A proposal: the corruption of judgment

And yet I agree that the key to understanding Milgram compliance lies in features of the experimental situation. The feature I wish to focus on is the slippery-slope character of the electrical shocks.

wrong.

Cognitive dissonance theory teaches that when our actions conflict with our self-concept, our beliefs and attitudes change until the conflict is removed.^{[457] [458]} We are all pro se defense lawyers in the court of conscience.^[459] Cognitive dissonance theory suggests that when I have given the learner a series of electrical shocks, I simply won’t view giving the next shock as a wrongful act, because I won’t admit to myself that the previous shocks were wrong.

Let me examine this line of thought in more detail. Moral decision-making requires more than adhering to sound principles, such as the no-harm prin­ciple. It also requires good judgment, by which I mean knowing which actions violate a moral principle and which do not. Every lawyer understands the difference between good principles and good judgment - it is the dif­ference between knowing a rule of law and being able to apply it to particular cases. As Kant first pointed out, you can’t teach good judgment through general rules, because we already need judgment to know how rules apply.

Let’s assume that most of Milgram’s subjects do accept the no-harm prin­ciple, and agree in the abstract that it outweighs the performance principle - again, the responses of audiences hearing the Milgram experiments described strongly suggest that this is so. The subjects still need good judgment to know at what point the electrical shocks violate the no-harm principle. Virtually no one thinks that the slight tingle of a 15-volt shock violates the no-harm principle: if it did, medical researchers would violate the no-harm principle every time they take blood samples from volunteers. Unsurprisingly, only two of Milgram’s thousand subjects refused to give any shocks at all.

But how can 30 volts violate the no-harm principle if 15 volts didn’t? And if a 30-volt shock doesn’t violate the no-harm principle, neither does a shock of 45 volts.

Of course we know that slippery-slope arguments like this are unsound. At some point, the single grains of sand really do add up to a heap, and at some point shocking the learner really should shock the conscience as well. But it takes good judgment to know where that point lies. Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance generates enormous psychic pressure to deny that our previous obedience may have violated a fundamental moral principle. That denial requires us to gerrymander the boundaries of the no-harm principle so that the shocks we have already delivered don’t violate it. However, once we knead and pummel the no-harm principle, it becomes virtually impossible to judge that the next shock, only imperceptibly more intense, crosses the border from the permissible to the forbidden. By luring us into higher and higher level shocks, one micro-step at a time, the Milgram experiments gradually and subtly disarm our ability to distinguish right from wrong. Milgram’s subjects never need to lose, even for a second, their faith in the no-harm principle. Instead, they lose their capacity to recognize that administering an agonizing electrical shock violates it.

What I am offering here is a corruption of judgment explanation of the Milgram experiments. The road to hell turns out to be a slippery slope, and the travelers on it really do have good intentions - they “merely” suffer from bad judgment.

The corruption-of-judgment theory fits in well with one of the other classic experiments of social psychology, Freedman and Fraser’s 1966 demonstration of the so-called foot-in-the-door effect. In this experiment, a researcher posing as a volunteer asks homeowners for permission to erect a large, ugly “Drive Carefully!” sign in their front yards. The researcher shows the homeowners a photo of a pleasant-looking home completely obscured by the sign. Unsurprisingly, most homeowners refuse the request - indeed, the only real surprise is that 17 percent agree to take the sign. (Who are these people?)

Within one subset of homeowners, however, 75 percent agree to take the sign. What makes these homeowners different? Just one thing: two weeks previously, they had agreed to place a small, inconspicuous “Be a Safe Driver” sticker in their windows. Apparently, once the public-service foot insinuates itself in the door, the entire leg follows.^[460] Perhaps what is surprising is only that such a small foot could provide an opening for such a large and unattractive leg. The slippery slope from sound judgment to skewed judgment is a lot steeper than we may have suspected.

