摘要：
Society's power to make us obey allows for peaceful existence, economic
prosperity and efficiency but it also allows faulty decisions to
be amplified and become catastrophic. In 1963 Stanley Milgram showed
that the vast majority of humans exhibit excessively obedient behavior
in the presence of an authority and that we can easily be made to
encourage or tolerate real torture and murder even though it contrasts
with our own stated ethical values.
The Milgram finding was buried by the criticism of the ethics of
the experiment itself and it is the purpose of this paper to resurrect
it.
While the murder of the confederate Learner is an unethical decision,
the fundamental finding of the experiment is not about which ethical
decision to make, but rather that we are not able to carry out the
ethical decisions we would like to make, in other words it is about
self actualization. To prevent the fake murder in the Milgram experiment
and, by extension, the real murders elsewhere, we need to accomplish
two things. First, we have to teach ourselves that there is a large
discrepancy between what we think we will do and what we will actually
do in situations of authority. Second, we have to minimize the difference
between what we do and what we would like to do.
In this paper barriers and dynamics in our society that keep us
from breaking and even enforce our habit to obey excessively are
discussed. A sketch of a solution to the problem of excessive obedience
is made involving experiential training, mappings of authority fields,
rules and strong situations, and policy changes.
