Talk:The Moral Arc

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but in the end, the individual natural rights to survive and flourish of sentient beings, [is] what counts[edit]

This quotation: "Shermer has stated that "[his] thesis is not for inevitable moral progress, we have to earn it, fight for it and argue for it." and that he used "a lot of Utilitarian thinking, but in the end, the individual natural rights to survive and flourish of sentient beings, [is] what counts". That might be an intrinsic sentiment of the book, but what a grammatical nightmare! Firstly I will change [is] to [are] because the subject "rights" is plural, not singular. I think also [to] should go before "flourish", but that then makes the phrase "of sentient beings" impossibly awkward. The infinitive "to flourish" cannot take a prepositional phrase. I'm also going to replace [his] with [my], since he is referring to his own thesis, not someone else's. These are common problems when transcribing verbal communication into written form, but I'd prefer to have the whole quote thrown out and replaced with a quote from the book. The thing is barely intelligible, and should probably be deleted if a suitable replacement cannot be found. Tumacama (talk) 16:29, 8 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]