Operant Conditioning

This clip opens by showing a pigeon in a study using food as a reinforcement for pecking behavior. B.F. Skinner discusses schedules of reinforcement and how learning research can be applied to understand human behavior. Skinner challenges the validity of human free will.

How is the process of learning, as understood by Skinner, inconsistent with the idea of free will? While this is a classic and important experiment in operant conditioning, do you have any ethical issues with the way the experiment was performed?