Our reinforcers are or become our values. The stimuli in various contingencies evoke our claims that we have rights regarding unrestricted access to these values, these reinforcers. Next, ethics involve the respecting of our rights claims for unobstructed access to our valued reinforcers.
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.
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.
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?
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.
