Conclusion
There is no reason to believe that corruption of judgment is inevitable in organizations or in the adversary system. But neither do I have a failsafe remedy to protect lawyers or anyone else from the optical illusions of the spirit that authority and cognitive dissonance engender.
(I take up this subject in more detail in chapter 8.) A first step, no doubt, is understanding the illusions themselves, their pervasiveness, the insidious way they work on us. Understanding these illusions warns us against them, and perhaps forewarned is forearmed, at least in contexts similar enough to call the warning to mind. I have argued here that to understand all is not to forgive all. But in some situations, to understand all may put us on our guard against doing the unforgivable.Unfortunately, the experimental evidence suggests that small differences in situations can generate large differences in behavior, which strongly suggests that we have a very weak capacity to generalize the lessons of one situation to another, even if the latter situation resembles the former in ways that should be apparent but turn out not to be.
But perhaps understanding the power of situations to corrupt our judgment can put us on our guard in a more indirect fashion. One of Milgram’s compliant subjects wrote him years later to say that his participation in the experiment subsequently led him to refuse military service in the Vietnam war. This is an instructive example. The subject’s experience in the Milgram experiment did not necessarily immunize him from wrongful obedience, and indeed there is no reason to suppose that anything can immunize us. Instead, it caused him to take a dramatic step to steer clear of a situation where destructive obedience was a genuine and ever-present possibility. In other words, by participating in Milgram’s experiments he may have learned the power of situations to distort judgment; and, rather than indulging in the wishful thought that he would do better next time, he tried to insulate himself from the very possibility of there being a next time. Of course, so long as wars continue to be fought, someone will have to serve in the military, and so this man’s personal solution is not available to everyone.
More generally, it is sheer illusion to suppose that society can be organized to eliminate hierarchies of command and obedience; and so long as command and obedience exist, destructive obedience remains an ever-present possibility. A disquieting conclusion, no doubt: we may find ourselves engaged in destructive obedience, responding to pressures that we cannot insulate ourselves from or even be aware of; and we may nevertheless still be blameworthy for giving in to those pressures. St. Augustine, who argued that predestination does not relieve us of the burden of sin, would not have been surprised.There is still one hopeful finding of the Milgram experiments. Recall that when subjects were paired with a fellow teacher who refused to go along with the experimenter’s commands, compliance plunged to 10 percent - just as, when the second teacher enthusiastically went along with the experiment, compliance ballooned to 90 percent. Our moral compass seems tremendously susceptible to the responses of the people around us. That fact creates the problem of wrongful obedience, but it also implies that noncompliers can influence their compliant fellows. The social psychologist Serge Moscovici has argued for many years that even a small minority of virtuous noncompliers can sometimes exert enough influence to break the corrupting spell of situations.[493] Human nature seems malleable more than overtly wicked - and that means susceptibility can be toward the good as well as the bad. The thought that a small number of righteous dissenters can sometimes sway the judgment of a larger majority is a profoundly hopeful one.