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An Ethics for Behaviour Modification
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
To assure ourselves of the benefits of the theory and practice of behaviour modification, and to avoid the dangers, which are obviously immense, we urgently need a comprehensively critical ethical theory, on the basis of which what is good for individuals and for society may be reasonably determined on the evidence, and not depend simply on arbitrary flat or the whim of the majority or arty powerful group. Once such a theory is outlined, it will, I am afraid, be found to be incompatible at first sight with the theoretical basis usually taken to underlie the most sophisticated techniques of behaviour modification. However, I shall argue that an appropriately restricted and modified behaviourism will be quite consistent with the required ethical theory.
In reading the literature on this and related topics, one is made most painfully aware of the yawning gap which there is in the place where a rational ethics ought to be. (If anyone is to be blamed for this, it is the moral philosophers rather than the psychologists.) One can hardly wonder at the fear expressed by some members of the public that, the more efficient our techniques of behaviour modification become, the less notion we have of what ends we ought to aim at, what states of affairs we ought to avoid, in our employment of such techniques.
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- Copyright © 1981 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The change of fashion in this matter can be said to have begun with the article by Philippa Foot, ‘Moral Beliefs Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1958-9.
2 This criterion was suggested by a team of psychologists and psychiatrists which studied the problem.
3 For this useful label of a common trick of argument, see Stevenson, C. L., Ethics and Language, New Haven, 1943Google Scholar.
4 I cannot now find the source for this view attributed to Skinner.
5 Lewis, C.S., That Hideous Strength, London 1955, p 243.Google Scholar
6 See the rather artless comments by Kuhn, T. S., in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1962, p 169.Google Scholar
7 For this account of knowledge, see B. J. F.Lonergan, Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, London 1957. It will be obvious, however, that my argument here does not depend upon the details of Lonergan's account.
8 For some rather alarming instances, seeLaing, R. D. and Esterson, A., The Families of Schizophrenics, London 1964.Google Scholar
9 For a working‐out of the suggestion that the patient should be regarded as analogous to a scientist, see Bannister, D. and Fransella, F., Inquiring Man. The theory of Personal Constructs, Harmondsworth, 1977.Google Scholar
10 For these dispositions, and the ‘transcendental precepts’ to put them into operation, see Lonergan, Method in Theology, London 1972, Chapter I.
11 Ibid, pp 16–17.
12 The term is due to Lonergan Insight, pp 619–24. It seems worth using a special term, since ‘autonomy’ or merely ‘freedom’ have too many associations which may mislead.
13 Of those who have spelled out in detail what this amounts to, Sir Karl Popper is perhaps the best known. See Bryan Magee, Popper, Harmondsworth 1973.
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15 Skinner identified the good with the positively reinforcing, B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, London 1972, p 107. P. Harzem and T. R. Miles complain that this claim is highly questionable, and that Skinner does not support it. Conceptual Issues in Operant Psychology, Chichester 1978, p 59. My own view is that Skinner is quite correct so far as what is positively reinforcing for a person or animal constitutes important data on what is good for him or it; ceteris paribus, what you like is good for you, and someone who denied this would be so far ignorant of the meaning of ‘good’. It is interesting that Skinner's view on this matter seems not unlike that of Thomas Aquinas, Sutnma Theologica, xciv, 2.
16 Since patients are positively reinforced in being preoccupied with their fantasies.
17 See Skinner, op. cit., passim.
18 New York 1953.
19 Descartes, the Occasionalists, Hume, and Kant were all preoccupied with it; and it cannot be said that contemporary philosophers have abandoned the topic. Cf. The Philosophy of Action, ed. A. R. White, Oxford 1968.
20 Harzem and Miles say that this kind of attack is due to failure to look at such conceptions in the language‐game which is their proper home op. cit. p 104; to call a person ‘free’ is to deny that he is subject to external coercion, and plainly people are sometimes thus ‘free’, p 108. But, on behalf of Skinner, one might urge that certain beliefs and assumptions are often involved in the playing of such language‐games; thus, when it is claimed that people are absolutely speaking free rather than unfree, it is often being implied that, even when all the circumstances are taken into account, they are yet sometimes capable of acting in another way than that in which in fact they do. In that case, there is more justification for his regarding the non‐existence of human freedom as a ‘hypothesis’Science and Human Behaviour, p 447, Than Harzem and Miles seem prepared to grant, op. cit. 107.
21 ‘Stating the matter in the most selfish light, I have been trying to get the reader to behave verbally as I behave. What teacher, writer, or friend does not’? Skinner, Verbal Behaviour, New York 1957, p 455, cited by Harzem and Miles, op. cit. p 106.
22 Harzem and Miles, op. cit. p 51. For purposes of evaluation, one may infer, the description of behaviour would have to contain rather more ‘extra‐episodic words’ibid, pp 61–3 than it would for purposes of reinforcement or extinction.
23 If behaviour is to be valued primarily as expressive of the agent's effective freedom, and in potential causal relation to the effective freedom of others, its description will have to be characterised by a fairly high proportion of extra‐episodic words.
24 On moral ambiguity, see Meyncll, H., Freud, Marx and Morals, London 1981, chapter 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 see C. S. Lewis, op. cit. p 46. ‘… desert was finite: you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was.
26 i.e. effective freedom which is such as to foster, rather than impugn, the effective freedom of others.
27 How far the actual situation falls short of the ideal may be gathered from the Colour Supplement of The Observer, 14.9.1980.