In the 1970s, Dr. Stanley Milgram, Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, published the results of a series of experiments on the tendency of subjects to accede to authority eve to the point of performing acts which they themselves considered unethical or immoral. The issue raised by Stanley Milgram and examined by him in his research is the disjunction between an individual's personal moral sense and his or her actions when performed under someone else's orders. The dichotomy is between conscience and authority, and Milgram says it is found in the very nature of society. Only the individual who lives in a remote area entirely alone escapes the role of social authority completely and can act only according to his or her conscience without pressure to do otherwise. The individual in a social setting who acts only according to his or her conscience will most certainly do so in a context of pressure and even coercion to act otherwise on certain occasions. Some societies enforce their strictures more directly and strenuously than do others, but all societies in some degree try to enforce conformity on members, at least in certain areas of conduct. Thus these experiments have much to say about the social order, how it is achieved and maintained, and what this might mean to anyone concerned about the morality of government actions with or without the acquiescence of the people.
Milgram states at the outset his view of the roles of obedience and discipline in society:
Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others (Milgram, 1974, 1).
Milgram also points to the prime example in this century of the consequences of obedience when carried to the extre...