Volume 12.1

 THESIS _xii

A Philosophical Review

Volume 12 • Number 1

September, 2004

                                      

Inside this Issue:                                                              

David Langston

INTITIAL COMMENTS ON LIBERAL EDUCATION AND VALUE RELATIVISM                                                                                               

                                                                               

Zach Natale

INTENTION: THE NECESSARY REQUIREMENT                                                                                                                                

Tom Byrne

ON THE VITALITY OF BEHAVIORISM

A Response to Silliman                                                                             

Matt Silliman

ON OUR BEST BEHAVIORISM

Reply to Byrne                                                                                                                                 

Maura Mills

WORKPLACE DRUG TESTING AS A VIOLATION OF PRIVACY                                                                                         

Initial Comments on
Liberal Education and Value Relativism by Patrick Malcolmson, Richard Myers, and Colin B. O'Connell
(Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).

David Langston

While exploring the merits of a book, Liberal Education and Value Relativism, as a potential summer reading choice for entering students, Matt Silliman invited me to summarize my response to the book for those readers of Thesis XII who have taken an interest in its view of liberal education. After reading some of the book's salient portions, I found that the authors have a noble goal in view: to preserve liberal education from being swallowed by vocational training, ideological and dogmatic instruction, and a spectrum of base-metal substitutes for liberal education the authors call "value relativism." The book has the virtue of presenting its arguments in clear, focused prose that would provoke discussion and further critical thought -- or so one would hope for its role as a summer reading.

At the same time, I grew restive and dismayed on more than one occasion by the terms the authors use to advance their thesis, and I finally put the book down with the conclusion that if liberal education depended on the definitions advanced by the authors, then it would fail -- and moreover, it perhaps deserved to fail.

The authors rest their case on a disabling starting point that is audacious in its simplicity, not only in its articulation but also in the ramifications on display as the authors blithely extend their analysis through a range of epistemological options. I hope that the problematic starting point will be abundantly clear from the following excerpt:

Value relativism is a doctrine that holds that all judgments of value are "subjective" in the sense that they are relative to the time, culture, and personality of the subject who makes them. Hindus see cows as sacred, for example, while most North Americans see cows as potential cheeseburgers. According to the value relativist, neither view is "true" in any objective sense. In fact, there is no such thing as truth -- the world is merely a collection of equally arbitrary value judgments.

Because the doctrine of value relativism holds that there are no universally and permanently true answers to the great questions of human existence, it poses a direct and deadly challenge to the possibility of liberal education. On the theoretical plane, relativism renders the quest for human wisdom pointless. And psychologically speaking, relativism creates the most debilitating teaching environment possible for students not inclined to pursue in any serious way questions for which they believe there are no true answers. (LE&VR 20)

The grounding opposition between "subjective" and "objective," as the primary distinction for analyzing value judgments, is in itself an exceedingly weak foundation. Not only have numerous twentieth-century philosophers found that distinction to be almost meaningless, but the cluster of people who have grounded their evaluations of the world in "objectivity" have anything but a distinguished track record, in part because they place a particular worldview on the pedestal of "objective universal." But, I thought to myself, the authors probably already know that because they put the problematic terms in quotation marks. But that momentary confidence was irreparably shaken when I encountered that revelatory sentence: "On the theoretical plane, relativism renders the quest for human wisdom pointless." Now, even the most dedicated Platonists and Thomists have at least had the humility to accept that while wisdom may be objective, it is only gained through a quest that is prone to making mistakes and wandering frequently from the true path. Such philosophers have further held that wisdom is not known in advance and, further still, that making the quest produces wise judgments. So when our intrepid authors, Malcomson and friends, contend that the quest for wisdom is pointless at the outset unless one already has a particular kind of goal clearly in view, I find the credibility of their argument virtually disappears. Or, I wonder, are they playing a game of sophistic logic that is decried by liberal learning?

Liberal learning emphasizes the quest for wisdom, not seizing it, conserving it, or brandishing it about boastfully. Liberal learning is modest in its claims, and it emphasizes the ground-clearing critique that is the necessary precondition for the quest for true wisdom. Our authors praise Socrates as a model of reasoning, but their attitude toward relativism suggests that they read Socrates the wrong way -- as though he began questioning the youth of Athens with a picture of the wisdom they should be exercising clearly in his mind. Socrates is a stronger and more enduring model if we regard the process of Socratic dialogue as an open-ended process that will treat all conclusions as provisional (rather than "universal" and "permanent") because every claim will be subjected to still further testing and interrogation. A good liberal arts college places those values, not the confirmation of universal and permanent wise sayings, as the foundation of its project.

