ABSTRACT
Stanley Milgram’s (1983) famous obedience experiments show that in some contexts, ordinary people obey authority even when doing so involves gross wrongdoing. In this chapter we ask what, if anything, these experiments reveal about individual moral responsibility for wrongful conduct and its consequences. We propose approaches for evaluating the conduct of Milgram’s subjects, and we propose ways to generalize these approaches to assess the behavior of managers who respond to authority inside complex organizations. Our inquiry is not empirical: We do not try to expand the stock of psychological explanations of the behavior of Milgram’s subjects or to adjudicate among rival explanations. Our inquiry is instead conceptual and normative: We analyze and propose norms for assessing some instances of wrongful conduct.
