How does reality show us what is ethical persuasion, or that ethical persuasion is objectively the correct approach? You need to convince me this chain of questioning won't lead to either:

-Pointing to a historical line of moral tradition and figures that hold a feeling of authoritativeness to us

-"Reality is reality" and an implicit appeal to yourself and your aura of "rationalistic candor" as the authority

Either way, I predict you'll ad-hom me for daring to ask the question... Because the most thoughtful option would be conceding that there's basically not a substantive enough basis for the virtue of ethical persuasion that makes it inherently part of science. And then, science isn't especially distinct in this way from any moral tradition that values ethical persuasion, and then your tribe loses some of its unique sense of popular appeal, and then society won't be as easily coerced into the shape you want it to be. And you understandably wouldn't want that.

You said in a cousin comment:

"It [science] is no more (or less) a religion than what we have now."

And I think this applies here also and flattens out the appeal to ethical persuasion into less of a rigid, dogmatic declaration of "reality". It's rather that you want to be ethically persuasive in your reporting and discourse of what we try to agree upon as scientific evidence, which I think is good of you as a matter of faith and instinct, but I do not accept as self-evidently inherent to the epistemological basis of science itself nor necessarily to reality if we try to approach this rationalistically and divorce ourselves from appeals to authority.

The only other direction I can see for you is to try to bum-rush past the Peripatetic Axiom, and say that something about "reality" is somehow bypassing the fallibility of our sense-data and instinctual human appeals to authority - and therefore absolutely rock-solid, utterly unmistakable to anyone sincere... And that would be like what we call "Divine Revelation" in the metaphysics business. Anything like it is a strictly religious dogma - anyone who questions that epistemology as some branches of philosophy do, becomes a heretic, someone who needs to just embrace the model and "get with the program" already.