To summarize, I find the judgments assembled above in our sample text troublingly simple-minded and reductive. The authors seem to be blissfully -- or perhaps perversely -- ignorant of several competing alternatives that are neither so starkly pessimistic nor so absolute about the human prospect. For one, the authors ignore the view that considers our values to be both historically constructed and progressively improved (and improvable). Equally, the authors skip over the view that value judgments can be ranked, and that some value judgments are local and transitory while others are more universal and enduring. Even if one steadfastly claims that ethical norms are permanent, one could still regard the description of cows as either sacred or as cheeseburgers-on-the-hoof as two relative value judgments, each of which entails more universal values. One could then say that the two ethical postures toward cows have only dimly grasped a more universal principle. In that vein, a third possibility the authors overlook is the view that ethical norms may be badly formed, poorly articulated, and/or incompletely understood.

Instead, they devote the remainder of their book to constructing a fairytale in which liberal learning is a small clearing of enlightenment surrounded by dense thickets in a dark wildwood populated by predatory relativists and nihilists. Their analysis employs the presumption that liberal learning will exclude the nihilist option and, equally, that all varieties of relativism are equally unacceptable. Nothing could be further from the truth (please note my unabashed use of this problematic term). Practitioners of liberal learning must regard relativism and nihilism as perpetually part of the conversation about the status of values. Liberal learning degenerates into the recitation of intellectual pablum when relativism is rendered as an impossibility of systematic thought. The all-or-nothing approach to "universal" and "permanent" values adopted by the authors is not only philosophically crude and historically simplistic, but it also exhibits the hubris of born-again ideologues who love to pit their newly found certainty against all comers, discounting entire systems of thought to further a polemical purpose. Such habits of thinking are the opponent of a liberal education, not its hallmark or its champion.

[N.B.: a brief squib like this in Thesis XII should be insufficient to persuade; it can only point toward a longer argument. To that end, I have excerpted a few other quotations from the book, Liberal Education and Value Relativism, on my website (observing the limits of the fair use doctrines of the copyright law, of course) that offers further evidence of the problematic position held by these authors. There is a further link on that page to the philosophy section of the college bulletin board, and I invite interested readers to explore the range of issues entailed by this book. The URL = http://www.mcla.edu/engl/langston/liberalrelative.html. If you get lost, just go to my website and look for the button with the words, "Liberal Learning and Relativism" on it.]

   David Langston teaches English at MCLA

~~~

Intention: the Necessary Requirement

Zach Natale

An artist is someone who produces art. The vocation of an artist is to produce meaningful, thought-provoking works, thereby invoking emotions in individuals; this is the artist’s intention.  An artist’s deliberate actions – whether it is the chiseling of a stone, the placing of brushstrokes on a canvas, or the writing of words on a page – manifest his/her intentions.  Thus, as the so-called “intentionality thesis” maintains, a necessary requirement for the production of art is the existence of an intention to do so.   

The artist by his/her nature sets out to create works of art, things of aesthetic merit.  After choosing from one of many mediums, the artist begins the production process.  The artist’s intention is always, in its most basic form, to create art.  The purpose of the art world is to judge the aesthetic merit of a work, not to decide whether it is art.  Insofar as the artist has intended to produce something, he/she has succeeded.

Suppose an artist begins with one particular intention, and then produces something other than what he/she initially intended.  The intentionality thesis still holds, since, as T.S. Elliot writes, “No poet, no artist of any art, [grasps the] . . . complete meaning [of the artwork] at the onset of creating it (Miller, 146).  The elements of artistic production thus involve necessarily guided actions, objectives, and  intentions.  Without intention, objects are merely objects.  Using intention to identify art makes it possible to include all aspects of art including both traditional and nontraditional forms.  The art world functions simply to decide if a work’s qualities are aesthetically commendable or aesthetically deplorable.

Works Cited

References

Elliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology, eds. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller (SUNY Press, 1987).

 

Zach Natale is a student at MCLA

~~~

On the Vitality of Behaviorism

A Response to Silliman

Tom Byrne

In his article, “Ethics and Animals: An Exchange”, Silliman misrepresents the philosophy and impact of behaviorism.  In doing so he also dismisses a research strategy relevant for examining some of the very questions about animal mental life that he attempts to address.  I put forth here three assertions: 1) Behaviorists have contributed a number of remarkably successful research programs that have profoundly and positively impacted a wide variety of human and nonhuman affairs, 2) Behaviorism, as it has been defined for the past 60 years, does not deny consciousness and thought, and 3) Behaviorists have much to offer in discussions of animal ethics and welfare.

