46 pages • 1 hour read
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
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Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Freedom”
Freedom is presented as the ability to avoid aversive conditions or negative reinforcers. Reflexes, such as pulling one’s hand away from a hot surface, are a simple example. Complex behaviors, such as running away from danger, function similarly and likely evolved to increase chances of survival. Other freedom-seeking behaviors are learned through operant conditioning—a process in which behaviors are rewarded or penalized through positive and negative reinforcers. Emergent behaviors may be passive, such as complying with an authority to avoid punishment, or more active, such as leaving or attacking the authoritarian force. Individuals may also practice displaced aggression, where aggression is taken out on an innocent party.
Skinner defines “literature of freedom” as writing designed to inspire people to free themselves from aversive control (29). It achieves this by emphasizing misery-inducing conditions, villainizing the individual or organized controllers causing the aversive conditions, and describing how to escape the aversive conditions, usually by discussing how to eliminate controlling forces. Without literature of freedom, people tend to submit to aversive control. Freedom-themed literature has contributed to society by reducing aversive social practices.
Freedom is often defined by the feelings it evokes. Skinner counters that this is not an effective way of defining freedom. Controllers can adopt non-aversive practices that prevent individuals from experiencing negative feelings, thus creating a false sense of freedom. For example, replacing slave labor with wage work creates a sense of freedom for the worker despite the individual performing similar behaviors. Such positive reinforcers are harder to recognize but are powerful forms of control. Positive reinforcers may have negative consequences, such as when governments promote self-destructive behaviors to encourage compliance. They can be misused, such as when enacted on a schedule; this encourages compliance with fewer or weaker reinforcers, exemplified by gambling systems. Addressing these negative consequences is difficult because they are delayed and are preceded by positive reinforcement, and those who suffer the consequences may feel oppressed when controlling forces are reduced: “The gambler objects to antigambling laws and the alcoholic to any kind of prohibition” (36).
Skinner asserts that behaviors are caused by antecedent circumstances and not by the feelings the behaviors evoke. Positive reinforcers are equally coercive as negative reinforcers. The Supreme Court of the United States briefly acknowledged this when the US moved to pay farmers for producing less food but later recognized that banning positive reinforcement is legally restrictive. Lotteries take advantage of this idea; lotteries, like taxes, supply the government with money, but without the negative feelings that accompany taxation. Such positive reinforcement negates freedom, although it is largely ignored by the literature of freedom.
Skinner cites an excerpt from Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) in which Rousseau advises teachers to impart a false sense of freedom in their pupils to encourage compliance. Others criticize this tactic, generalizing that such positive reinforcers are morally wrong. Control and freedom are inverses, but the generalization that all control is corrupt prevents a technology of human behavior.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Dignity”
Whereas freedom relates to the avoidance of aversive consequences, dignity requires positive behavioral reinforcement. Skinner writes: “When someone behaves in a way we find reinforcing, we make him more likely to do so again by praising or commending him” (44). Positive reinforcement may be either direct or conditioned, and humans evolved to practice reciprocal reinforcement. The credit a person is given for certain behaviors is determined by the visibility of the behavioral causes, and positive behaviors with apparent causes are less celebrated than behaviors with obscured causes. People are given more credit when they have visible reasons for behaving differently; for instance, celibate people are given credit for resisting love and lust.
Individuals use various tactics to preserve or intensify their dignity, such as obscuring causes of behavior, avoiding undignified actions, claiming an undesired behavior is irresistible, purposefully conquering temptations, or practicing self-flagellation. People preserve others’ dignity by minimizing behavioral causes, by gently criticizing instead of punishing, and by giving hints instead of answers or advice instead of orders. Dignity is tested by providing excuses for individuals to act undesirably. Skinner posits that people treat credit as a resource and that they avoid giving credit to undeserving behaviors, such as reflexes or individuals explicitly seeking commendation. Credit and punishment are given, Skinner argues, based on perceived deservedness.
Laudable behaviors with obscured causes are admired and attributed to free will. People strive for dignity as they strive for freedom, and a lack of dignity is aversive. The literature of dignity, Skinner argues, works to deride those who do not give due credit and to emphasize justice. The literature of dignity focuses on those who impede one’s claims to credit: “[W]e object to being told that the mountain we are about to climb is not really difficult, that the enemy we are about to attack is not really formidable, that the work we are doing is not really very hard” (55). Scientific advancements occasionally challenge dignity by making hardworking or courageous individuals seem “foolish.” This is where the literature of freedom and dignity differ, with the former advocating for ease and the latter for respectable toil.
Freedom is often prioritized over dignity. Reading and learning from others’ work used to be viewed as undignified and uncommendable, but this opinion was transient; learning through reading offered more freedom than learning through direct experience. Similarly, a technology of human behavior may initially seem demeaning because it prevents autonomous man for taking credit for their behaviors. Protesting such a science, Skinner posits, would postpone the honorable achievement of deciphering human behavior.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Skinner identifies freedom and dignity as influential social concepts but argues they are both illusory and inhibitive of a technology of behavior. Skinner uses consistent structures across Chapters 2 and 3. His arguments center on the idea that a thoroughly developed and properly employed technology of human behavior could create a utopian-like society; thus, anything that impedes such a technology is objectively impractical. He critiques the ideas of freedom and dignity by arguing that behaviors are caused by contingencies of reinforcement and not by feelings.
Skinner advances the discussion of Behavioral Determinism Versus the Autonomous Man by reinforcing that all behavior is conditioned and determined. He uses examples to make the material more relatable and provides working scenarios to demonstrate the relationship between controllers, controlees, behaviors, and reinforcers.
Skinner uses logos, or a logical sequence of points, in his assertions that freedom and dignity are illusory, and draws on the ideas of freedom and dignity, respectively, to support his positioning. He argues that if all behavior is determined, if both positive and negative reinforcers are coercive, and if any control negates freedom, then freedom is an imaginary social construct. A similar but shorter chain of logic demonstrates that dignity and credit are false—if behavior is determined, then giving someone credit is illogical. He elucidates the illusory natures of freedom and dignity through discussions on literature. He portrays the literature of freedom and dignity as having significant social and political influence, as they promote the arguably misunderstood concepts of freedom and dignity. Skinner asserts: “The literature of freedom has made an essential contribution to the elimination of many aversive practices in government, religion, education, family life, and the production of goods” (31). As with the overarching concepts of freedom and dignity, the literature of freedom and dignity impede a technology of behavior by insisting that intentional control is corrupt.
Skinner addresses the ethics of intentional control by arguing that non-scientific approaches to control produce unwanted or destructive consequences. The ethical considerations of lotteries and taxation, for example, are called into question. Lotteries provide a false sense of freedom; the government employs lotteries to increase its revenue with seemingly less force than implementing higher taxes. In other words, citizens, particularly those who do not have a strong understanding of statistics, are coerced via positive reinforcers into giving the government additional money. While society generally regards intentional control as unethical, Skinner feels that, when a scientific approach is taken by the controlling power, control is ethical. A secondary ethical implication that emerges implicitly is the concept of awareness. Skinner suggests that it is unethical to use low-visibility methods of controlling behavior. Thus, a technology of behavior would provide a framework for consensual behavioral control, as opposed to the current reliance on freedom and dignity, both of which obscure behavioral causes.
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