According to this explanation of the Milgram experiments, it is our own previous actions of shocking the learner that corrupt our moral judgment and lead us to continue shocking him long past the limits of human decency. In a sense, then, we “do it to ourselves” - Milgram compliance turns out to be the result of cognitive dissonance and our need for self-vindication, rather than of obedience to authority. In that case, what role does the man giving the orders play in this explanation?

The answer, I believe, is twofold. First, his repeated instruction - “The experiment requires that you continue!” - prompts us to view the shocks as morally indistinguishable, to downplay the fact that the shocks are gradually escalating.

The idea that obedience to evil may result from corrupted judgment rather than evil values or sadism is central to the most famous philosophical study of wrongful obedience in our time, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jer­usalem.^[461] Adolf Eichmann, on Arendt’s account, was neither a monster nor an ideologue, neither an antisemite nor a sadist. He was a careerist - an organization man through and through, who could never understand why doing a responsible job well might be regarded as a crime against humanity.

Arendt was struck by the many statements Eichmann made that showed that he never perceived anything at all extraordinary about mass murder. Eichmann would relate the “hard luck story” of his failure to win promotion in the SS to an Israeli policeman whose parents he knew had been murdered by the Nazis; or describe the “normal, human” conversation he had had with an inmate of Auschwitz, who was actually begging for his life.^[462] He was utterly oblivious to the way that his listeners would regard these war stories. For Arendt, who understood that thinking is the inner dialogue by which we examine our situation from various perspectives, Eichmann’s inability to think from another person’s point of view meant that he could not think at all.

The result was a man who was incapable of judging reality for what it was; he could experience the world only through the arid, Newspeak categories of a functionary. Eichmann’s inability to think from another’s point of view deprived him of the ability to think from his own point of view, perhaps even the capacity to have a point of view of his own. As in the Milgram experi­ments, Eichmann allowed his superiors to define the situation he was in; and that is why Eichmann, “an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”^[463]

The parallels between Arendt’s account and the corruption-of-judgment theory offered here are straightforward. To begin with, consider the slippery slope that led Eichmann to the dock in Jerusalem. Eichmann “knew” that his conscience was clear about his casual decision to follow a friend’s advice and join the Nazi Party, about which he knew very little at the time. As for his subsequent decision to transfer into the SS, that was a simple mistake: he thought he was joining a different service with a similar name. He regarded his early work in Jewish affairs as something close to benevolent, as he expedited the deportation of Jews from Austria by making it easier for them to obtain their exit papers (in return for all their property). When the mission changed from expelling Jews to concentrating them in camps in the East, Eichmann persuaded himself that this was the best way to fulfill the Zionist ambition of “putting firm ground under the feet of the Jews.”²⁹ As for the Final Solution, all the glitterati in the Nazi hierarchy embraced it enthu­siastically; so after six weeks of bad conscience, Eichmann came to see things their way.

For Arendt, the case of Adolf Eichmann posed profound questions in moral psychology, questions she wrestled with for the rest of her life. What is thinking? What is judgment? How can thought, which is not the same as judgment, insulate us, at least in part, from bad judgment?^[464] These are ultimate questions that I shall not even try to answer here. But the corruption- of-judgment account presented here can at least provide us with a point of connection between Arendt’s philosophizing and the empirical phenomena revealed in social psychology experiments such as Milgram’s.

To many readers, the idea of analogizing issues of legal and organizational ethics to the Eichmann case will be preposterous and even offensive. On the one side, the analogy demonizes the Joseph Fortenberrys of the American workplace; on the other, it trivializes the Holocaust. But this objection misses the point. Obviously, I am not suggesting that wrongfully obedient law-firm associates are the moral equivalent of Eichmann, nor that genocide is just one more form of wrongful obedience in the workplace. Rather, the point for both Arendt and Milgram is that if an ordinary person’s moral judgment can be corrupted to the point of failure even about something as momentous as mass murder - or shocking an innocent experimental volunteer to death! - it is entirely plausible to think that the same organizational and psychological forces can corrupt our judgment in lesser situations. The extreme situations illuminate their ordinary counterparts even if, in the most obvious ways, they are utterly unlike them.