Free-floating responsibility

The system of authority in Milgram's experiments was simple and contained few tiers. The subject's source of authority - the experimenter - was the topmost manager of the system, though the subject could be unaware of this (from his point of view, the experimenter himself acted as an intermediary; his power was delegated by a higher, generalized and impersonal authority of science' or research). Simplicity of the experimental situation rebounded in the straightforwardness of the findings. It transpired that the subject vested the authority for his action with the experimenter; and the authority indeed resided in the experimenter's orders - the final authority, one that did not require authorization or endorsement by the persons located further up in the hierarchy of power. The focus, therefore, was on the subject's readiness

162

The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram)

to renounce his own responsibility for what he had done, and particularly for what he was about to do. For this readiness, the act of endowing the experimenter with the right to demand things which the subject would not do on his own initiative, even things which he rather would not do at all, was decisive. Perhaps this endowment stemmed from an assumption that by some obscure logic, unknown and unfathomable to the subject, the things the experimenter asked the subject to perform were right even if they seemed wrong to the uninitiated; perhaps no thought was given to such logic, as the will of the authorized person did not need any legitimation in the eyes of the subject: the right to command and the duty to obey were sufficient. What we do know for sure, thanks to Milgram, is that the subjects of his experiments went on committing deeds which they recognized as cruel solely because they were commanded to do so by the authority they accepted and vested with the ultimate responsibility for their actions. These studies confirm an essential fact: the decisive factor is the response to authority, rather than the response to the particular order to administer shock. Orders originating outside of authority lose all force ... It is not what subjects do but for whom they are doing it that counts.'' Milgram's experiments revealed the mechanism of shifting respons­ibility in its pure, pristine and elementary form.

Once responsibility has been shifted away by the actor's consent to the superior's right to command, the actor is cast in an agentic state¹" - a condition in which he sees himself as carrying out another person's wishes. Agentic state is the opposite of the state of autonomy. (As such, it is virtually synonymous with heteronomy, though it conveys in addition an implication of the self-definition of the actor, and it locates the external sources of the actor's behaviour - the forces behind his other-directedness - precisely in a specific point of an institutionalized hierarchy.) In the agentic state, the actor is fully tuned to the situation as defined and monitored by the superior authority: this definition of the situation includes the description of the actor as the authority's agent.

The shifting of responsibility is, however, indeed an elementary act, a single unit or building block in a complex process. It is a phenomenon that takes place in the narrow space stretched between one member of the system of authority and another, an actor and his immediate superior. Because of the simplicity of their structure, Milgram s experiments could not trace further consequences of such responsibility shifting. In particular, having intentionally focused the microscope on basic cells of complex organisms, they could not posit organismic'

The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram) 163

questions, such as what the bureaucratic organization is likely to be once the responsibility shitting is occurring continuously, and at all levels of its hierarchy.

We may surmise that the overall effect of such a continuous and ubiquitous responsibility shifting would be a free-floating responsibility a situation in which each and every member of the organization is convinced, and would say so if asked, that he has been at some else's beck and call, but the members pointed to by others as the bearers of responsibility would pass the buck to someone else again. One can say that the organization as a whole is an instrument to obliterate responsibility. The causal links in co-ordinated actions are masked, and the very fact of being masked is a most powerful factor of their effectiveness. Collective perpetuation of cruel acts is made all the easier by the fact that responsibility is essentially unpinnable', while every participant of these acts is convinced that it does reside with some proper authority'. This means that shirking responsibility is not just an after-the-fact stratagem used as a convenient excuse in case charges are made of the immorality, or worse still of illegitimacy, of an action; the free-floating, unanchored responsibility is the very condition of immoral or illegitimate acts taking place with obedient, or even willing participation of people normally incapable of breaking the rules of conventional morality. Free-floating responsibility means in practice that moral authority as such has been incapacitated without having been openly challenged or denied.

Pluralism of power and power of conscience

Like all experiments, Milgram's studies were conducted in an artificial, purposefully designed environment. It differed from the context of daily life in two important respects. First, the link of the subjects with the 'organization' (the research team and the university of which it was a part) was brief and ad hoc, and was known to be such in advance, the subjects were hired for one hour and one hour only. Second, in most experiments, the subjects were confronted with just one superior, and one who acted as a veritable epitome of single-mindedness and consistency, so that the subjects had to perceive of the powers that authorized their conduct as monolithic and totally certain as to the purpose and meaning of their action. Neither of the two conditions is frequently met in normal life. One needs to consider, therefore, whether

164

The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram)

and to what extent they might have influenced the subjects' behaviour in a way not to be expected under normal circumstances.

