An ethical perspective on operant conditioning.

Since 1960, American behavioral scientists and clinicians have widely endorsed behavior modification techniques based on learning theory. A large segment of these specialists has been particularly interested in the use of response-focused operant conditioning. Because of its popular acceptance, its nature, its effectiveness, and its rapid application as a clinical method for effecting behavioral change, operant conditioning deserves the ethical scrutiny that some scientists are now giving it. If ethics may be defined as "the systematic study of the nature of value concepts and of the general principles that justify the application of value judgments to human affairs" (L. J. West, p. 229, 1969), some scientists are wondering about this technique which aims to engineer preselected, specific changes in the behavior of human beings. With only rare exceptions it is the psychodynamically oriented scientists who are questioning the values inherent in operant conditioning. They are raising their questions not solely out of ignorance,