In the heyday of temperance reform, temperance – like women’s suffrage and abolitionism – stood in the foreground of the progressive reform agenda, and temperance reformers believed themselves to be basing their actions on the latest scientific research and on up-to-date sound philosophical arguments, specifically the prominent philosophy of Scottish common-sense realism. Their biblical and scientific arguments took place in a larger philosophical and cultural context which sheds light not only on temperance, but on other nineteenth-century reforms.