Silliman labels behaviorism as a “failed research program.”  I should point out that behaviorism is not a research program at all, but the rather the philosophy underlying the research conducted by behavior analysts.  I do not know the criteria by which Silliman classifies research endeavors as successes or failures, but I submit the following tidbits as falsification of Silliman’s claim:

• Between 1967 and 1995 the federal government spent over $500 million on Project Follow-Through,  “a massive effort to find ways to break the cycle of poverty through improved education. (Grossen, 1996, p.1)” Out of eleven educational paradigms, only Direct Instruction and Applied Behavior Analysis demonstrated promising results.
• Due to the rise of managed health-care and an increased focus on accountability, the American Psychological Association formed a Committee on Science and Practice charged with identifying psychological treatments with demonstrated efficacy.  In 1993 the committee reported that behavior analytic treatments had proven efficacy for encopresis, enuresis, alcohol abuse, cocaine abuse, depression, obesity, tricotillomania, headaches, smoking, sex offenders, marital stress, female orgasmic dysfunction, male orgasmic dysfunction, phobias, and developmental disabilities.  Considering that behavior analysis is somewhat of a pariah within the field of psychology, these endorsements are somewhat remarkable.  Please also note that many of these problems have obvious mental components.
• In 2003, the Surgeon General weighed in on the continuing failures of behaviorism: “Thirty years of research (have) demonstrated the efficacy of applied behavioral methods in reducing inappropriate behavior and in increasing communication, learning, and appropriate social behavior.  .  . Strategies that take a behavioral approach to youth violence can also have positive, consistent effects on violence, delinquency, and related risk factors.” 
• Skinner’s operant methodology revolutionized the understanding of psychoactive drugs, and to this day operant procedures are a mainstay of psychopharmacology research at universities, government institutions, and pharmaceutical firms.  This includes an immense literature on drug discrimination, which directly asks the question “How do drugs make animals feel?”, which is undoubtedly relevant to knowing about the mental lives of animals.  In addition, the most effective programs available for treating substance abuse are based heavily on operant methodology (e.g. Higgins, Silverman).
• Behavioral interventions have proven to be by far the most effective strategy for the treatment of autism spectrum disorders.  Through intensive intervention, autistic children gain communication and independent living skills once thought impossible.  In fact, some children have been able to transition to regular classroom education without any special support (e.g. Green 1996). 

And those are just a few examples from the applied literature.  One must also consider the basic literature’s contributions to learning, memory, motivation, communication, perception, aggression, etc.  It may be relevant that the field’s flagship journal, The Journal of The Experimental Analysis of Behavior, has an impact factor that consistently ranks in the top ten of all biological psychology journals.

Silliman’s statement that behaviorism denies the reality and importance of consciousness is demonstrably false.  This is a prevalent academic myth and an example of what Todd and Morris (1992) refer to as the ‘power of steady misrepresentation.”  Part of the problem is the term behaviorism itself, which has been associated with a number of different schools of thought during the past 100 years.  Silliman’s critique would certainly be relevant to John B. Watson’s methodological behaviorism, which did in fact did deny the importance of thoughts and feelings.  However, methodological behaviorism went the way of the dinosaurs well over 60 years ago with the arrival of B.F. Skinner’s influence.  A major point of departure for Skinner’s radical behaviorism was that it included the study, admittedly theoretical, of the world within the skin.  I will not argue whether or not radical behaviorism provides a reasonable accounting of thought and consciousness, but behaviorists certainly do not deny the existence of these important topics or attempt to explain them “merely as operant conditioning”.  (As an aside, it is hard to appreciate the phrase “merely as operant conditioning.”  This implies operant conditioning is simple and completely understood; it is not.) One need not dig too far in the current literature or in Skinner’s writings to find evidence that behaviorists have made honest attempts at including mental phenomena in their science. Citing from Skinner’s voluminous works is a bit like interpreting holy writings; one can usually find a quote to support any given argument.  However numerous statements equivalent to the following can be found throughout Skinner’s texts: “It is particularly important that a science of behavior face the problem of privacy (228)”.  As used by behaviorists, the terms privacy and private events refer to thoughts, feelings, and other mental activities.  Skinner’s insistence on including private events in a science of behavior continues to influence behaviorism to this day.  To cite just one example, in an article published in The Behavior Analyst, the official publication of the Association for Behavior Analysis, Wilson and Hayes begin their abstract with the sentence “Behavior analysis has long accepted the legitimacy of the analysis of private events in a natural science of behavior (p.25).”  This is clearly evident if one examines current empirical research.  For example, The Psychological Record, a journal solidly in the behaviorist camp, is currently dominated by investigations of stimulus equivalence, a largely cognitive phenomenon. 

