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| AGENCY, FREEDOM, AND DIGNITY |
Dec 27th, 2009 1:20:21 am - Subscribe |
| Skinner sometimes writes as if inner conscious ideas, ideals, purposes, feelings, and choices simply do not exist (Blanshard and Skinner). At other times he makes an epiphenomenal (causally ineffective) place for inner activities like self-control, choice, agency, or autonomy. He recognizes that freedom of action is important because it allows individuals to avoid aversive or negatively reinforcing stimuli, but he can make no place for conscious moral agency. In Skinner’s view, human dignity consists of behaviors that cultivate the positive reinforcement of praise or credit from others for behaving well, or as others want them to behave. By contrast, most ethicists agree that human dignity involves conscious self-awareness, self-control, and rational persuasion. They abhor manipulative techniques that bypass these qualities, and they approve of educative and persuasive techniques that develop and appeal to them. Escaping aversive stimuli and cultivating social credit have their proper place, but most moral philosophers would balk at Skinner’s behavioral reduction of freedom and dignity to solicitous activity. Behavioral freedom means little without inner personal autonomy, and human dignity, however difficult to define, is something that persons constantly have as conscious persons; and it makes all people equals. Dignity is not just something that people possess during those rare moments when others credit them for behaving as they see fit. |
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