's us the nuns the enlightened ones the secularists who are bringing these about so it's our job to go out thank you thank you so much Michael Sherman ladies and gentlemen Michael Sherman