The ethical foundations of behavior therapy

Ethics and Behavior 1 (4):221 – 238 (1991)
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Abstract

In this article, I am concerned with the ethical foundations of behavior therapy, that is, with the normative ethics and the meta-ethics underlying behavior therapy. In particular, I am concerned with questions concerning the very possibility of providing an ethical justification for things done in the context of therapy. Because behavior therapists must be able to provide an ethical justification for various actions (if the need arises), certain meta-ethical views widely accepted by behavior therapists must be abandoned: in particular, one must give up ethical subjectivism, ethical skepticism, and ethical relativism. An additional task is to show how it is possible to provide a nonsubjective, nonskeptical, and nonrelativistic moral justification for an ethical statement. Although this is a monumental task, I provide a rough sketch of such a model, one that is congenial to the value judgments underlying behavior therapy.

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References found in this work

The structure of empirical knowledge.Laurence BonJour - 1985 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.David Bohm - 1964 - Philosophical Quarterly 14 (57):377-379.

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