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In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence HasDeclined (Viking, 2011), Steven Pinker argues on the basis of various statisticsthat there is a general tendency of decrease in violence, and that this is partly brought about by the change of moral attitudes. Pinker then asks whether the existence of this trend supports moral realism. This paper examines thisquestion, and tentatively offers an affirmative answer. The answer depends on the success of an argument, a premise of which asserts that the best explanation of this tendency hypothesizes that moral realism is true, and people come to recognize moral truth. This premise is controversial because there are apparent alternative explanations. The change of moral judgments might be brought about either by non-cognitive processes or by the recognition of non-moral truths. The most plausible realist strategy is to hold reductive naturalism,arguing that moral judgments are about individual well-being, of which human beings have become more informed through empirical discovery.