To start with the first of these points: the impact of authority so convincingly shown by Milgram would, if anything, have been more profound still were the subjects convinced of the permanence of their link with the organization the authority represented, or at least convinced that the chance of such permanence was real. Additional factors, absent for obvious reasons in the experiment, would then have entered the situation: factors like solidarity and a feeling of mutual duty (the I cannot let him down' feeling) which are likely to develop between members of a team staying together and solving shared problems over a long period of time, diffuse reciprocity (services offered freely to other members of the group, hoped, if only half-consciously, to be 'repaid' at some unspecified future time, or just resulting in a good disposition of a colleague or a superior which again might be of some unspecified use in the future), and most important of all, the routine (a fully habitualized behavioural sequence which renders calculation and choice redundant and hence makes the established patterns of action virtually unassailable even in the absence of further reinforcement). It seems most likely that these and similar factors will only add strength to the tendencies observed by Milgram: those tendencies stemmed from the exposure to a legitimate authority, and the factors listed above certainly add to that legitimacy, which can only increase over a span of time long enough to allow for the development of tradition and for the emergence of multifaceted informal patterns of exchange between members.

The second departure from ordinary conditions might have, however, influenced the observed reactions to authority in a way not to be expected in daily life. In the artificial conditions carefully controlled by Milgram, there was one source of authority, and one only, and no other frame of reference of an equal standing (or even, simply, another autonomous opinion) with which the subject could confront the command in order to put its validity to something like an objective test. Milgram was fully aware of the possibility of distortion that such unnaturally monolithic character of authority must carry. To reveal the extent of distortion, he added to the project a number of experiments in which the subjects were confronted with more than one experimenter, and the experimenters were instructed to disagree openly and argue about the command. The outcome was truly shattering: the slavish obedience observed in all other experiments vanished without trace. The subjects were no longer willing to engage in actions they did not like;

The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram) 16^

certainly they would not be prompted to afflict suffering even to the unknown victims. Out of twenty subjects of this additional experiment, one broke off before the staged disagreement between the two experimenters started, eighteen refused further co-operation at the first sign of disagreement, and the last one opted out just one stage after that. 'It is clear that the disagreement between the authorities completely paralyzed action.¹¹

The meaning of correction is unambiguous: the readiness to act against one's own better judgment, and against the voice of one's conscience, is not just the function of authoritative command, but the result of exposure to a single-minded, unequivocal and monopolistic source of authority. Such readiness is most likely to appear inside an organization which brooks no opposition and tolerates no autonomy, and in which linear hierarchy of subordination knows no exception: an organization in which no two members are equal in power. (Most armies, penitentiary institutions, totalitarian parties and movements, certain sects or boarding schools come close to this ideal type.) Such an organization, however, is likely to be effective on one of the two conditions. It may tightly seal its members from the rest of society, having been granted, or having usurped, an undivided control over most, or all its members' life activities and needs (and thus approximate Goffman's model of total institutions), so that possible influence of competitive sources of authority is cut out. Or it may be just one of the branches of the totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian state, which transforms all its agencies into mirror reflections of each other.

As Milgram put it, it's only when you have ... an authority who ... operates in a free field without countervailing pressures other than the victim's protests that you got the purest response to authority. In real life, of course, you're conflated with a great many countervailing pressures that cancel each other out.¹² What Milgram must have meant by real life' was life inside a democratic society, and outside a total institution: more precisely still, life under conditions of pluralism. A most remarkable conclusion flowing from the full set of Milgram experiments is that pluralism is the best preventive medicine against morally normal people engaging in morally abnormal actions. The Nazis must first have destroyed the vestiges of political pluralism to set off on projects like the Holocaust, in which the expected readiness of ordinary people for immoral and inhuman actions had to be calculated among the necessary - and available - resources. In the USSR the systematic destruction of the real and putative adversaries of the system

166

The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram)

took off in earnest only after the residues of social autonomy, and hence of the political pluralism which reflected it, had been extirpated. Unless pluralism had been eliminated on the global-societal scale, organizations with criminal purposes, which need to secure an unflagging obedience of their members in the perpetration of evidently immoral acts, are burdened with the task of erecting tight artificial barriers isolating the members from the 'softening' influence of diversity of standards and opinions. The voice of individual moral conscience is best heard in the tumult of political and social discord