What defines what is evil? What defines what is good? Are there standards of morality? Don’t be too quick to respond; consider for a moment what was morally accepted 100, 500, 1000, 3000 years ago. You may want to say that that is what religions are for, to teach us what is moral. However, if you shield yourself that way, that the very nature of religion does not allow for variations; premarital sex is a SIN, lying is a SIN and it doesn’t discriminate white lies.

There are those that will say morality is the majority opinion and there are no standards. If society at large accepts something, it is moral. But here is a little story that will make you think again:

“A man just found out that his wife is suffering from a rare disease. They are happily married for 5 years, and have the sweetest baby daughter. However they are poor, and the medicine costs $1000. The man cannot pay for it and without it his wife will die, so he steals it and gives it to her. He is caught and sent to jail.”

Who is “right”? The man protecting the life of his wife? The pharmacist that was robbed of the medicine? The judge that sent him to jail? All of them? None of them?

Most people don’t even understand what true evil is; the say that the Nazis were Evil. However, an American psychologists wasn’t that sure. You see he was intrigued by the Nazi defence that they were only following orders. “How can this be? Is it possible to blindly follow orders? Where is the humanity?”, you may ask, as did he. So in 1961 he developed a test that we today know as the Milgram experiment.

Here is the description of the experiment from Wikipedia:

“For the experiment, subjects were recruited by newspaper ads and direct mail to participate in a study at Yale. The experiments themselves took place in two rooms in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall on the university’s Old Campus. The experiment was advertised as taking one hour, for which those responding would be paid $4.50. Participants were men between the ages of 20 and 50, coming from all educational backgrounds, ranging from an elementary school dropout to participants with doctoral degrees. [edit: later experiments included women, which showed that the gender of the test subject had no bearing on the results of the experiment]

The participant and a confederate of the experimenter, who would be an actor pretending to be another participant, were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment to test the effects of punishment on learning behaviour.
A slip of paper was given to the participant and another to the confederate. The participant was led to believe that one of the slips said “learner” and the other said “teacher,” and that the participants had been given the slips randomly. In fact, both slips said “teacher,” but the actor claimed to have the slip that read “learner,” thus guaranteeing that the participant was always the “teacher.” At this point, the “teacher” and “learner” were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. The confederate was sure to mention that he had a heart condition.

The “teacher” was given a 45-volt electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the “learner” would supposedly receive during the experiment. The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read 4 possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the learner would receive a shock, with the voltage increasing by 15 volts with each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, the learner gave no further response to the questions and made no further complaints.

At this point many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Many test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Some continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. Some subjects began to laugh nervously once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1.Please continue.
2.The experiment requires you to continue, please go on.
3.It is essential that you continue.
4.You have no choice, you must continue.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession”.

Milgram was surprised to say the least. He believed that his test would show that very few people, if any, would go all the way. He had asked fellow psychologists what they thought the results would be, before he did any testing, all answering that very few people were sadistic enough to go all the way. However, 67,5% of the participants administered the final voltage! Later studies showed that the percentage remains remarkably constant, between 61% and 66%.

Several variations were tested, women being tested instead of men, the experiment was disguised as being done for a commercial entity instead of Yale university, nothing affected the results in any meaningful way. The only thing that did affect it was the introduction of one or two actors pretending to be “teachers” themselves. When both actors refused to comply, only 4 in 40 continued to the last voltage. What I find surprising is the use of the word “only”. 4 in 40 is 10%, that is one person for every ten that would kill another just because he was given an “order” to do so, despite two other people refusing to do so!

Read up on Milgram to get a complete idea, I have stated the main points. So I ask again. What is evil? What is moral?