| The Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion was founded in 1940 to mobilize American intellectuals to defend democracy against Nazism and Communism. Its larger aim was to develop an "American conscience," an organizational solution to moral pluralism and a fragmented moral order. Sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary, it met for thirty years, providing a truly inclusive ethical dialogue between Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Secularists. Its president, Louis Finkelstein, hoped the Conference would become a "super-Thomas Aquinas or Maimonides" by synthesizing Judeo-Christian values with modern science, but it evolved into a pragmatic experiment in the ethics of process. Members included Harold Lasswell, Harlow Shapley, Richard McKeon, Robert MacIver, Lyman Bryson, and John Courtney Murray, with Talcott Parsons, Pitirim Sorokin, Hans Morgenthau, F.S.C. Northrop, Margaret Mead and Alain Locke associated with it.;The Conference is best known as the place where Mortimer Adler argued for a neo-Aristotelian foundation for democracy against Sidney Hook's scientific pragmatism, but neither Adler nor Hook participated after 1940. The Conference was not an attempt to impose traditionalist religion on American intellectual life, but rather to create a consensus on democratic ethics which would include religious and secular traditions. One of its major accomplishments was to help develop an inclusive ethic of "one-world," which would include non-Western traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism and which was a major alternative to Cold War realism. In this role the group was also closely associated with UNESCO.;The emphasis on the ethics of process operated effectively until the mid-1950s, when Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger asked them for a "Moral Framework of National Purpose." The Conference was unable to provide this framework, for process ethics could not provide moral principles of use to policy makers. The conflict between an ethics of process and an inclusive ethical universalism grounded in Judeo-Christian values was unresolved. In 1968 the group held its last meeting.;The Conference represents a prototype of inclusive dialogue, but in the end it demonstrates that pragmatist ethics are insufficient, and instead an inclusive ethical universalism, a progressive orthodoxy, is necessary to create a consensus on a normative American moral order. |
