Science and Moral Choice discusses how scientific thought relates to moral thought. Most philosophers accept that the central problem in modern thought has been our failure to adequately integrate scientific thought with moral thought and other areas within the humanities. The author takes the position that scientific thought and moral thought are not fundamentally different in character: both base their conclusions on empirical evidence as well as purposeful choice. The author discusses a broad range of ideas that show how an integration of scientific thought and moral thought can be achieved. The book is accessible to specialist and non-specialist alike, and discusses some controversial contemporary issues. Dr. Icenogle received his doctorate in biophysical chemistry from Cornell University. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Authors Guild. He has been profiled in Marquis Whos Who in America. We are faced with many choices in our lives, choices as to what to believe and what to do. Moral thinking arises because we want to make good choices. How do we make these decisions? What do we need to know to make good decisions? The two sources of moral thinking that have dominated the West are the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and Greek philosophy. The Jewish religion began with Abraham, originally of Ur, in Mesopatamia, early in the second millennium B.C., and Christianity was founded by Jesus of Nazareth during the first century A.D. The first major figure in Greek philosophy was Socrates, of Athens, who lived during the fifth century B.C. Socrates was able to show people through questioning and analysis that they had not thought carefully about their ideas and choices. This questioning and analysis became a process by which Socrates could develop ideas of greater depth and supposedly greater truth than had previously been developed, and the importance of his work lay as much or more with the development of this process as it did with the answers he proposed to specific questions. This analytical approach to wisdom was further developed in the work of Plato and Aristotle. The ideas of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition originally developed independently of Greek philosophy, but Jewish and Christian religious ideas were eventually fused with the ideas of the ancient Greeks in the grand synthesis that defined Western culture in the Middle Ages. It was a time of intellectual and cultural unity in the West. The philosophical synthesis of the Middle Ages was to a great extent the work of the thirteenth-century Scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas. He based his work on the philosophy of Aristotle and the Christian religion, and showed that the two traditions could be successfully integrated. The thinking of Aristotle and Thomas is still a dominant force in modern culture. However, the cultural and philosophical unity of the Middle Ages was broken by the changes that occurred during the Renaissance, the Reformation, and, finally, the Enlightenment. The thinkers of the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries strove to develop a modern philosophy based on the principles and methods of the natural sciences. The results of that attempt have been decidedly mixed. While modern science has become successful in explaining the natural world in terms of universal principles, modern philosophy has become fragmented. The main alternatives to traditional beliefs that modern philosophy has given us are such agnostic and atheistic philosophies as existentialism, Marxism, and scientific materialism. Existentialism finds its way into our culture directly through the works of existentialist writers and indirectly through the social sciences by academic schools such as the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and others. Marxism has dominated the present and former communist countries, and makes its way into American culture especially through the radical political philosophies—the ideologies of the left. Scientific materialism is an interpretation of science that sees only science as producing meaningful knowledge and understands scientific theories as implying the universe is solely a physical mechanism. These challenges to traditional beliefs have resulted in large part from the changes in our understanding of the world engendered by the advances in science and the new views in philosophy developed at the time of the Enlightenment. These ideas have been advanced, critiqued, and altered up to the present time. Some of the new ideas in philosophy have passed the test of time and become part of our traditional thinking. However, modern philosophy has failed to establish a consensus on both the nature of reality and what should be considered right and wrong. Many of the political philosophies that have been developed in the modern era have supported some of the most cruel and autocratic governments in mans history. Science and Moral Choice takes the viewpoint that a primary reason for these problems is that, at the time of the Enlightenment, philosophers made fundamental errors in their thinking, and these errors permeate modern thought. A better approach than that which modern philosophy has taken is to return to the traditional system of thought and make changes in that system so as to make it consistent with what we have learned from science. Science and Moral Choice outlines this task for moral philosophy, the study of ethics and politics, and does this in part by building upon and critiquing the work of the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who adopts a similar approach to doing philosophy and is an apologist for the traditional philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas. Adlers books are written for the general reader and provide a ready source of additional reading to help the reader understand the argument in Science and Moral Choice; indeed, Icenogle has taken care to make sure that almost all of his references are to sources that are understandable to the general reader and dont require specialized training. Although Icenogle accepts most of the ideas that Adler presents, a key point in Icenogles argument is to take exception to Adlers contention that there must be a radical difference in kind between human and nonhuman animals, this difference being the possession of an immaterial intellect by humans that is not possessed by nonhuman animals, which Adler sees as a necessary feature of traditional philosophy. Icenogle argues that this isnt necessary, and that the contradiction that appears to arise from accepting the existence of an immaterial intellect in man but denying the existence of a radical difference in kind between humans and nonhuman animals is analogous to that which arises in a famous thought experiment in physics known as Maxwells demon, and that solutions to the problem of reconciling traditional philosophy with science are thus intimately connected to solutions to that problem in physics, solutions which underlie our thinking about perhaps the most fundamental of all laws in physics, chemistry, and biology—the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This is an interesting, indeed striking, feature of the metaphysical aspects of the argument in the book. Overall, the book presents a challenging, relevant, and exciting picture of what moral thinking can and ought to be. Science and Moral Choice is written to be an interesting and informative book for the general reader. The reader need not be a specialist in either philosophy or science, although more knowledge in these areas will make the force of the argument more apparent. The author addresses the practical problems of individuals as well as problems that impact larger groups of people. While the main focus of the book is philosophy, the author discusses a great deal of science, particularly topics in the natural sciences that are often ignored in discussions of human values. The book not only examines a particular viewpoint on moral issues, but also helps the reader to organize his own thinking about the choices he must make. It discusses much theory, but it is also a practical book to be used by practical people.
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