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Chapter 9: Obedience to Authority |
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Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., in "Letter From Birmingham Jail," justifies his civil disobedience and chastises the white moderates who value order more than justice, saying that "There are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that 'An unjust law is no law at all.'" Although most people would agree that laws and rules are necessary for us to live in a civilized society, to what extent should people obey authority? This chapter explores the dilemmas and dangers inherent in obeying the orders of authority.
The chapter begins with "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism" by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, writing for U. S. News & World Report (24 May 2004). This selection reminds us that the topic of obedience and the following of unlawful orders is far from academic and is very much an element of today's news. As the Stanford Prison Experiment website (links found in this chapter's web destinations) points out, the events at the prison do parallel what happened in experimental models. Reading such accounts of immoral behavior cause each of us to ask if we would behave differently in such situations. As the following readings show, peer groups can exert enormous pressures on individuals, even causing normally moral people to torture others.
Solomon Asch's "Opinions and Social Pressure" discusses his experiment designed to discover to what extent individuals can be influenced to deny the evidence of their own senses. This is followed by "The Perils of Obedience" where Stanley Milgram reports on his controversial experiment that tested how far individuals would go in obeying orders, even if carrying out those orders caused serious harm to others. In Diana Baumrind's response to Milgram's experiment, "Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience," she criticizes the experiment's long-term effects on participants and points out the flaws in the experiment's design, which may have skewed Milgram's results. Ian Parker's "Obedience," focuses on both the immediate and the long-term reaction to Milgram's experiment among both the general public and Milgram's professional colleagues and also of the effect of the experiment upon the experimenter himself.
"The Stanford Prison Experiment," by Philip K. Zimbardo, discusses the results of his controversial experiment designed to examine the ability of individuals to resist authoritarian or obedient roles, if the social setting requires those roles. Using the threat of world annihilation as a backdrop, Erich Fromm's "Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem" distinguishes between disobedience that is destructive and disobedience that is necessary to preserve the survival of mankind. Crispin Sartwell, in "The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror," argues, as his title implies, that "We—and by this I mean you and I—are deeply evil." Sartwell reviews some of the conditions that impel ordinary human beings to commit genocide—including "deference to authority" and "response to social consensus"—some of the same conditions explored by social scientists represented earlier in this chapter.
The chapter concludes with Theodore Dalrymple's "Just Do What the Pilot Tells You," which while noting the need to obey in an increasingly security-minded world, attempts to find a balance between absolute obedience and absolute disobedience.
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