Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Beyond Freedom and Dignity is a 1971 book by the American psychologist B. F. Skinner. Skinner argues that the entrenched belief in free will and in the moral autonomy of the individual, which he calls "dignity", hinders the use of scientific methods to modify behavior in order to build a happier and better-organized society. The book can be read as an attempt to promote his philosophy of science, his deterministic conception of behavior, and what he calls "cultural engineering".

The book is organized into nine chapters covering the technology of behavior, freedom, dignity, punishment, alternatives to punishment, values, the evolution of a culture, the design of a culture, and the question of what man is. Skinner contends that problems such as overpopulation and warfare will not be solved by physical or biological technology alone, but require a technology of human behavior. He considers punishment ineffective as a means of controlling behavior and regards the idea of an autonomous self as an illusion that obscures the environmental contingencies that he believes truly explain our actions.

The work extends Walden Two (1948), his novel about a utopian community built on behavior modification, and drew strong criticism. The linguist Noam Chomsky rebutted it in his 1971 essay "The Case Against B.F. Skinner", and the psychologist John Staddon objected that punishment does not always abolish freedom and that freedom is not merely the absence of punishment. Today the book is remembered both as a manifesto of radical behaviorism and for the debate it provoked about the boundaries between science, social control, and individual liberty.