The Elephant in the Room: Free Will (PART ONE)
The Elephant in the Room: Free Will (PART ONE)
Behavior Analysts Can and Do Work on Increasing Free Will
Applied behavior analysis (ABA) sometimes gets a “bad rap” from different groups, but I love what I do because when ABA is performed correctly it can bring about meaningful changes in a person’s life. Behavior analysts work in a number of different professions, with the most popular specialty of working with children diagnosed with Autism. Behavior analysts (and the technicians they supervise) can teach people a wide range of important skills, from teaching our clients to communicate and regulating their emotions to socially interacting more appropriately. They teach others to become more adept at problem-solving and to learn independent skills, such as using the bathroom, eating, drinking, getting dressed, and sleeping without an adult. One of the most critical areas on which behavior analysts work is reducing challenging behaviors, such as self-injury and harming others. What I also believe behavior analysts do (knowingly or not) is teach clients to exercise their will freely and responsibly.
How is free will, from a Christian perspective, treated in ABA? We can do this by helping our clients to:
Make choices
Accept limits on what can be done with their free will
Tolerate frustrations
Practice self-discipline and inhibition
Flexibly respond
Overcome fears
Work through sensitivities
Practice responsibility for self and others
Follow rules (more on that another time)
Allow, moderate, or disavow emotions (i.e., emotional co-regulation and self-regulation)
Develop healthy habits (i.e., virtues)
Persevere in value-oriented committed actions even when there are difficulties (i.e., grit, resilience)
Even though there are many examples of clients growing in healthy and responsible freedom in ABA, there is still a cloud looming over our field which can make us question if a client is actually choosing to do something or if we just made a client choose something through our particular brand of science.
Is Anyone Actually Free?
Before anyone writes this off as a purely philosophical question, let me ask you to do something: Close your eyes for 10 seconds. Now…if you closed your eyes, you might think it was because I asked you to do it. If you did not close your eyes, you may think it was because you want to exercise your liberty to do something different than what someone asks you to do. Following instructions may feel to some that it imposes on their “freedom.” However, what materialism and radical behaviorism propose is that, whether you closed your eyes or not, it is still determined by a constellation of variables (i.e., your learning history, your biology, physics, the immediate environment in which you are, etc.). Notably, one of those variables is not your free will. In other words, the proposal pushed by Skinner and many others in behavior analysis is that we do not “author” our actions – we are a bewildering arrangement of atoms being tossed about in the sea of circumstance, or at best a bag of organic cells that behave in very fanciful ways at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom.
I seriously doubt that the majority of behavior analysts doing work with human beings actually believe or think consciously about this while doing the work that they do. In fact, I sincerely believe that many behavior analysts, Christian or otherwise, intuit the dignity of the human person and thus treat their capacity for freedom with deep respect. In fact, the current Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts underscores our core values with one of them being: “Treat Others with Compassion, Dignity, and Respect.” One of the sub-points is to promote the “clients’ self-determination to the best of their abilities” (p. 4). I think the majority of behavior analysts have a deep respect for the client’s capacity to self-determine, regardless of competing stimuli under and outside the skin. In other words, many of us believe our clients can act in ways that transcend our circumstances and contexts. It is admittedly difficult to remember this when we are actively helping some clients who have been referred to our services in part for this very reason – to act in freedom despite their circumstances and history.
What is Free Will or Freedom?
There are different definitions of “freedom” and “free will” with which we operate. Even the example of following rules as a demonstration of exercising free will may cause some to cough in disapproval. From a Catholic perspective, freedom is a responsibility to pursue what is objectively (not just subjectively or personally) good. Much of our American culture aims at counter-control in ridding ourselves of being “coerced” by rules. Rules can seem oppressive and coercive in both worldviews of materialism and free will because independence is prized in both perspectives. However, independence is not at odds with rules.
The fantasy is thinking that “if the rules were not there and I could do as I please, I would be independent.” The truth is something quite different. We begin to be independent as our own rules begin to develop inside and determine our behavior. These internal rules stem from a combination of parental rules, the rules of society, and original ones that we have accepted inside. We impose these rules on ourselves through our will power (Azcárate, 1973, p. 66).
