No BF to Existentialists

As mentioned at various times in these blogs, in order to keep my home library of old-fashioned paper-and-ink books from exceeding my shelf capacity (“add more bookshelves” is no longer a desirable option), my rule-of-thumb is to keep a book only if in principle I might re-read it. Newly finished books that I never willingly would read again even if I had boundless time are not shelved at all. As I acquire new “keepers,” marginal titles on the shelves are culled out so the total shelved number (some 2500) remains about the same. In truth, most of the remaining books will not be re-read either simply because of limited time. However, if I’ve culled properly, any one of them ought to be re-readable if plucked out at random. I test the matter with some frequency by making just such random plucks, usually about one per week.

One recent out-pluck had been sitting on my shelf un-reread since 1972 when I was in college: Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner. Back then it inspired a 20-page paper (see pic of cover page) that I wrote for an English class. The class was specifically for honing writing skills (i.e. it wasn’t a literature or general grammar class), and one of the assignments was a +-20 page research paper; the topic didn’t matter, since it was to be judged on form and presentation rather than content per se. The paper (The Conversion of a Reluctant Behaviorist) was an overview of Behaviorism that mostly cited Skinner’s formal studies but also referred to Beyond Freedom and Dignity. I did not know until afterward when she handed me back the graded paper and discussed it with me that the professor had been a student of BF Skinner. (What were the odds on that?) Perhaps that helped on the grade despite the supposed “content doesn’t matter” standard. It probably would not have helped had I mentioned I was lying… sort of. It simplified my task (hey, I had work to do in other classes) to explain straightforwardly how I found the tenets of Behaviorism to be convincing despite my initial misgivings. Adding a “yes, but” detailing my remaining misgivings required more nuance, more research, and more plain old work than I really wanted to put into this paper. Yet I had reservations then and still do.

My 2020 re-read hasn’t changed my opinion much. I was baffled by the book then, and I’m still at something of a loss today. I’ll say up front that I have a lot of respect for Skinner, the research scientist. He has more than proved his case that the Behaviorist school of psychology has a lot of merit. Though best known for his animal studies (e.g. the classic Superstition in the Pigeon), he argued the results are readily applicable to humans. In many ways they prove to be so. (Apparent failures in the technique on any one human are attributed to a lack of full information on that person’s reinforcement schedules outside the lab.) He turns the usual approach to psychology on its head (pun intended) by not tending first to the mind. Change the behavior via the proper reinforcement schedule, he says, and let the psyche take care of itself. If we like a behavioral change, our general mental state is likely to improve too. The approach is not without successes.

However, Beyond Freedom and Dignity is not about treating individuals. It is about treating society, and so it is political philosophy, not “science” despite the frequency with which he uses the word to dismiss anyone who disagrees with him as unscientific. Skinner is a strict determinist who doesn’t believe in free will.

I think I need to sketch out one personal view, which informs my response to this book: in my opinion the whole discussion of determinism and free will is academic. It’s a bit like discussions of whether time is real or if it is just an illusion created by the perception of entropy: as a practical matter, tomorrow will arrive for us whether the passage of time is “real” or not, so we’d better be ready for it and we’d better pay our bills before the end of the month. As for free will, as a practical matter we have it, whatever the ultimate underlying cosmic reality might be. We have to hold people accountable for their choices, which means we have to assume people make them. We can’t ignore criminal behavior, for example, on the grounds that the criminal had no choice or culpability because the crime was already built into the structure of the universe – were that true, Jeffrey Epstein, for one, ought never have been arrested. I am not about to surrender my freedom of choice because a determinist says I don’t have any. As a practical day-to-day matter I do. (Notice that “to surrender” also would be a choice.) It is notoriously hard to define consciousness – the meta-state of not only knowing but knowing that one knows – but it is safe to say that human minds are more complex than those of pigeons. We can consciously choose to alter our behavior even if the reinforcements remain the same. It’s not always easy, as any addict will tell you, but we can do it.

Skinner argues that since there is no such thing as freedom or autonomous beings, we should chuck the whole idea of personal liberty out the window and organize society on scientific principles (aka his principles) with a structure of reinforcements that would maximize human happiness. I’m not quite sure how we could choose to do that, since by his own argument we don’t really choose anything – what we do or don’t do is already predetermined. And whose definition of happiness?

Once again, I respect the work by Skinner that actually is scientific, but I can’t help thinking that in this book he has gone seriously wrong somehow. Skinner personally might have been a kind-hearted soul who genuinely wished for human happiness, but it’s not hard to see how easily his philosophy can be coopted by less kindly authoritarians. Besides, kindly authoritarians are often the most dangerous of all.

Will Beyond Freedom and Dignity go back on the shelf? Probably. I keep a lot of books with which I disagree. I’ll let it sit for a while longer on my desk, though, while I consider it.

BF on pigeons and people