A once peaceful country with just a hiss of command, turns into a zone of bloodshed, rush for security, protests, forced incorporation into the army for adult males and youth, incarceration and extermination of civilians. In Nazi Germany, the belief in a destructive type of obedience manifested itself during World War II with the command of Adolf Hitler. More than six million Jews, Communists, Roma, and trade union members in Nazi Germany and all other regions under Nazi rule were taken to concentration camps and killed. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The questions that arise from this massacre are: How is it possible for people to be massacred on command? How could gas chambers be built and surveillance of torture concentration camps? How could one expose a neighbor to extreme forced labor, starvation, starvation and poison? Does this mean that there were dispositional factors that led to such evil, meaning that humans are inherently evil? Obedience to authority requires that all within the hierarchy accept the leader's legitimacy, knowledge, and competence in administering command. Therefore the person who gives the commands has a higher rank than the person who receives the orders. Obedience also occurs when someone is told to do a task that can have positive or negative results. For example, Germany's chief Holocaust planner, Adolf Eichmann, claimed to have no hatred for Jews. Instead, he simply followed orders that ensured that the collection, transportation, and slaughter of the victims went smoothly. In this scenario, obedience is a natural phenomenon but extreme and blind obedience to authority has disastrous outcomes and their morals should guide them in choosing what is right for them because all human beings have the gift of free will . In today's society, being obedient is a primary element in the lives of many individuals. Obedience is vital to peaceful coexistence in society, and only people who live in isolation are those who cannot be forced to respond or submit to the commands of others. Being obedient is a character rooted in the hearts of many people and prevails over ethical training, moral conduct and sympathy. Disobedience, on the other hand, has negative outcomes for those who practice it. Disobedience is the failure to obey the commands of the person in authority. As a result of disobedience, the agent may feel embarrassed and uncomfortable thinking that we are interrupting an order. It often leads to anxiety on the part of those who disobey the command because it can lead to punishment. What if the Nazi soldiers had disobeyed the command for reasons of morality and humanity? Was fear a driving force behind the soldiers' actions of brutality? Eichmann's actions could be considered a mad man as his blind obedience without questioning authority led to the holocaust that sends a chilling spike into the hearts and minds of many. As a result, Eichmann was examined by six psychiatrists to ascertain his sanity, only to diagnose that he was very healthy and that his life was that of an average human being. Since he was a normal human being, his inhuman conduct was, therefore, the result of blind obedience combined with situational factors that affect all human beings and can lead to egregious acts. After the effects of the Holocaust of World War II, psychologists decided to examine the wonder of human obedience as the first tests conducted focusedmainly about German culture which was thought to be distinct. But, if we had been in the same situations as Nazi soldiers, would we have obeyed the command to torture and massacre other human beings who were once our neighbors? The dilemma of obedience to authority has its origins in ancient times, when Abraham was told to leave his ancestral land and go to an area he did not know. In the historical era, human obedience has been investigated by many, and the question that remains is whether people should submit to authority even if submission would compromise human morality. Conservative sophists argue that because society faces the threat of disobedience, people have no choice but to obey. On the other hand, scholars emphasize the supremacy of personal conscience. The philosophical view of obedience has provided very little information about how human beings behave in extreme situations. Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram studied the logic behind the actions of those prosecuted at the Nuremberg War Criminal Trials for causing the Holocaust. Many of the condemned based their justification on obedience to higher authorities. Milgram wished to examine whether Germans were particularly obedient to their superiors in terms of power or whether obedience was common to all human beings. Milgram's experiment at Yale University was redone with ten male participants from the university to quantify obedience. Pain was inflicted on a student by the teacher according to the instructions of the experimenter, who is a professor at the university. From the experiment, a harsh authority is marked against the morals of the teacher who opposes him to hurt the student. The teacher could hear the victim screaming due to the pain of the electric shock generator, but could not stop administering the shocks and, instead, chose to obey the experimental