Autonomy from the Viewpoint of Teleological Behaviorism

Summary

INTRODUCTION

I will argue that the autonomy of a particular act of a particular person depends on the pattern of behavior in which it is embedded. I call this conditional autonomy. A person's act is conditionally autonomous or not, relative to other acts at other times. Consider an example of a person crossing the street. On the one hand, this act might not be done for its own sake, but may fit into some ongoing long-term behavioral pattern that is personally beneficial to the person crossing the street—such as regularly buying groceries in the supermarket (which happens to be across the street). On the other hand, crossing the street might be done simply for its own sake. If such an act were considered to be autonomous, regardless of its temporal context, its autonomy would be unconditional. However, I will argue that whereas conditional autonomy is a highly useful social concept, indeed a necessary concept, for any human society, unconditional autonomy is a useless concept that actually impedes our efforts to understand and explain human behavior.

Before making this argument I need to discuss the psychological viewpoint from which it comes, a viewpoint I call teleological behaviorism. In order to do this, I first need to distinguish between cognitive psychology and behavioral psychology (as I understand these terms), and then, to distinguish between Skinnerian behaviorism (the form of behaviorism that most people are familiar with) and teleological behaviorism.