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Stanley Milgram's Analysis

Decent Essays

In this text, Stanley Milgram approaches the idea of obedience and its role in moral conduct. Milgram’s angle explores what happens when obedience and the moral conscience cross. His experiments proved that the idea of obedience superseding one’s morals is different between different people. To support this, he presents the actions during and after four different cases of the same experiment. Milgram starts by stating how important obedience has become over time. A society cannot socially thrive without some type of authoritative hierarchy. That hierarchy implicates that obedience has to follow in order for the authority to have any significance. For example, in the United States, most citizens are obedient to the laws that are set …show more content…

With the experiment, he found that some people were really in-tuned with their conscious and did not mind being disobedient if it disagreed with their moral standards. Whereas in another experiment, he found that obedience was a priority with disregard to any moral standings. As we discussed in class, the torturing of another human being is considered morally wrong in most places and cultures. So, the fact that the “teachers” even agreed to participate in the study showed me that they let obedience to the experimenter control their actions even if were only for a few trials of the experiment. I think that portrays how much free-will and self-control has been tainted by the idea of obedience. Another idea Milgram had was that people usually give in to obedience because they are fixated on pleasing the authoritative figure. The experiment with Bruno Bratta supports this most because Bratta was determined to completely satisfy the experimenter as if the experimenter offered him a prize from completing the task. So, what does this say about his moral character? He has one that his really tainted and that might be the cause of several life experiences or other reasons that would cause him to be set on being

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