scientist's command. The study shows that humans are capable of making an extra effort to obey commands. The experiment tests the student's ability to memorize pairs of words. The student should remember the pair of the second word after listening to the first, otherwise an electric shock of a different voltage should be administered. The student is strapped into an electric chair and his wrists are also connected to an electrode to minimize his movements. The main goal of the experiment is to see how far a teacher would go in administering shocks to a student after being commanded to obey. what the experimenter wants. The teacher then sits in a chair placed in front of an electric shock generator that has horizontally positioned toggle switches ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts. The switches indicate shock intensity from mild to extremely dangerous, indicated by XXX. The pilot lights that correspond to the various switches illuminate a bright red light when turned on. In the experiment, the teacher is an ingenious subject who comes to experiment in the laboratory. The victim is the student who ultimately receives no shock (Behrens and Leonard 584). In the modern world, human rights activists see the consequences of administering shocks to a human being as a crime against humanity and, most importantly, no one will be willing to suffer it. The Yale University laboratory, the electric shock generator, the lab coat, the electric chair, and the screaming drive home the experimental scientist's point. It involves investigating the extent to which a human being can obey and administer pain to a complaining victim when commanded to do so by an authoritarian person. Theclash occurs when the student shows pain while switching the switches on the machines. At moderate shocks of 75 volts, it growls; when the switch switches to 120 volts, it whines; the student commands exit from the experiment at voltage 150, and protests emotionally and intensely as the energy continues to increase. At voltage 285, his scream indicates extreme torture, and thereafter, no sound comes from the student. The teacher morally feels the need to stop administering the shocks when the student screams vehemently. But the moment the teacher feels like quitting; the experimental scientist orders him to continue. At 330 volts, it is a tug of war between the teacher's obedience to his morals or submission to the experimental scientist's fatal commands. From the results, it is evident that humans can go a long way in obeying people in authority rather than using their conscience to distinguish right from wrong. Even though the student was screaming, 65% of the participants did not obey their morals and performed the experiments at the full voltage of 450 V and chose to listen to the experimenter's stimuli. What mattered to them was obeying the experimenter's command. In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, people were subjected to harsh conditions, exposure to cold, starvation and brutal treatment. People's lives were not a matter of concern for the soldiers. Instead, they tortured and took people to poisoned gas chambers. Soldiers have come a long way to see their fellow men suffer immensely from a voltage of 450 as directed by Milgram's electroshock machine to achieve Adolf Hitler's goals. Obedience is a natural phenomenon and we all face hierarchies at home, school or workplace and, as such, we give our control to another person. We arrive at an agent state which has four components which are; capabilities of an agent, becoming an agent, characteristics of an agent, and limiting factors that prevent us from exiting the agent. The role of the agent is made social in many spheres of our lives where there are rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience. We usually find ourselves acting as agents because as human beings we value order and, above all, we no longer feel responsible for our actions and would apply the rules of those in authority. In Nazi Germany, soldiers no longer felt guilty for their actions in killing and torturing millions of innocent civilians because they were acting on behalf of their leader Adolf Hitler. The agency also binds us in such a way that we cannot get out of it. When we feel we have done something wrong, morally, we are obliged to leave it, but according to Milgram, consistency makes us not admit that our actions are sometimes illegal. We always feel beholden to our leader in terms of authority and tend to ignore the leader's legitimacy, knowledge and competence. The soldiers who participated in the Holocaust felt obligated to carry out their leader's monstrous commands, and the consistency made them feel no longer responsible for their actions. Based on Solomon Asch's study on opinions and social pressure, a study was conducted to bring to light the impact of Holocaust group pressure on individuals. The study aimed to ascertain the extent to which individuals' judgments are influenced by the strengths of other people. The result of the experiment was that many people succumb to the group's influence while others choose to remain indifferent. The same happened in Nazi Germany, where army officers practiced massive bloodshed and torture on victims not because they had anything against them, but.