I will concede that the concept of “mind” is considered flaccid by any scientific psychologist, behaviorist or not.  However this behaviorist, like most of his colleagues who find themselves “in the grip” of behaviorism, certainly does not deny the mental life of his pets.   The confusion arises because behaviorists have long rallied against the omnipresent use of “mentalism” in circular explanations of behavior such as “He hit the wall because he was mad.” The behaviorist position on thinking and feeling may be stated succinctly as follows: private events must be explained; they are not in and of themselves explanations.

Ironically, Silliman seems unaware that many behaviorists have made and continue to make considerable contributions to the study of animal ethics and welfare.  For example, in 1976, Kilgour, a scientist well versed in operant methodology, proposed five freedoms requisite for animal welfare: freedom to express normal behaviors, freedom from hunger and malnutrition, freedom from thermal or physical distress, freedom from disease or injury, and freedom from fear (yes, behaviorists do talk about feelings.)  However, as a human it is difficult to know if these conditions are being met because, as Silliman correctly points out, we can’t simply ask animals how they are feeling.  However, one can, with clever experimental designs, obtain relevant information.  Kilgour and behaviorists who followed his example set up research programs to assess animal preferences for food, housing, temperature, lighting, and other environmental conditions (for a review see Foster and Poling, 1995).  The results have made considerable impacts on farm animal welfare, and, to a much lesser extent, lab animal welfare.  This research, although in its infancy and far from perfect, has resulted in concrete and practical information that has improved the lives of those animals which, rightly or wrongly, are dependent upon their human captors.

Tom Byrne teaches psychology at MCLA and is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst

~~~

On our Best Behaviorism

Reply to Byrne

Matt Silliman

I am grateful to Tom Byrne for taking to task my somewhat flippant remarks about behaviorism.  My reply will be three-pronged:  first, I will suggest that much of our apparent difference might be merely terminological; second, I will argue for a reading of B.F. Skinner contrary to Byrne’s; and third, I will suggest that unexpurgated traces of invidiously reductive thinking may yet linger in contemporary behaviorist practice as Byrne describes it.

Professor Byrne is quite right that not everything that goes by the name of behaviorism suffers from the reductive foolishness I disparaged.  I was indeed directing my remarks to early, reductive behaviorism as practiced by Watson and Skinner, and I ought to have said so.  Studying behavior as a way to understand the mental lives of humans and other animals (and alter their behavior through conditioning) is of course legitimate and often fruitful, and some psychologists who call themselves behaviorists (or cognitive behaviorists) do just that.  I have doubts about the moral appropriateness of some of their experiments, but as Byrne points out they have indeed helped to bolster our understanding of animal minds, made progress in the treatment of autism, and other fine things.  I thus did not mean to imply that behavioral research had no success, but rather that what results it did produce failed to establish its radical and methodological premise – that the idea of mind is meaningless and dispensable.

However, there remains a reductive strain in some behaviorist psychology that did not, it seems to me, die off with Watson, and far from being ‘steady misrepresentation,’ remains palpable throughout Skinner’s own writings.  His magisterial pronouncements about the irrelevance of moral reasoning in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, for example, suggest that the impulse to explain away (or minimize as epiphenomenal and causally inefficacious), rather than understand, our mental and emotional lives remains potent in Skinner, whatever belated and coded talk of ‘privacy’ or ‘interiority’ the inconvenient fact of consciousness compelled him to adopt.  I concede, however, that there is plenty of room for reasonable disagreement about Skinner’s mature views, and no doubt close reading could uncover many contrary currents in his work.

But must psychologists really treat the concept of mind as ‘flaccid’ if they wish to be scientific?  I trust that Byrne himself is not tempted by the lingering reductivism this phrase suggests (raising the question whether the fault lies not in our academic stars but in ourselves).  “He hit the wall because he was mad” is plainly not an adequate explanation (we are agreed on this), but it would only be circular if we assumed, as Watson did, that ‘being mad’ literally consists of nothing other than wall-hitting kinds of behavior.  Since none of us professes to make that assumption, there is no logical circle, and any complete explanation for his hitting the wall will certainly need to understand the crucial role played by the fact that he was mad.  “The sun rose” may be a folk description (now a mere metaphor) of an astronomical event, but everyone really does get mad sometimes (not just those bedeviled and unsophisticated ‘folk’), and no adequate science will require us pretend otherwise.  The ‘mentalism’ against which behaviorists long railed (in Skinner’s case it was the mysterious ghosts of Cartesian dualism) is a phantom of bygone centuries; science ought not, I think, feel threatened by the persistence of minds and what they do as it seeks to plumb the depths of how it all works.

Matt Silliman teaches philosophy at MCLA

