Civil Disobedience Research Paper

Does each person have morals? Or just simply follow the leader?

Each person is born and grow into having morals and knowing what’s right from wrong, but what if people are just following orders and just obey simply because the “authority” demands it. This community needs challenges and changes or else there wouldn’t be any justice. If Martin Luther King Jr didn’t take a stand for what he believed in, there would be a different world out there and still have different colored schools and treat people differently just based on their skin. Disobedience is needed; challenges should be taken everyday into consideration. There is an experience called the Milgram experience that was conducted by Yale Unviersity psychologist Stanely Milgram. He
first described his research and findings in 1963.
Stanely Milgram measured the willingness of study participants, mostly young male students from Yale, to obey an authority figure that instructed the participants to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. How the experiment works is that there’s two people but one is on other side and getting “shocked” while the other person questions him and also there is person of “authority” telling the person to keep going and contuine with the experiemtn, while the other person in the room that is getting shocked. Then the person would start getting uncomfortable because the other person is saying they are hurt and to get them off, while the authority says keep going. So then the person has to decide obey the authority and keep going or disobey and stop shock the

other human being that is being hurt right now and cant resist anymore.
In the first set of the experiment 65% of the experiment participants administrated the 450 volt shock. The machine that “shocked” the people was a shock generator with 30 switches ranging 15 to 450 volt shocks but instead of shocks that would “shock the participants, it actually just made noise that sounded as if someone were shocking them. Since time has passed there has been psychologist that has redone the experiment and the psychologist states that nothing as really changed and we have about the same
results.
In the article “ Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem” by Eric Forman he states the story of Adam and Eve “the orginal sin” that he disobeyed god and Prometheus the Greek myth and disobeyed stealing fire from the gods and was actually punished for his disobedience but he states that “I would rather be chained to this rock than be the obedient servant of the gods.” The saying “The law should be challenged,” has some right the law and “authority should be challenged. That is based on us the people on our morals and knowing when to take a stand. Otherwise if we never have or never do then what does that say to our human society now? Just a bunch of whimps that stood back and didn’t do anything and let the “authority” selected right from wrong. I’m not initiating that the whole authority is wrong and that we need to act now, but we do have a right to what us the people think what is best and not best for us. In the article it states “in order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err, and to sin. But courage is not enough. The capacity for courage depends on a person’s state of development. Only if a developed individual and thus has acquired the capacity to think and feel for himself, only then can he have the courage to say “no” to power, to disobey.” Schools should

teach more that students are the change and should take a stand in what they believe in otherwise there will be no leaders in the future, seeing that people just go by what the authority stands by. Freedom of Speech is one of our amendments yet we have so much “no that’s wrong” don’t do that” and my absolute favorite “because I said so.” I heard that saying by school teachers and even principals and even our parents will say that once in a while. Leaders are only built with an “army” in the people.
Majority of Americans don’t trust their leaders and the ones that should be taking care of us but one question out of all them who has actually done something about it? Right a close number probably to none. All this negativity that go through my ears the “government is hiding things” “The government doesn’t want us to know” is all complaints but no solution comes out of it. In the article “The Follower Problem” it states “ I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our intuitions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.” Which is true we follow whatever leader says we think we need and follow authority just because of a title and they’re “bigger” than us. For example if we know we are innocent for speeding in a car but a police officer says you were and hands you a ticket; most people wouldn’t even try to fight for their innocence simply because “it’s a cop it doesn’t matter.” People should take in charge what their conscience and morals say instead of following what other citizens in the community
say.

In Conclusion, People are brought up to listen to authority and follow what they say but what about what they go by? Is it worth bending what you believe is right or wrong for someone you don’t even know telling you how to act? There was an experiment called the Milgram experiment that was discovered by Stanely Milgram who was a psychologist from Yale University.