The Ethics of Obedience (Reading Milgram)

untempered power over some other people. If there is a sleeper in each of us, he may remain asleep forever if such a situation does not occur. And then we would never have heard of the sleeper's existence.

The most poignant point, it seems, is the easiness with which most people slip into the role requiring cruelty or at least moral hlindness - if only the role has been duly fortified and legitimized by superior authority. Because of the breathtaking frequency with which such slipping into role' occurred in all known experiments, the concept of the sleeper seems to be no more than a metaphysical prop. We do not really need it to explain the massive conversion to cruelty. However, the concept does come into its own in reference to those relatively rare cases when individuals found the strength and courage to resist the command of authority and refused to implement it, once they found it contrary to their own convictions. Some ordinary people, normally law-abiding, unassuming, non-rebellious and unadventurous, stood up to those in power and, oblivious to the consequences, gave priority to their own conscience - much like those few, scattered, singly acting people, who defied the omnipotent and unscrupulous power, and risked the ultimate punishment trying to save the victims of the Holocaust. One would search in vain for social, political or religious 'determinants' of their uniqueness. Their moral conscience, dormant in the absence of an occasion for militancy but now aroused, was truly their own personal attribute and possession - unlike immorality, which had to be socially produced.

Their capacity to resist evil was a 'sleeper' through most of their lives. It could have remained asleep forever, and we would not know of it then. But this ignorance would be good news.

7

Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality

I propose now to consider in detail the problem that emerged at the end of the last chapter: the problem of the social nature of evil - or, more precisely, of the social production of immoral behaviour. A few of its aspects (for instance, the mechanisms responsible for the production of moral indifference or, more generally, for the delegitimization of moral precepts) have been dealt with briefly in earlier chapters. Because of its central role in the perpetration of the Holocaust, no analysis of the latter can claim to be complete unless it includes a more thorough investigation of the relation between society and moral behaviour. The need for such an investigation is further reinforced by the fact that the available sociological theories of moral phenomena prove, on closer scrutiny, ill-prepared to offer a satisfactory account of the Holocaust experience. The purpose of this chapter is to spell out certain crucial lessons and conclusions from that experience which a proper sociological theory of morality, free of the present weaknesses, would have to take into account. A more ambitious prospect, toward which this chapter will take only a few preliminary steps, is the construction of a theory of morality capable of accommodating in full the new knowledge generated by the study of the Holocaust. Whatever progress in this direction we can achieve will be a fitting summary of the various analytical themes developed in this book.

In the order of things construed by sociological discourse, the status ot morality is awkward and ambiguous. Little has been done to improve it, as the status of morality is seen as of little consequence for the progress

170 Towards a Sociological Theory of Morality

of sociological discourse, and so the issues of moral behaviour and moral

choice have been allocated but a marginal position in it and, accordingly,

are paid only marginal attention. Most sociological narratives do without

reference to morality. In this, sociological discourse follows the pattern

of science in general, which in its early years had attained emancipation

from religious and magical thought by designing a language that couid

produce complete narratives without ever deploying such notions as

purpose or will. Science is indeed a language game with a rule forbidding

the use of teleological vocabulary. Not using teleological terms is not a

sufficient condition for a sentence to belong to scientific narrative, but it

certainly is a necessary condition.

In as far as sociology strived to abide by the rules of scientific discourse, morality and related phenomena sat uneasily in the social universe generated, theorized and researched by the dominant sociological narratives. Sociologists therefore focused their attention on the task of dissembling the qualitative distinction of moral phenomena, or accommodating them within a class of phenomena that can be narrated without recourse to teleological language. Between them, the two tasks and the efforts they commanded led to the denial of an independent existential mode of moral norms; if acknowledged at all as a separate factor in social reality, morality has been assigned a secondary and derivative status, which in principle should render it explicable by reference to non-moral phenomena - that is, phenomena fully and unambiguously amenable to non-teleological treatment. Indeed, the very idea of the specifically sociological approach to the study of morality has become synonymical with the strategy of, so to speak, sociological reduction; one which proceeds on the assumption that moral phenomena in their totality can be exhaustively explained in terms of the non-moral institutions which lend them their binding force.