~~~

Workplace Drug Testing as a Violation of Privacy

Maura Mills

Drug testing in the workplace is an invasion of employees’ privacy.  Workplace drug testing became popular in the 1980s, after President Reagan signed an executive order leading to the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988.  While written for government employees, the act soon led to drug testing in the private sector.  In either case, however, statutes prohibiting workplace drug testing should exist.  Not only are some types of testing—particularly urinalysis—degrading, but they also infringe upon peoples’ basic rights to be left alone.  Likewise, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other opponents of drug testing argue that it violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searchers and seizures.  Employers do not need a warrant or even probable cause to demand that their employees submit to drug testing.  Further, drug testing cannot prove impairment on the job, and therefore is an unreasonable method of evaluating or predicting job performance.  An employee can smoke marijuana weeks before testing and still test positive, but another employee can snort cocaine on the way to work and test negative, because the latter employee’s body has not yet had an opportunity to metabolize the drug.

Furthermore, drug testing can also detect many medical conditions, and such an outcome is similar to an employer having access to employees’ medical records.  Such information can then be used against the employees, perhaps indirectly leading to their termination.  Employers may not want to cover the costs and liabilities of employing people with heart conditions, epilepsy, depression, or diabetes, all of which can be detected through drug testing.  Such testing can also detect pregnancy, another medical condition that may seem undesirable in an employee.  Hair testing and other drug tests that are not as degrading as urinalysis can also detect this medical information, and therefore can be morally dismissed on the same privacy grounds as can urinalysis.

Another reason why persons innocent of drug use may object to testing is that drug tests are unreliable.  Popular drug tests yield false positive results at least ten percent of the time, with less expensive tests yielding them as much as thirty percent of the time.  Some of this unreliability is attributable to the tendency of drug tests to confuse legal drugs for illegal ones.  For instance, Vicks Formula 44-M tests positive for heroin, Advil for marijuana, and Nyquil for amphetamines.  Such unreliability is unacceptable in a test that can weigh so heavily on people’s job acquisition and retention.

Proponents of drug testing, however, maintain that because employers are legally responsible for on-the-job wrongdoings of their employees, they have a right to conduct drug tests in order to ensure that their employees are capable of safely performing their jobs.  While this argument does make a valid point, it also assumes that drug testing is the only way to measure performance.  On the contrary, new computer technology allows employers to evaluate employees’ performance without violating their privacy.  These tests evaluate such criteria as hand-eye coordination and reaction time, both of which can directly impact safety.  Organizations such as NASA and the U.S. Air Force currently employ this technology, but private sector businesses have yet to adopt it.  It is, however, and acceptable alternative to the privacy invasion inherent in drug testing, and both proponents and opponents of drug testing should recognize it as such.

References

“ACLU Announces Settlement of Random Drug Testing           Case.”  ACLU of Colorado.  7 August 2002.  3 April   2004.    release_drugsettlement.htm>.

Dentzer, Susan, et al.  “Can You Pass the Job Test?”  Ethical                   Issues in Professional Life.  Ed. Joan C. Callahan.  New                 York: Oxford, 1988.  211-215.

Moore, Jennifer.  “Drug Testing and Corporate             Responsibility:  The ‘Ought Implies Can’ Argument.”                 Taking Sides:  Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in   Business Ethics and Society.  Eds. Lisa Newton &       Maureen Ford.  Guilford, Connecticut:  McGraw-               Hill/Dushkin, 2004. 195-206.

Niznik, J. Stephen.  “Drug Testing in the Workplace:  Is it Legal?”  Job Searching:  Technical.  3 April 2004. 

                  library/weekly/aa090301.htm>.

“Drug Testing in the Workplace.”  The National Workrights     Institute.  3 April 2004.

                  dt_legislative_brief.html>.

Maura Mills is a student at MCLA