ABSTRACT
Skinner vacillated between a “final-cause” evolutionary viewpoint and two versions of proximal causation: values are just reinforcers, and reinforcers just are or can be derived via respondent conditioning or conditioned reinforcement from a few primaries. There are problems with each of these approaches. The real problem is that Skinner wasn’t much interested in the problem of values, because he knew what he believed and thought that the main problem was in implementation: “To confuse and delay the improvement of cultural practices by quibbling about the word improve is itself not a useful practice.”
Philosophers have pointed out that the facts of science do not by themselves provoke action. Therapeutic drugs and preventive measures arise not from the fact of a disease but from a desire to cure it. Yet many scientists seem to think that correct values, and the actions that follow from them, are self-evident. They are not. On the other hand, every successful society relies on values that may well be essential to its success. The problem is, we cannot, for the most part, predict what those successful values are. All we know is that a successful culture must believe in some things it cannot prove. But science, even behavioral science, does not provide us with values, with ideas of what is good and bad.
