Assignment 1 Humn 330

What Topic makes for a Good Ethical Discussion?

Trista L. Serra

Embry Riddle

Human nature is such a touchy subject for an ethical debate. What’s right and what’s wrong comes into play with looking at the experiments with Milgram and Stanford. Is it wrong to subject someone to pain just because someone is telling you to and furthermore taking responsibility for it all?

A group of people were told to give their subject a series of questioned. Then they were advised that each time their subject got an answer wrong they would have to give them an electric shock. Also, each time the voltage increased more and more. What the question ‘askers’ didn’t know is that the people getting shocked were actors. So naturally, the askers would feel an emotional connection to that person and their pain. They would try and resist the urge to comply with the ‘boss’ and bring reason and their morals into it. “A classic answer has been an appeal to the logic of the Golden Rule: You wouldn’t want someone to harm you?” (Nina Rosenstand, 2013, The Moral of the Story, p. 19) The askers found it morally wrong to be shocking these people as they plead to be let out. However, more often than not, they would continue with upping the voltage each time the subject got a wrong answer. Since they saw no punishment on their end they were more inclined to listen to the instructions and continue on with the experiment.

It was important to the person’s morals and ethics to express their opinions to the boss-like figure. It takes not only an emotional perspective into view, but a logical one as well. Why are we doing this? What is the purpose? An experiment such as this brings all these questions up. It questions almost all of the aspects that factor into ethics.