Obedience to Authority and Moral Conduct

Obedience to authority seems to be an everyday phenomenon. It starts primarily at home with parents as authoritative figures to their children and older siblings to the younger ones. It carries itself out of the household like in school and in the employment world where several levels of authority are in place.

However, in a situation where obedience to an order conflicts with one’s conscience a variation of people’s responses ensues.The most famous experiment in the study of obedience was conducted by Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), a psychologist who taught at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York (“Stanley Milgram”). In 1961 at Yale University he began what is to be known as the Milgram experiment that took him to Hartford, Cambridge, Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa, and Australia (Dimow, “Resisting Authority”). The participants in the experiment were initially told that it is an experiment about memory and learning.The Milgram experiment requires two people to begin with.

One is the “teacher’ and the other is the “learner”. The learner is strapped in a miniature electric chair. The teacher reads simple pairs of words and the learner must be able to correctly remember the second word of a pair after he hears the teacher repeats the first one. For every mistake that the learner makes an electric shock will be administered. These electric shocks gradually increase up to a maximum of 450 volts (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”).

The real subject is the teacher who is seated before a shock generator with marked switches of different intensity from 14 to 450 volts. Before commencing with the experiment each teacher is made to experience a 45-volt electric shock to further intensify their belief in the authenticity of the shock generator (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”). In reality the learner is an actor who acts out the different responses to the perceived electric shock.Every level of voltage will give in empirical terms the length the teacher would proceed from the order of the experimenter (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”).

The important point in the experiment begins when the learner responds to the pain of the electric shock. Tension begins to show in the teacher’s demeanor every time the learner shouts in pain. The teacher begins to hesitate then attempts to stop only to be ordered by the experimenter to go on (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”). This constitutes the crux of the experiment.

Predictions were sought prior to the experiment from different kinds of people and the common outcome was that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the orders of the experimenter. According to Milgram, “the psychiatrist specifically predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, when the victim makes his first explicit demand to be freed. ” They predicted further that around four percent (4%) would try to administer 300 volts and “only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock” (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”).These would all prove to be wrong. The pilot experiment was conducted among Yale students where sixty percent (60%) obeyed the experimenter.

Given the background of Yale students as being aggressive and competitive, Milgram continues his experiments with “ordinary” people from different levels of society. There were peculiar reactions but the outcome was generally the same and the percentage became higher as the experiment was taken overseas. Sixty-five percent (65%) of the ordinary decent people subject their learners to the maximum electric shock of 450 volts.The obedience rate even reached eighty-five (85%) in Munich. The experiment, although unethical now because of the stress it lays on the subjects, yielded significant interpretations.

One is that people have the tendency to obey authority and a high tendency to obey destructive orders that conflict with their moral principles (“Obeying and Resisting”). Ordinary persons who inflict electric shocks to the learners did so out of a sense of duty to the authority. (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”).The authority exercises moral ascendancy over them that they relinquish their responsibility to tell right from wrong to the authority (“Obeying and Resisting”) as opposed to self-examination or exercising one’s own volition before doing a malevolent act. A significant finding also showed that all people have deep dormant unexpressed aggressive tendencies and not just limited to the sadistic fringes of society (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”). Several situational factors are cited as contributory to the different levels of obedience as shown in the variations of the experiment.

For example, as Sharon Presley wrote, Milgram found out that the closer the learner to the teacher or the lower the feedback from the learner, the lower the rates of obedience and “the more diffuse the responsibility for administering the shock, the higher the rate of obedience (qtd. in Muster). The pressure exuded by the experimenter also creates a different level of obedience. The closer the experimenter, the higher the obedience rate.

When the experimenter barked his orders from a telephone only about one third of the subjects fully obeyed up to the 450 volts shock (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”).Resistance among peers also diminished the obedience rate. It must be noted then that these results are “not a function of class, religious affiliation, gender, location, educational background, ideology, and general culture. Nor are they a result of character or psychopathology. The results were derived solely from the assertion of hierarchy-authority in the form of the experimenter” (Blumenthal, “Perpetrators and Rescuers”). Milgram’s disturbing experiment is very much relevant in the understanding of several heinous crimes against humanity in the past years.

