Freedom as the Absence of Aversive Stimuli

What it is

Two practical claims follow from the redefinition, and they are the reason the book caused the trouble it did.

The first is that control and punishment are necessary features of any society and should be understood as instruments to be designed well, rather than as evils to be abolished. On Skinner's account the choice is never between control and its absence. It is between control that is planned and control that is not.

The second is the argument against what he calls autonomous man, the inner agent to whom choices are attributed. That agent, he says, is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way, and it dissolves as understanding grows. His own formulation is that science does not dehumanise man, it dehumunculises him.

Human nature in this account is an evolved adaptation to an environment, so the only way to change a person is to change the environment.

In effect

The two halves of the argument have had very different afterlives, and separating them is the useful thing this page can do.

The redefinition is widely regarded as winning by construction. If freedom just is the absence of aversive stimuli, then a person under complete but non-aversive control is maximally free, which is precisely the case most people using the word intend to rule out. Stipulating the meaning of the contested term does not settle the argument it was contested in.

The homunculus argument is stronger and survives independently of the definition. Explaining behaviour by appeal to an inner agent who chooses is not an explanation, and that point is now common ground well outside behaviourism.

As for reception, the intellectual historian Peter Watson judges that Skinner's ideas proved nowhere near as influential as those of Rawls, Nozick or Hayek, mainly because in the American civil rights context freedom and justice were taken to be the same thing. That judgement is his, is unfootnoted, and is plausible as an account of reception rather than of merit.

The programme that did survive is the design-the-environment half, stripped of the metaphysics, which is recognisable today as choice architecture.

What it does not say

It is not a finding. Nothing here was measured. It is a philosophical argument by a psychologist who thought much traditional philosophy was wrong, and the tension between those two facts is the interesting thing about the book.

It does not show that freedom does not exist. It defines the word so that a particular answer follows, which is a different and much weaker move.

It does not stand or fall with the homunculus argument. That argument is independent and has aged considerably better.

And nothing in this page inherits authority from the intellectual history it reaches this publication through. That book is a map rather than a source, its apparatus is under one per cent peer-reviewed and it carries no bibliography, so it is cited only for the fact that the idea existed and mattered.

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