Which is stronger? Fear or morals? A Few Good Men addresses this issue through the court case of two men who acted under a morally questionable order. Multiple scenes in the movie show this conflict between heart and mind. Psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to test how far the average citizen would be willing to go to follow an order from an authoritative figure. His results contradict intellectual Ian Parker’s conclusion from his own tests of obedience. Both experiments have their own take on the question raised by A Few Good Men: “Do humans obey conflicting orders because of lack of strength to resist or because of a lack of value for others?” Although it is the general opinion that horrific deeds are done by horrific people, …show more content…
this assumption is brought into question by the movie, A Few Good Men. Obedience is a prevalent theme throughout A Few Good Men, as that is the basis for why two Marines are pleading not guilty to the murder of fellow Marine Private William Santiago. Lance Corporal Dawson claims that he was given a direct order from his superior, Lieutenant Kendrick to administer a code red, a behavioral corrective measure, to Private Santiago. Dawson passed this order onto P.F.C. Louden Downey, and the two of them proceeded to start the code red, tying up Santiago and placing a gag in his mouth. Later, he died, and the two were charged with murder. Their case is assigned to Navy Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, a slick young lawyer who had never seen the inside of a courtroom. He is teamed up with Lieutenant Commander Jo Galloway and Lieutenant Sam Weinberg. Although it looks grim for the two young Marines, Kaffee’s team listens to their clients and works to prove them to be not guilty. Dawson and Downey hold that they were just doing as they were instructed by a superior, which means more in the Marines than it does in the civilian world. At the end of the movie, Kaffee wins the case and Dawson and Downey are not charged for murder, but they are dishonorably discharged from the Marines, much to the dismay of the young men. Continuing on the theme of obedience, as told in “The Perils of Obedience,” psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to see just how far people would go out of their comfort zones to follow a direct order.
The basic experiment consisted of a teacher, a learner, and an administrator. The learner was strapped into a chair and the teacher read him/her words and the learner had to know what word to pair it with. Whenever the learner answered incorrectly, the administrator instructed the teacher to shock the learner with a volt of electricity. As the learner continued to respond inaccurately, the teacher had to execute shocks with higher and higher voltage causing greater and greater pain for the learner. About 60% of all “teachers” obeyed the entire time, giving the highest voltage and most painful shock (Milgram 80). British writer Ian Parker in “Obedience” analyzes Milgram’s life and his experiment. He questions the true purpose of the experiment and wonders if it really tested obedience and morals or situational …show more content…
pressures. Certain scenes in A Few Good Men help shed some light on whether people are moraless or spineless. Corporal Howard, a man in the same unit as Santiago, is put on the stand by defense lawyer Lieutenant Kaffee. Kaffee proceeds to ask Howard details about a code red and the many reasons someone would receive one. After revealing that Santiago had most definitely earned a code red for multiples mistakes, Kaffee asks why he never got one when he was such a “burden to the unit” (Reiner, A Few Good Men). Howard responds with “Dawson wouldn’t allow it” (Reiner, A Few Good Men). Howard furthers his point by going on to say that he and the other men were afraid of Dawson, and the reason he specifically did not give Santiago a code red, even though he wanted to, is because Dawson would have “kicked [his] butt.” From the questioning, the watcher can conclude that Dawson cared about Santiago and did his best to protect him from the other men in their unit. Another prevalent scene to the theme of this movie, consists of the questioning of Lieutenant Jonathan Kendrick, the man in charge of Santiago’s unit. From the testimony of Corporal Howard, the compassionate side of Dawson is revealed, but another side is brought to light by Kendrick’s testimony. Kaffee proceeds to ask Kendrick about fitness reports for the defendants, Dawson and Downey, and states that both obtained exceptional ratings upon two examinations, but with the last one, Dawson acquired a below average mark. Upon more investigation, it is proven that Dawson received this grade, which hindered his ascent to full corporal status, because he went behind the backs of his commanders and brought food to a man who was deprived of food and drink, except for water and vitamin supplements, as punishment for stealing alcohol. After laying this all out, Kaffee inquires if Dawson was given the low rating because he had helped a man who was being disciplined. To this, Kendrick replies “Corporal Dawson was found to be below average because he committed a crime.” The crime being, disobeying an order. Kendrick further uncovers that Dawson would have learned his lesson from this incident and would not commit another crime of this fashion. From this, the question arises? Why not? Was Dawson afraid of bad marks? Of not rising in ranks? While these all may be valid fears, Lance Corporal Dawson himself discloses what he is afraid of. Kaffee tells Dawson and Downey that he can get them off in six months if they plead guilty, but Dawson refuses to say he has done something wrong when he was only following an order. He knows if he takes this bargain, he and Downey will be dishonorably discharged. That is what he is truly afraid of, losing his life of order as a Marine. He says, “We joined the corps 'cause we wanted to live our lives by a certain code. And we found it in the corps.” Yale psychologist Milgram believes his experiment between the teacher and the learner tested morals, but Parker believes it only tested how people react under situational pressures.
