This unfolding 72 article set deals with deeper topics in the science of behaviorology. Most of these topics concern initial scientific answers for some of humanity’s ancient questions, because the ancient—and many current—answers to these questions remain inadequate. The ancient–question topics include values, rights, ethics, morals, language, consciousness, personhood, life, death, and reality. Some more recent topics also receive some coverage, topics such as the Law of Cumulative Complexity, robotics, evolutions, and experimental and applied research methods. Another set of 72 unfolding articles titled “Mysteries of Living” covers more basic topics.
Welcome to more columns scientifically exploring some of the mysteries of life and living, especially the behavior–related mysteries. Welcome to “more” columns, because this new set of columns follows an earlier set that was titled simply “Exploring Mysteries of Living.”
The particular difficulty with normal human–behavior examples centers on their inevitable complexity. Every realistic example contains numerous factors and effects. Many of these regularly interact with each other. While an example illustrates one or another concept or point, these other factors and effects continue to demand explanation as well. Meeting such demands would expand each example far too much, and would get me into trouble with editors or publishers.
Consider a little detail on some superseded alternatives from the early days of behaviorology. This can help clarify the current directions of this science. Across the over 100 years of its existence, several types of behaviorism sequentially grappled, with increasing success, with the question of how, effectively, to handle private events.
This column begins our coverage of initial scientific answers to some of humanity’s ancient but as yet inadequately answered questions. Like love, back in column 27 of the first set, these topics face traditional opposition to the notion that science can address them. A sequence of topics becomes our first focus. The full interrelated sequence covers reinforcers, values, rights, ethics, and morals.
We define a right as unhindered access to a value, to a reinforcer. This definition comes from the contingencies, often of deprivation or coercion, that compel particular forms of verbal behavior, forms that we call statements about rights. These rights statements often take the form of claims regarding unhindered access to valued reinforcers.
While the term values refers to reinforcers, and the term rights refers to access to values (i.e., to claims of access to reinforcers) the term ethics refers to respecting those rights claims for clear access to valued reinforcers. We define ethical behavior as behavior respectful of rights claims. Those who respect our rights claims earn the label, “ethical” or, rather, their behavior of respecting our rights claims earns the label, “ethical behavior,” and we appreciate the ethics we say they “show” by respecting our rights claims.
No mystical accounts achieve status as relevant explanations of values, rights, or ethics. The same applies to morals. Before we move on to that topic, however, consider an additional and common aspect of ethics. Most of our discussion so far pertains to ethics among people with fairly equal peer status. But what about ethics when some of those involved hold power of some sort over the others?
Ethical behaviors not only respect others’ rights claims but also, as contingency processes generalize their scope, some aspects of them take on the status of characteristics of stimuli, especially characteristics that cannot stand alone. Our verbal conditioning then evokes our speaking of this new status as abstraction. This phenomenon exceeds the usual conditioned reach of our “ethics” term, and so evokes a different term. The conditioned term for ethics at an abstract level is morals, akin to the “redness” of our next, simpler, example.
That abstract status of morals, as verbal stimuli, somewhat divorces them from the contingencies that generate them. This can lead to problems just as rules that no longer reflect the contingencies that they describe—because the contingencies have changed—can lead to problems.
So, how does the natural science of behavior make discoveries? How does it apply those discoveries to bring practical benefits to people? What experimental equipment and methods does it employ in its basic and applied research? The next several columns consider the answers to these questions in terms of the standard research equipment and procedures of both the classic behavior–research laboratory and the practical research for applied settings and interventions.