Although the word “determine” is used above, Dr. Azcárate, a Catholic psychologist and the founder of my community of Youth Apostles, is actually proposing that we grow in independence (free will) when we respond in freedom to rules made for our own good and the good of others. When we follow rules, we actually become more independent and interdependent, rather than dependent. For Azcárate (1973), independence is actually described as “not just to choose freely, as we sometimes would like to think, but to choose the right thing using our own free will” (p. 66).
Regarding those who really believe we are just a smattering of particles bumping into one another or highly advanced mammals, I probably won’t be able to convince you otherwise here. There are plenty of others having that debate – a debate on which I may comment more in the future. Don’t get me wrong: physics and biology, especially studying other mammals, teaches us a lot about how we operate as human beings who do in fact have molecules, cells, organs, mammalian brains, etc. However, I turn this conversation to those who acknowledge that there is a major difference between a rock, a tree, a dog, and a person in terms of dignity and the capacity for freedom.
I would like to share a definition of free will (or “freedom”) with which you may or may not agree – hopefully it is found agreeable among most Christians and other faiths. Below is an excerpt from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), which is a compilation of official teachings of the Church and it is sourced from Sacred Scripture, writings from the Saints, and the earliest leaders in the Church. As a side note, some people wonder what the Church actually teaches — this is the thing to read (along with your Bible). The chapter in which this is found is titled “The Dignity of the Human Person.”
“Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God …” (CCC #1731)
God made us to be able to “initiate and control” our own behavior (CCC #1730); “it attains its perfection when directed toward God” (CCC #1731) and “is exercised in relationship between human beings” (CCC #1738). This is God’s great gift and responsibility given to us – “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1; CCC #1748). We are called to exercise our freedom for the good. Freedom is not the ability to say or do whatever we want, it is the ability to say and do as we ought to in accord with goodness (see CCC #1731, 1733).
If we are made for freedom, and that freedom is ultimately for the goodness of God, other human beings, and ourselves, it has major implications regarding those for whom we provide care in any human service industry. Every patient, client, customer, etc. is a person. This is wildly different from a clump of molecules or a really smart mammalian animal, but that is only possible when we adopt a worldview beyond the material and the organic – namely, to adopt the personalist worldview (Beauregard, 2015). We need “both the natural law tradition and personalism, which both set the human person, created in the image of God, as a norm for understanding oneself and for interacting with others” (Vitz, Nordling, & Titus, 2020, p. 258). The philosophy of personalism, even aside from a Christian lens, is far closer to the call for elevating human dignity. We are not determined by solely Newton’s physics or Darwin’s biology (Beauregard, 2015). We also have personhood which is immaterial and thus cannot be captured by a purely empirical, observational perspective. The religion of “scientism” (i.e., the religious belief that only science can present truth) will be a stumbling block to someone wishing to extend more reverence to the inviolable dignity of the human person.
May God bless you for reading (or even skimming) this far.
Sincerely,
The Catholic Behavior Analyst
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Bio & Disclaimer:
Joseph (Joey) Clem is a Catholic licensed behavior analyst in Virginia. He is a husband, father, and lifetime full member in Youth Apostles. He works primarily with children diagnosed with Autism and volunteers in youth ministry. This article does not constitute professional advice or services. All opinions and commentary of the author are his own and are not endorsed by any governing bodies, licensing or certifying boards, companies, or any third-party.
REFERENCES
Azcárate, E. M. (1973). Growth Through Independence. Clinical Proceedings of Children’s Hospital. Vol. 29, No. 3, March 1973
Beauregard, J. (2015). Neuroscientific free will: Insights from the thought of Juan Manuel Burgos and John Macmurray. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics, 3(1), 13-37
Behavior Analyst Certification Board. (2020). Ethics code for behavior analysts. https://bacb.com/wp-content/ethics-code-for-behavior-analysts/
CCC = Catechism of the Catholic Church (2012). Vatican City, Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Retrieved from https://www.usccb.org/sites/default/files/flipbooks/catechism/
Vitz, P., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology & Mental Health Practice. Divine Mercy University Press: Sterling, VA