Foremost is the Holocaust. History shows that the shoah was a picture of the lack of compassion and value for human life with the atrocious and systematic extermination of six millions Jews. In the famous trial of Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962), the high-ranking Nazi SS Officer who facilitated the logistics in the deportation of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps in Eastern Europe (“Adolf Eichmann”), German political theorist Hannah Arendt, observed that Eichmann is a normal fellow with deep-seated belief in the authority of the Fuhrer.For him his word is the law and thus his law served as Eichmann’s conscience which he followed as a duty (Blumenthal, “Perpetrators and Rescuers”).

Poland was a scene of an unforgettable brutal Jewish extermination solely done by the controversial group, Police Batallion 101, a unit of the German Order tasked to carry the so called “final solution” in Poland. This was another example of mindless obedience to hierarchical authority. They were conveniently utilized to the mass shooting of the remaining Jews in Poland.Consider that from July 1942 to November 1943, they shot more than 38,000 Jews and deported 45,000 to concentration camps (“Reserve Battalion 101”). Christopher Browning wrote that the “main mechanism that enabled these ordinary men to become "grass roots" killers was insertion into the hierarchy of army command.

Their officers only needed to invoke the authority of their hierarchy to obtain obedience, even though it was sometimes accompanied by anger and upset…” (Blumenthal, “Perpetrators and Rescuers”).The justification of just following orders was also the recurring line in the My Lai village massacre in Vietnam. Here American soldiers openly fired at the villagers and killed over 350 men, women, and children. The soldiers were said to be just following orders dictated by higher authority. They found it their duty to obey the chain of command. Milgram explains that a soldier’s training is likened to brainwashing them to respond to orders as soldiers are expected to do (“Stanley Milgram 1933-1984”).

According to Kelman and Hamilton, “to maintain its legitimacy, an authority must focus individuals on rule-, role-, and value-oriented decisions; not on decisions based on personal, subjective preference” (Blumenthal, “Perpetrators and Rescuers”). The soldiers’ unique training to obey orders becomes obligatory for the legitimate authority does not coax but demands obedience. This results in the temporary surrender of an individual’s prerogative to choose which in turn reinforces authority and an obedient environment (Blumenthal, “Perpetrators and Rescuers”).A recent twentieth-century crime against humanity is the 1994 genocide in the small African country of Rwanda.

This was one of the bleakest moments of international consequence not only because of the 800,000 Tutsis killed but by the general callousness of the international community that could have prevented if not cut short such infamy. Rwanda is a country divided mainly by two ethnic tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis. In 1994, the Hutu was not willing to share power with the Tutsis despite an existing accord.The assassination of its president by blowing up the plane he was in together with the president of Burundi triggered the massacre that would follow within twenty-four hours. How the hatred spread like wildfire speaks of the efficiency of a hateful state bureaucratic hierarchy whose singular purpose is the elimination of a rival ethnic group.

Through the state-run radio the Hutu government blatantly called on the Hutu people to kill the Tutsis under a false accusation of attacking the ruling Hutu government.This mass mobilization, a form of indoctrination by the state, incited hatred which led to the obedience of the citizenry to create assassination squads to eliminate Tutsis from the neighborhoods in the city of Kigali before spreading to the countryside. With firearms and machetes, they shot and hacked Tutsis, moderate Tutsis, and those who side with the Tutsis to death. In just 100 days, without any significant assistance from other states, 800,000 lives piled up.

Those who did their job were either rewarded materially, those who hesitated were punished and anyone who sheltered Tutsis were killed (Sartwell, “Genocide, You, and Me”). It is therefore vital to tackle how the above perpetrators could have viewed responsibility in their wrongdoings. According to Milgram, in a typical complex society “it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of actions” (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”). Failing to see the bigger picture somehow lessens the guilt.

To feel fully responsible therefore the act must flow from one’s own will. But as long as justifications like in Milgram’s experiment where one subject voiced out that “If it were up to me, I would not have administered the shocks to the learner,” one always has a an honest psychological excuse of his participation in the malevolent act induced by one’s submission to authority (Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience”). People who act under the orders of an authority act out of a sense of duty which is separated from their personal emotion or conviction.Responsibility is transferred or shifted to the authority figure. Milgram once said of his findings, “"The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing.

They raise the possibility that human nature, or -more specifically-the kind of character produced in American society, cannot be counted on to insulate the citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority" (“Stanley Milgram 1933-1984”).