At Least in This Passage, Skinner Isn't Very Convincing

Skinner says that we value people's actions more when they have to good reasons to do something else--and while that sounds good, it's probably foolishness.

Certainly, we often admire people who could have done something else but didn't. Achilles could have rinsed his socks in the river but chose instead to die with an arrow in his foot. Davey Crockett could have sat out the war in Waco, Texas, but chose to make a All-American scene at the Alamo. Shane could have stayed a nobody and shuffled off to Durango but chose to strap on that big silver gun one more time to blow away Jack Palance. The seven samurai could have let all those whining little peasants die out there in black and white, but chose to take a stand for honor and glory and the future of humankind. And while I don't know a lot about religious saints and other acknowledged good folk, I suspect many of them could have done something else, too, if they had wanted.

But we don't always praise those who have good reasons to do something else but don't. Jimmy Carter could have stayed on the farm, but he didn't. Elbert Hubbard could have kept the money he earned as vice-president of Larkin Soap Factory but chose to make a fool of himself as a liar, bigamist, flim-flam newspaper columnist and self-help guru. Jerry Falwell could have remained a somebody and raked in the souls for fifty bucks apiece (cash or credit) but chose instead to do something else.

And contrary to what Skinner says here, I suspect that we sometimes even give "credit" to people for their weak wills, not their strengths. Why else would some of us admire weak-kneed Hamlet? Guilt- ridden Lord Jim? Avaricious Sugar Ray Leonard and Bruce Springsteen? Oliver North? Darth Vader? Oedipus could still be eating cream cheese and cakes if he had been even more weak-willed and had left well-enough alone, yet some of us find something sorta human and good and respectable in his weak-willed foolishness and blindness.

So sure, we value some people for doing the right things, the hard things and respectable things and heroic things--but why we praise them or don't praise them is rather complex. And while I don't want to think about it much here, our praise and admiration may have a lot more to do with strange, illogical, and even uncontrollable urges in our own, biased, perforated hearts than it does in some sort of abstract, context-free belief in good deeds performed in some storm of "clear reasons" and "opposing conditions."

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