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.
We would benefit from clearing up a couple of misunderstandings that arise from our traditional cultural conditioning. After that we can consider managing superstition. The misunderstandings concern reinforcers as rewards and the related question of bribery.
Love in not a “trait.” We could describe traits not as behaviors but as adjectives that others, who witnessed an event, turn into nouns when telling you about the event, which you never witnessed. If we take these nouns uncritically, they all too easily become fictional accounts for the behaviors that occurred in the un–witnessed event.
While the process of generalization enlarges the set of evocative stimulus relations, the process of evocation shrinks the set of evocative stimulus relations. The evocation process often reduces the number of stimuli that evoke the response of concern while making the remaining evocative stimuli more effective. Let’s consider to what these terms refer.
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.
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.
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.
