[1] The founder of teleological behaviorism is Howard Rachlin, an Emeritus Research Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.
A large influence for Rachlin’s work was Aristotle’s early philosophies on the mind, specifically how “Artistotle’s classification of movements in terms of final rather than efficient causes corresponds to B.F. Skinner’s conception of an operant as a class of movements with a common end”.
He likens the ability to weight the options of the future to avoiding making short-term poor investments in exchange for profitable, more beneficial ones at a much later point in time.
criticize Rachlin for his perspective, however, as his concepts of simply considering the potential reactions to certain situations over a longer time frame have been hailed as being closer to a self-help practice of making good investments and life choices than it is close to an actual Psychological practice.
In other words, society’s definitions and expectations are what guide us in terms of what they consider right and wrong as any other external factors do.