A scientific experiment is very different from a psychological experiment as was observed with The Milgram Experiment. The test was applied to participants recklessly because it stood to inflict psychological trauma in no less than a third of the participants, whose expression of nervous laughing or sweating indicated extreme psychological distress that these people were not prepared for. It was not merely because this risk was not discussed that this experiment was therefore unethical, but instead because it knowingly inflicted damage and therefore would never be justified in a standard scientific trial such as for a new medication where another solution would have been chosen.
Animal testing is used as a surrogate to human testing when effects on people are not known or believed to be too dangerous to them. That animal surrogacy was inapplicable to The Milgram Experiment as well as the emergence of nascent psychological analysis lead to a dangerous combination. Despite not being able to use animals there were alternative ways to find the same information and knowingly inflicting psychological damage in pursuit of scientific inquiry is immoral and unethical behavior.
An indicator that this science was too new to be responsibly applied during this experiment is the relatively high error rate in estimated “experiment stoppers” from folks who completed the experiment. For US citizens this difference exceeded 50% where it was estimated that 3-10% would actually carry through with the experiment. 26 of 40 of participants took the experiment to its furthest extreme of injuring someone against their will (Milgram 376).
Is it ethical to identify highly undesirable genetic predispositions and effectively wage a war with something so foundational that includes the very essence of what makes a human human in order to deter mass catastrophic societal errors that empowered Mao, Leopold II, Hitler, Stalin and their ilk from knowing the satisfaction of a theft so vast and vile that it prompts scientists to responsibly look so far inwardly that that if the results of such introspection revealed that it would be more ethical to no longer be human than ever allow for such a monumental travesty to repeat in any foreseeable subsequent generation that they ought to pursue those results despite potentially inflicting collateral damage? I think it’s fundamentally critical that experiments like this continue. The results don’t indicate immorality, but following sound scientific principles that aren’t potentially unethical are a higher priority to pursue.
Works Cited
Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper Colophon Books, 1969.
Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral study of obedience.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 67, no. 4, Oct. 1963, pp. 371–378, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040525.
“Obedience.” Milgram, Stanley. Youtube, 25 Apr. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rdrKCilEhC0. Accessed 23 Sept. 2024.