Milgram addresses how his “teachers” continue to administer shocks of high voltage even as the learner’s discomfort grows as made obvious by yelling and begging for the experiment to be done, and as it proceeds, agonized screams and then silence (Milgram 79). When put into context of A Few Good Men, however, it is obvious that what Dawson and Downey did to Private Santiago, that is tie up and gag him, was not out of sadistic pleasure, but because of an order. Dawson evidently cared about Santiago as he would not let any of the other man lay a hand on him to teach him a lesson. Which again brings up the question of why he did it. In Milgram’s experiment, the teachers continued despite their concern for the learner’s health because the administrator explicitly told them to and said he would assume the responsibility for all consequences. However, when orders were not given face-to-face, but over the telephone, people were much more likely to disobey (Milgram 88). These people were afraid of disappointing the experimenter and how they would appear if they did not fully carry out their task. Was Dawson afraid of disappointing his commander? Are people really that shallow? Milgram seems to think so, but Parker would beg to
differ. Parker says “People tend to do things because of where they are, not who they are.” With this kind of thinking, one can wonder if the incident between Dawson and Downey and Santiago had taken place anywhere but in the Marines, what would have happened. Are they horrible people? It is proven that they are not when Kendrick testifies that Dawson risked getting in trouble to feed a hungry man and when Howard testifies that the others were afraid to touch Santiago because he had Dawson’s protection. So why did they do it? Erich Fromm, a distinguished intellectual of the twentieth century, points out that obedience equals safety and protection (Fromm 127). He even goes so far as to say, “If I am afraid of freedom, I cannot dare to say ‘no,’” which can then be applied to Dawson’s case. Maybe it is not the situation like Parker believes or the lack of morals like Milgram initially believed, but the lack of strength to stand up for the little guy even when it is hard. Fromm, Parker, and Milgram would all have different perspectives as to why Dawson did what he did from a psychological standpoint, but they could all agree, just like the jury did, that Dawson and Downey did not behave in the way Marines should, defending the weak, but instead carried out an order that they had to morally compromise themselves to do. So, it is not only horrific people who do horrific deeds, but a mix of situation, ethics, and fear that drives people to do sadistic acts that they normally would not even consider. After knowing all this, would the jury have still dishonorably discharged Dawson and Downey, knowing that was the very thing they feared the most? What motivates people on the everyday business? What is stronger? Fear? Morals? Or the situation?
In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure. The study was set up as a "blind experiment" to capture if and when a person will stop inflicting pain on another as they are explicitly commanded to continue. The participants of this experiment included two willing individuals: a teacher and a learner. The teacher is the real subject and the learner is merely an actor.
Dalrymple states that he obeyed his superior because she was more knowledgeable over her job (256). The Milgram experiment demonstrates how ordinary people act towards authority in certain situations. Dalrymple accurately utilizes that point by describing when a boy is turned in for trying to steal a car and then the parents proceed to yell at the guards. The guards began to stop reporting kids because they wanted to avoid the conflict all together (257). Parker agrees with Dalrymple by explicating that the experimenter alludes to conflict when the teacher wants to discontinue the experiment, but stumbles to rebel when dictated to continue (238). Parker’s solution is to offer a button for the teachers to press when they are no longer able to continue the experiment (238).
