Human Dignity and Bioethics

The Mystery of the Human Soul | 65
states as well as for robotics and artificial intelligence. Indeed, if we
jump ahead a few centuries, we can see that B. F. Skinner’s “behaviorism”
is a development of Hobbes’s scientific materialism and suffers
from many of the same problems.
Like Hobbes, Skinner is critical of those who bemoan the loss of
man’s lofty place in the universe and worry about the human soul.
In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972), he responds to C. S. Lewis’s
fears about “the abolition of man” by saying that the only thing “being
abolished is autonomous man—the inner man…defended by the
literatures of freedom and dignity; his abolition is long overdue.” 3
Commenting as well on fears that he lowers humans to the level
of animals, Skinner says: “‘animal’ is a pejorative term only because
‘man’ has been made spuriously honorific…whereas the traditional
view supports Hamlet’s exclamation, ‘How like a god!’ Pavlov, the
behavioral scientist, emphasized, ‘How like a dog!’ But that was a
step forward.” 4 Of course, Skinner adds, “man is much more than
a dog, but like a dog he is within range of scientific analysis.” In
his campaign to deflate human dignity, Skinner cites as progress the
impact of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud in diminishing the special
status of humanity. But why is this progress?
Like Hobbes, Skinner favors scientific materialism because it
gives a realistic, naturalistic view of man and is more conducive to
the survival and material welfare of the human species than earlier
conceptions. Skinner develops Hobbes, however, by adding the theory
of “behavior modification” through the reinforcement of values
in a controlled environment like his notorious “Skinner box”—an
invention influenced by Rousseau’s ideas about highly controlled
social environments and Darwin’s ideas about evolutionary change
in response to natural environments.* While recognizing the role of
genetic inheritance, behavioral scientists like Skinner believe human
nature is more malleable than Hobbes thought, and they consciously
seek to modify man in new ways for the benefit of the human
species.
The difficulty for Skinner is that the use of science to get outside
of nature leads to a major contradiction in his scientific materialism:
* The Skinner box is an idea that Skinner may have developed from Rousseau’s
Emile (1762), a work that features the role of a tutor as the invisible manipulator
of the child’s environment; see Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, pp. 89, 124.