Obedience

The Milgram Experiment

Questions What was the task for the learner and the teacher? How did the learner protest? What sorts of things did the experimenter say to encourage the teacher to obey? What made the experimenter seems like an authority? How far did the subjects go before stopping? Did the real subjects enjoy shocking the learning?

What did this experiment reveal What did this experiment reveal? What do you think the point of the experiment was?

The Holocaust

Hannah Arendt German Jewish political philosopher, 1906 - 1975 Escaped to the United States at the beginning of the Holocaust Her writing deals with questions of authority, totalitarianism, and the nature of power

Hannah Arendt If a government orders an individual to do something that, in normal circumstances, is illegal and, even more to the point, morally wrong, must the individual obey? Her question: “How do average, even admirable, people become dehumanized by the critical circumstances pressing in on them?”

Adolf Eichmann “The Architect of the Holocaust” Chief of operations in deporting over 3 million Jews to concentration camps Ordinary man, had a wife and 4 children

As she watched Eichmann’s trial, Hannah Arendt observed: “Eichmann said he recognized that what he had participated in was perhaps one of the greatest crimes in history, but, he insisted, if he had not done so, his conscience would have bothered him at the time. His conscience and morality were working exactly in reverse. This reversal is precisely the moral collapse that took place in Europe.”

Hannah Arendt argued in her controversial essay "The Banality of Evil" that Adolf Eichmann was just an ordinary guy. Eichmann is you and me. There was nothing strikingly evil about him. Eichmann's defense, like that of other Nazis, was that he was "just following orders." Furthermore, Eichmann said that he actually had no real ill will toward Jews. In any case, Arendt was ostracized by the Jewish community for the rest of her life, and Eichmann was hanged and cremated.

Do you believe in the “Banality of Evil”? Can some of the world’s most horrible massacres and human rights violations be committed by ordinary people? Or are evil crimes only committed by evil people?

Should we forgive those who were just following orders Should we forgive those who were just following orders? What if they apologize for their behavior?

The Sunflower: The Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness By Simon Wiesenthal

Simon Wiesenthal Austrian Jew, born 1908 & died in 2005 Holocaust survivor After WWII, he became a “Nazi hunter” - someone who pursued former Nazi war criminals Wrote The Sunflower based on a personal experience at a concentration camp in the Ukraine in 1943

The Situation, a Moral Dilemma At the concentration camp, Wiesenthal is summoned to the bedside of the dying Nazi soldier Karl Seidl. The soldier tells him he is seeking "a Jew's" forgiveness for a crime that has haunted him his entire life. The man confesses to him having destroyed, by fire and guns, a house full of 300 Jews. He says that as the Jews tried to leap out of windows to escape the burning building, he gunned them down. Wiesenthal was so troubled he simply walked out of the hospital room silently. Later, he told the tale to other prisoners in the camp and asked them if he was justified in his silence. He received different responses. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunflower:_On_the_Possibilities_and_Limits_of_Forgiveness

Response by Hans Habe: “One of the worst crimes of the Nazi regime was that it made it so hard for us to forgive. It led us into the labyrinth of our souls. We must find our way out of the labyrinth – not for the murderers’ sake but for our own. Neither love alone expressed in forgiveness, nor justice alone, exacting punishment, will lead us out of the maze. A demand for atonement and forgiveness is not self-contradictory; when a man has willfully extinguished the life of another, atonement is the prerequisite for forgiveness. Exercised with love and justice, atonement and forgiveness serve the same end: life without hatred. That is our goal: I see no other.”

Response by Primo Levi: He argued that it was right to refuse to pardon the dying man because it was “the lesser evil: you could only have forgiven him by lying or inflicting upon yourself a terrible moral violence.”

Response by Herbert Marcuse “The easy forgiving of such crimes perpetuates the very evil it wants to alleviate.”

Response by E. Eugene Fisher ”We have no right to put Jewish survivors in the impossible moral position of offering forgiveness, implicitly, in the name of the six million. Placing a Jew in this anguished position further victimizes him or her. This, in my reading, was the final sin of the dying Nazi."

Who do you agree with? Should former Nazis be forgiven if they recognize their wrong-doings and apologize?