The movie A Few Good Men provides a perspective with which to view the issues of the defense of obedience to authority when following instructions from superiors. Stanley Milgram, author of “The Perils of Obedience,” and Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, authors of “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience,” would likely argue that numerous factors other than intentional sadistic urges could cause a person to unnecessarily inflict violence on another human being. Both articles use psychological methods to examine the reasons a person would knowingly inflict pain on another human. Milgram’s article begins by explaining the dilemma of submission to authority and continues to describe his well-known experiment in its entirety (78-79).
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Kaffee to protect the lives of Dawson and Downey involves the fact that the soldiers were simply following orders when committing the crime. Milgram effectively discusses the concept of obeying the instructions of superiors, and he logically explains that obedience occurs when a person’s viewpoint involves responsibility to the directing authority but does not involve responsibility for the actions ordered by the authoritative figure (87). These ideas have been used to rescue inmates from death row, as described by the American Psychological Association in “Obeying and Resisting Malevolent Orders.” The article cites a situation in which nine of thirteen South African defendants were spared the death penalty due to expert testimony regarding obedience to authority (“Obeying and Resisting”). Describing the scenario of the convictions from the My Lai Massacre, which also apply the ideas brought up by Milgram, Kelman and Hamilton provide the defense of Lieutenant Calley, the only person convicted of any crime from the massacre (136). In his defense, Calley explains that in the military, officers teach the subordinates in the chain of command that all orders are to be assumed legal and that the soldier should be held responsible to carry out any orders commanded of him (Kelman and Hamilton 136). Likewise, in “Just Obeying Orders?” Alexander Haslam and Steven Reicher elucidate through multiple examples that …show more content…
Kelman and Hamilton effectively explain in their article that routinization reduces the necessity of drawing personal conclusions about the legitimacy of authority and that dehumanization deprives victims of identity and community, two qualities that define human relationships (140-141). Elucidating a specific instance of a subject who routinizes the experiment and dehumanizes the victim, Milgram logically describes a welder who executes the experiment, not accepting any objections from the learner, in a routine-like fashion (86). This welder “hardly takes cognizance of [the learner] as a human being” and acts as if no trouble has occurred after the learner cries out in pain (Milgram 87). The dehumanization demonstrated in this instance removes the learner’s sense of identity, one of the central human qualities. Rowan Savage, a renowned sociologist and author of “Modern Genocidal Dehumanization: A New Model,” describes three other characteristics of the act of dehumanization: exclusion, denial, and essentialization (143). These ideas can be applied to the assault of Private Santiago, who was excluded from the soldiers for his inferiority and denied the rights to contact authorities regarding his situation; for this reason, the acts
Kaffee to protect the lives of Dawson and Downey involves the fact that the soldiers were simply following orders when committing the crime. Milgram effectively discusses the concept of obeying the instructions of superiors, and he logically explains that obedience occurs when a person’s viewpoint involves responsibility to the directing authority but does not involve responsibility for the actions ordered by the authoritative figure (87). These ideas have been used to rescue inmates from death row, as described by the American Psychological Association in “Obeying and Resisting Malevolent Orders.” The article cites a situation in which nine of thirteen South African defendants were spared the death penalty due to expert testimony regarding obedience to authority (“Obeying and Resisting”). Describing the scenario of the convictions from the My Lai Massacre, which also apply the ideas brought up by Milgram, Kelman and Hamilton provide the defense of Lieutenant Calley, the only person convicted of any crime from the massacre (136). In his defense, Calley explains that in the military, officers teach the subordinates in the chain of command that all orders are to be assumed legal and that the soldier should be held responsible to carry out any orders commanded of him (Kelman and Hamilton 136). Likewise, in “Just Obeying Orders?” Alexander Haslam and Steven Reicher elucidate through multiple examples that …show more content…
Kelman and Hamilton effectively explain in their article that routinization reduces the necessity of drawing personal conclusions about the legitimacy of authority and that dehumanization deprives victims of identity and community, two qualities that define human relationships (140-141). Elucidating a specific instance of a subject who routinizes the experiment and dehumanizes the victim, Milgram logically describes a welder who executes the experiment, not accepting any objections from the learner, in a routine-like fashion (86). This welder “hardly takes cognizance of [the learner] as a human being” and acts as if no trouble has occurred after the learner cries out in pain (Milgram 87). The dehumanization demonstrated in this instance removes the learner’s sense of identity, one of the central human qualities. Rowan Savage, a renowned sociologist and author of “Modern Genocidal Dehumanization: A New Model,” describes three other characteristics of the act of dehumanization: exclusion, denial, and essentialization (143). These ideas can be applied to the assault of Private Santiago, who was excluded from the soldiers for his inferiority and denied the rights to contact authorities regarding his situation; for this reason, the acts