At first Milgram believed that the idea of obedience under Hitler during the Third Reich was appalling. He was not satisfied believing that all humans were like this. Instead, he sought to prove that the obedience was in the German gene pool, not the human one. To test this, Milgram staged an artificial laboratory "dungeon" in which ordinary citizens, whom he hired at $4.50 for the experiment, would come down and be required to deliver an electric shock of increasing intensity to another individual for failing to answer a preset list of questions. Meyer describes the object of the experiment "is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch" (Meyer 241). Here, the author is paving the way into your mind by introducing the idea of reluctance and doubt within the reader. By this point in the essay, one is probably thinking to themselves, "Not me. I wouldn't pull the switch even once." In actuality, the results of the experiment contradict this forerunning belief.
As depicted in A Few Good Men, authors Fromm, Dalrymple, and Szegedy-Maszak provide evidence as to why blind obedience influences individuals’ motives, such as fear and trust, to examine how unjust authority pollutes a person’s ability to
In this article “The Pearls of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram asserts that obedience to authority is a common response for many people in today’s society, often diminishing an individuals beliefs or ideals. Stanley Milgram designs an experiment to understand how strong a person’s tendency to obey authority is, even though it is amoral or destructive. Stanley Milgram bases his experiment on three people: a learner, teacher, and experimenter. The experimenter is simply an overseer of the experiment, and is concerned with the outcome of punishing the learner. The teacher, who is the subject of the experiment, is made to believe the electrical shocks are real; he is responsible for obeying the experimenter and punishing the learner for incorrect answers by electrocuting him from an electric shock panel that increases from 15 to 450 volts.
The motion picture A Few Good Men challenges the question of why Marines obey their superiors’ orders without hesitation. The film illustrates a story about two Marines, Lance Corporal Harold W. Dawson and Private First Class Louden Downey charged for the murder of Private First Class William T. Santiago. Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, who is known to be lackadaisical and originally considers offering a plea bargain in order to curtail Dawson’s and Downey’s sentence, finds himself fighting for the freedom of the Marines; their argument: they simply followed the orders given for a “Code Red”. The question of why people follow any order given has attracted much speculation from the world of psychology. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted an experiment in which randomly selected students were asked to deliver “shocks” to an unknown subject when he or she answered a question wrong. In his article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram concludes anyone will follow an order with the proviso that it is given by an authoritative figure. Two more psychologists that have been attracted to the question of obedience are Herbert C. Kelman, a professor at Harvard University, and V. Lee Hamilton, a professor at the University of Maryland. In their piece, Kelman and Hamilton discuss the possibilities of why the soldiers of Charlie Company slaughtered innocent old men, women, and children. The Marines from the film obeyed the ordered “Code Red” because of how they were trained, the circumstances that were presented in Guantanamo Bay, and they were simply performing their job.
In the film “ A Few Good Men” the rule of law and fundamental justice were not followed by Lance Cpl. Harold and Pfc. Louden Downey. The rule of law was disobeyed as soon as Cpl. Lance and Pfc. Louden acted above the law. They committed a criminal offence and disregarded Pvt. Santiago's rights. Although, the orders were given by superior officer, Col. Nathan Joseph, the fact of the matter still remains the same, a crime was committed . Pvt. Santiago’s rights were not taken into consideration, which inevitably lead to his death. Although Cpl. Lance and Pfc. Louden clearly disregarded the rules of law and acted above the law, procedural justice was still exercised. Both Cpl. Lance and Pfc. Louden were given rights to a fair trial and the
Stanley Milgram, author of "The Perils of Obedience," conducted an experiment at Yale University to see if average citizens would partake in a study revolving around obedience to authority (Milgram 78). In said experiment, a professor from Yale would give an ordinary individual the authority to shock another person. If the ordinary individual asked to stop, the professor would coax them to continue and remind them they hold no responsibility (78). Not only did Milgram 's study revolve around obedience to authority, it also stressed the point of every person could be capable of torture and doing so without feeling responsible. In the article, "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism," author Marianne Szegedy-Maszak states, anyone can
More specifically, the movie A Few Good Men depicts the results of blindly obeying orders. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, also explores obedience to authority in his essay “ The Perils of Obedience”. On the other hand, Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, focused on disobedience to authority in his essay “ Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem.” Milgram wrote about how people were shockingly obedient to authority when they thought they were harming someone else while Fromm dissected both: why people are so prone to obey and how disobedience from authoritative figures can bring beneficial changes for society. Obeying commands, even when they go against our morals, is human nature; Disobeying commands, however, is challenging to do no matter what the situation is.
