Obedience to authority goes a long way and has been met with little rebellion or questions. That is how strong Obedience of authority is and even if the act is inhumane or dehumanising, obedience to authority ensures that a majority of people will still carry on with the inhumane act as long as authority orders it.
Obedience genuinely refers to the orders that people partake and listen to before carrying them out on a particular assignment. Authority figures are people who give such orders and are seen as people who will either punish or reward, for the orders that are either rebelled against or carried out without any questions or interrogation. Obedience is expected to be followed at any given level as long as the order comes from an authority figure. That may come as a shock, but it is the truth since people do realize that if they are not obedient to the authority, it will cause a downturn in the system which the authority cannot afford. Therefore, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans is viewed as the ultimate record of obedience to authority and is met with similar results when Hitler ordered the genocide of German Jews during World War 2. These acts of atrocities have been committed without any second thought since the order came from an authoritative figure. The Americans could complain that they bombed two cities during an active war, but those cities had thousands of innocent civilians. Any humane person, given his will of freedom, would not have committed that act of barbarism. However, since the order came from an authoritative figure, it was deemed absolute and necessary or else there would be punishable consequences. Same ideology can describe the turn in fortunes for the genocide of German Jews. They were innocent, were not active in a war and did not know clearly why they were being targeted out of so many religious groups in the world. However, the German soldiers could have made amends by letting these Jews free but they didn’t. This is because they were ordered to exterminate these innocent civilians, and, being afraid of the consequences of not conforming to their authoritative figure, they exterminated the Jews out of commitment rather than freedom .
Obedience and violence are part of the human nature, and both may be carried out through an order at once while they both can define the acts that a human nature commits. The Americans who bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima followed an order which showed their obedient side of human nature while some of them may have dropped the bomb just for the fun of it, which shows the violent side of human nature. However, in the case of Nazi Germany, Obedience was carried out through violence and that is one side of human nature that most people will be unable to see in future authoritative orders unless a same method of authority is enabled .
There are quite a lot of moral dilemmas that are associated with obedience to authority. One of these moral dilemmas is one about privacy intrusion that is evident through the use of power to abuse privacy rights to the people of the United States of America via its National Security Agency. What is more disturbing is that a whistle blower from the NSA was the person to reveal such hideous atrocities. He was later charged with charges of treason that is another moral dilemma associated with obedience to authority. It justifies any unjust act through force of authority ad power and the ones who follow these orders are blind and forget their moral responsibilities such as finding the difference between right and wrong. When asked, they merely consolidate their part of the bargain by saying that they had no choice and were only following orders .
Situational forces are the surrounding environment and everything related to it and the person to whom these environmental factors associate themselves. Peer pressure and social pressure is the conformity to abide by the rules of a particular group or society that the person lives in while obedience to authority is the act of following orders to any extent as long as these orders are given from an authoritative institution or figure, such as the government or the President himself. The correlation of all these elements is the mere fact that situational forces are created by peer and social pressure while the obedience to authority either outcasts a person from his environment in the forms of rebels and other categories or assigns the same person to neglect moral responsibilities and carry out orders even if they’re as vivid and tormenting in their nature as they seem to be in the form of officers and other similar categorical posts .
In conclusion, it can be said that obedience to authority derives from situational forces, peer pressure as well as the norms of obedience yet it can also be enlightened by savage violence and the comfort of going astray from moral responsibilities.
Works Cited
Blass, Thomas. Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Psychology Press, 1999.
Boyd, Carolyn P. "The limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile." Journal of Interdisciplinary history (2001): 644-645.
milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. HarperCollins, 2009.
