CENT PAPER NUMBER TWO (b):

Fairness, Justice and Morality Issues in REBT and CENT

Copyright (c) Dr Jim Byrne, March 2010

1. Introduction

On 25^th January 2010, I wrote a post to my Happiness Blog (at http://www.abc-counselling.com/id143.html) on the subject of fairness and justice in Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and the contrast with how those subjects are dealt with in Cognitive Emotive Narrative Therapy (CENT).

That post generated some public interest, and I received about a dozen responses, through various channels, to my declared position on fairness, justice and morality.  Most responses indicated that the writer agreed with me that we need to defend the concept of fairness when dealing with counselling and therapy clients.  One or two indicated that they thought fairness was a subjective notion, and difficult to measure.  And one raised some interesting questions about how to find, define, and/or develop objective criteria for discussing fairness with married couples who squabble about unfairness in couples' therapy.

2. The happiness blog post on fairness and justice

We humans cannot be truly happy unless we learn how to think about our lives; and to live our lives as thoughtful people.  ‘The unexamined life is not worth living", as Plato said.

Thinking is a process of asking and answering questions; of posing and solving problems.  One of the unavoidable problems for humans is that we must each learn what to think - social rules and moral codes - before we ever get a chance to learn how to think.  Some people seem to be able to shed those social rules and moral codes and to become quite immoral, and they also seem not to think.  They operate at the level of appetite led animals:  Greedy, angry and aggressive.  And those kinds of individuals are a big problem for society, and corrosive of social cohesion and, ultimately, the survival of social groups.

I was raised as a moral person - a ‘good Catholic' - and that moral education has largely stayed with me throughout my sixty-odd years of life.  Over the decades I have migrated from Catholicism, via Marxism, to Buddhism.  When I was 22 years old, I became a Marxist revolutionary for the very simple moral reason that it is not okay for governments to promote inequality between citizens, as governments, morally and logically, should represent the interests of all social classes and groups, and not just the rich and greedy.  We are all born equal and deserve equal treatment; but inequalities have crept into our social groupings, over a period of centuries, and produced very different, stratified social classes.  While Marx thought that his philosophy was not moral, but rather historical/ evolutionary/ materialism, I was always motivated by the importance of the moral principle of fairness.

When I got involved in studying Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), from 1992 onwards, I was enrolled into a whole new set of beliefs, which, broadly, I found liberating.  For example, I learned to eliminate inappropriate and oppressive ‘shoulds' about practical matters.

However, for a good number of years, I failed to notice that REBT was strongly (if implicitly) advocating that people ignore social norms regarding moral judgements.  For example, Dr Ellis's repeated references to the claim that "Hitler was not a bad man!"  And "Why must life be fair when it's obviously unfair?"  These seemed to be 'harmless therapeutic tools', but the time would come when they would be applied socially as guides to action or non-action.  I was finally awoken to this danger by the way in which Dr Ellis was treated in the final years of his life by some of his former colleagues.