Upon analyzing his experiment, Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, concludes that people will drive to great lengths to obey orders given by a higher authority. The experiment, which included ordinary people delivering “shocks” to an unknown subject, has raised many questions in the psychological world. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California and one of Milgram’s colleagues, attacks Milgram’s ethics after he completes his experiment in her review. She deems Milgram as being unethical towards the subjects he uses for testing and claims that his experiment is irrelevant to obedience. In contrast, Ian Parker, a writer for New Yorker and Human Sciences, asserts Milgram’s experiments hold validity in the psychological world. While Baumrind focuses on Milgram’s ethics, Parker concentrates more on the reactions, both immediate and long-term, to his experiments.
A Few Good Men is a prime example of obedience-involved situations throughout the entire film. Specifically, it contains great examples of the relationship of obedience and the sense of entitlement. Entitlement tends to logically come hand and hand with a sense of being above most authority figures, resulting in the lack of obedience towards those figures. Stanley Milgram has examples of this trend in his works in “The Perils of Obedience,” where the test subject tends to feel entitlement, mainly from the experiments “teacher” explaining how the experiment depends on them with how far they are willing to go with the experiment (Milgram 79). An additional popular experiment we can effectively compare A Few Good Men to is the Stanford Prison
If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority figures. Milgram is well aware of his audience and organization throughout his article, uses quotes directly from his experiment and connects his research with a real world example to make his article as effective as possible.
Obedience to authority and willingness to obey an authority against one’s morals has been a topic of debate for decades. Stanley Milgrim, a Yale psychologist, conducted a study in which his subjects were commanded by a person in authority to initiate lethal shocks to a learner; his experiment is discussed in detail in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgrim 77). Milgrim’s studies are said to be the most “influential and controversial studies of modern psychology” (Levine).While the leaner did not actually receive fatal shocks, an actor pretended to be in extreme pain, and 60 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, despite evidence displaying they believed what they were doing was harming another human being (Milgrim 80). Likewise, in Dr. Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducted an experiment, explained in his article “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” in which ten guards were required to keep the prisoners from
Summary of the Experiment In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram conducted experiments with the objective of knowing “how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist" (Milgram 317). In the experiments, two participants would go into a warehouse where the experiments were being conducted and inside the warehouse, the subjects would be marked as either a teacher or a learner. A learner would be hooked up to a kind of electric chair and would be expected to do as he is being told by the teacher and do it right because whenever the learner said the wrong word, the intensity of the electric shocks increased. Similar procedure was undertaken on the teacher and the results of the experiments showed conclusively that a large number of people would go against their personal conscience in obedience to authority (Milgram 848).... ...
But I believe I was right, sir. I believe I did my job. And I won 't dishonor myself, my unit, or the Corps, so that I can go home in six months.” (Kaffee, Dawson, and Downey in interrogation room). By saying this, he proves what Zimbardo found in his study: when placed in a social role, young educated men and women are radically transformed to fit that role. Though Dawson appears to have no remorse over what he 's done, we see that he knows what he did was wrong when he says “I never meant to hurt Willy” to Kaffee, Jo, and Sam after he 's been sentenced. Would Dawson and Downey have done what they did to Santiago if they were at home with family? If they had never joined the Marines? Zimbardo 's answer to this would be a definite no. To explain his reasoning, he says “To what extent do we allow ourselves to become imprisoned by docilely accepting the roles others assign us or, indeed, choose to remain prisoners because being passive and dependent frees us from the need to act and be responsible for our actions (117).” Through Zimbardo 's viewpoint, Dawson and Downey were nothing more than ordinary men who were placed in an extreme role and were radically changed to assume that role. Much like how the guards changed in The Stanford Prison Experiment, Dawson and Downey were changed through the pressures of the military, and took the responsibility of the Code Red too