Case Study: The Man Who Shocked The World

1776 Words8 Pages
The case study that I have chosen for this particular paper comes under the section ‘Thinking Critically 1.2’ titled ‘The Man Who Shocked the World’. The case study mainly revolves around a controversial psychological experiment conducted by Dr. Stanley Milgram, a 28-year-old psychologist at Yale University who was also a Harvard graduate with a PhD. He basically chose to study human behavior and provide insights on the capacity of the members of the human race to inflict harm on each other. In order to carry out this study, he advertised for and chose participants from the general public who were only told that they would be volunteers in an experiment on punishment and learning. The set-up of the experiment was such that the ‘teacher’ in…show more content…
Universal ethics can be described as the set of rules by which a person or a group of people or an action and/or a group of actions are judged as being either good, evil or neutral and applies to the universe (i.e. everybody in the universe) regardless of dividing factors such as class, color, race, creed, religion, nationality, personal ideas, etc. The emphasis of the universal ethics as being devoid of anything ‘personal’ is based on four conditions: It applies to all persons, it applies to all acts and is comprehensive in nature, it is based on logical reason without any illogical element and finally it is premised on non-arbitrary conditions and is grounded in empirical reality (“Universal Ethic”, 2010). The positive features of this particular ethical theory are that they are uniform and do not discriminate. The concept of global citizenship that is a recent political idea can be imagined when considering this theory. However, the main issue that I have with this theory is that it I believe it has a tendency towards homogenization. What I mean is that all actions that are good come under the ambit of good universal ethics according to this theory. However, how can we classify something as essentially ‘good’? Good for whom? What good? Is your good different from my good? These questions cannot be impressively answered using this ethical theory. When analyzing this particular case study under the lens of universal ethics, it may be argued that what Dr. Milgram did was both good and evil. ‘Good’ because he did it to prove a point and ‘evil’ because he deceived the volunteers/ participants by withholding information from them. But as per the conditions specified by the theory, ‘if an act has both evil and good elements, then the good does not cancel out the evil’ (“Universal Ethic”, 2014) and hence the evil prevails. The mental trauma suffered by some of the volunteers who tried to plead

More about Case Study: The Man Who Shocked The World

Open Document