And Perhaps Our Awareness Is The First

Although A Person Acting Under Authority Performs Actions That Seem To Violate Standards Of Conscience, It Would Not Be True To Say That He Loses His Moral Sense. Instead, It Acquires A Radically Different Focus. He Does Not Respond With A Moral Sentiment To The Actions He Performs. Rather, His Moral Concern Now Shifts To A Consideration Of How Well He Is Living Up To The Expectations That The Authority Has Of Him.

It May Be That We Are Puppets-puppets Controlled By The Strings Of Society. But At Least We Are Puppets With Perception, With Awareness. And Perhaps Our Awareness Is The First Step To Our Liberation. (1974)

Ordinary People, Simply Doing Their Jobs, And Without Any Particular Hostility On Their Part, Can Become Agents In A Terrible Destructive Process. Moreover, Even When The Destructive Effects Of Their Work Become Patently Clear, And They Are Asked To Carry Out Actions Incompatible With Fundamental Standards Of Morality, Relatively Few People Have The Resources Needed To Resist Authority.

I Would Say, On The Basis Of Having Observe A Thousand People In The Experiment And Having My Own Intuition Shaped And Informed By These Experiments, That If A System Of Death Camps Were Set Up In The United States Of The Sort We Had Seen In Nazi Germany, One Would Find Sufficient Personnel For Those Camps In Any Medium-sized American Town.

A Substantial Proportion Of People Do What They Are Told To Do, Irrespective Of The Content Of The Act, And Without Pangs Of Conscience, So Long As They Perceive That The Command Comes From A Legitimate Authority.