The experiment of Fred Prozi:

He was referring to the filmed record of the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s classic—some call it notorious—experiment in obedience and authority conducted at Yale University in the summer of 1961. So disturbing and astonishing was this experiment and what it seemed to reveal about human nature that it has ever since been a required subject of study and debate by countless students of psychology and sociology, as well as by many philosophers and theologians.

Following immediately in the wake of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the Milgram experiment seemed to show a terrifying tendency in people to violate the most fundamental principles of morality when so ordered by an authority figure—just as, at the trial, Eichmann claimed to be merely “following orders” when he collaborated in the businesslike slaughter of millions of men, women and children in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Milgram’s experiment has been a key element in discussions of good and evil and the fragility of human morality—and especially with respect to what Milgram called “the perils of obedience.”

But there was one crucial aspect of this experiment, as shown in the film, that has received only a limited kind of study. It is because of this one vividly demonstrated aspect of human nature that I have shown this film to every philosophy class I have ever taught in which the question has arisen: what is evil and why does evil exist?

For the description of the experiment: The Perils of Obedience

Extracted from the Book  Why Can’t We Be Good, Jacob Needleman

Jacob Needleman, Why can’t We Be Good