Real Life Events That Happened In Okinawa And Abu Graib

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Argument Synthesis Essay
Extreme obedience leads to the compliance of social norms within the society. This ensures that humans follow the rules that have been set and this promotes law and order in the community. Similar levels of obedience allow bodies of authority set and exert laws in its people which eventually which eventually promote co-existence among us. Extreme obedience also allows us to establish hierarchies in our organizations because we need people or leaders at the top and subordinates below them for the organization to function well and effectively. Thus, despite of how ruthless extreme obedience may seem, it is important to have it in our society because it promotes co-existence.
Extreme obedience pleads for ethical appeal, ethos. This means for extreme obedience to work in our society, it appeals to be recognised as ethical. Extreme obedience shows no bias to anyone as everyone has to follow the law. In their experiment, both Milgram's and Zimbardo's got similar results where both showed how human beings obey authority. Stanly Milgram researched on obedient on authority. On the other hand, Philip Zimbardo researched on why guards as well as prisoners play their role of ensuring obedience to authority in prison (Craig, 121). The Milgram experiment and Zimbardo experiment shows how human beings show obedience to the authority and how capable and ready we are even to the extent of hurting innocent ones if given such an order (Nicholson, 741). These two cases failed their ethical test as they were unethical.
In the case of colonel Wenker and the American military, the rules and regulations governing the conduct of military personnel work on the grounds of ethical appeal too. These personnel are required to do what is ethical. Military works on ethics for them to co-exist peacefully. The interesting thing is the obedience which is based on the authority of the superior than in compliance due to the superior’s ability to give rewards and punishments (Miner, 125). There is interesting moral obligation placed on the military personnel to obey even there are no rewards or punishments involved as well as when disobedience will not even be noted.
Extreme obedience works under emotional appeal, pathos. Philip Zimbardo’s study main sort out why prisoners and guards become authoritarian and compliant. The participants of the study, involving 10 prisoners and 11 guards were college students. When the guards acted as brutal beings obeyed, the prisoners acted as obedient beings obeying (Nicholson, 739). The students (prisoners) seemed to obey the orders given to them by the leaders (guards). The same case applies to Stanly Milgram’s where when emotion...