The Perils of Obedience and The Case for Torture Essays
The Perils of Obedience and The Case for Torture EssaysSince childhood, one of the wisest adages that parents have drilled into our minds is to always take responsibility for our actions. However as children there have been many times when we feel as though we are not responsible for a wrong doing, just because someone else takes the blame. In reality only we know if we our responsible or not. For example as a child I was playing ball inside the house with my older cousin, and I threw ball in the wrong direction, which broke my mother’s flower vase. When asked who broke the vase, my cousin took the blame. It was a sigh of relief for myself because I thought I was off the hook. Being elder than myself, my cousin thought it was his responsibility to take the blame for the broken flower vase. I offered to tell the truth and tell my mother it was really I who broke the vase, but my cousin convinced me it wasn’t my fault, when it actually was. So just because by word of mouth from my cousin telling me that I wasn’t responsible, made me believe that I really wasn’t. My cousin probably should have let me take the fault, because the incident spoiled me. In a way it encouraged me to do more mischief, and whatever I pleased because I thought it was not my fault. Just as Stanley Milgram describes in his essay, “The Perils of Obedience” I had once behaved as the teachers in Migram’s experiment. Michael Levin’s essay “The Case for Torture” Levin declares his belief in that it is the responsibility of a person in authority to torture someone who is believed to be guilty of planting a bomb. Cesare Bonesana’s essay “Torture” concerns Bonesana’s principles concerning the law and how no man is guilty until proven innocent. He argues against Levin, saying that because of the law, that no one should take the responsibility to torture someone who is just believed to be guilty. All three of these essays have two main concepts, torture and responsibility. Milgram’s essay focuses on how a person accepts responsibility as the torturer or not. With Bonesana’s essay arguing against Torture and Levin’s essay arguing for Torture, many connections can be made with Milgram’s essay regarding when people accept him or herself as the torturer.
After reading Milgram’s essay one can begin to understand the question of how does one’s concept of responsibility for one’s actions affect the willingness to become the torturer. Milgram’s essay is about his encounters with people and what he observed from them while conducting his experiment. As a result of his experiment Milgram found, surprisingly, that most of his subjects who had the title as the teacher in the experiment who were ordinary people. They were willing to give harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts. A person with the...
To view the complete essay, you be registered.