Originally a comment by Seth on It turns out nice people are Nazis!
It’s not true, in general, that ‘nice people are Nazis’. But the converse was true; i.e., the average Nazi was a ‘nice’ and ‘good’ and ‘decent’ person, as measured by the standards of their peers. Upwards of five hundred thousand people (only half of them Germans) were involved in the Holocaust (which rendered extinct approximately twelve million people, about half of them Jewish); by far, the vast majority of these people were ‘just doing their jobs’, being nice and agreeable, attempting to make the world a better place. That was their intent (and the stated intent of every single National Socialist). That is one major reason why intent weighs very little next to consequence; sure, there’s a difference between first-degree murder and manslaughter, but that difference is much smaller than the difference between a convicted criminal and an unconvicted civilian.
Ophelia, I think your objection boils down to wariness of making a converse error; it may well be true that most moral actors are disagreeable people, but that does not logically entail that most disagreeable people are moral actors. This is basic logic, but it is beyond most people, especially those who get their news from their networks of friends and colleagues rather than checking the source material. In short, the results of this experiment may well be sound, but your own concerns are still valid–just because someone’s asocial (or mildly anti-social), it doesn’t necessarily entail that they will effect moral outcomes, even if most of those who do effect moral outcomes turn out to be asocial.
As a generally-irascible anti-authoritarian, I like to put myself in the latter camp…but such requires (at least) honest self-reflection, a working moral theory, and the ability to change one’s mind (and subsequent behaviour). Most people who subscribe to the rule ‘if people are mad, you’re doing something right!’ generally fail on these and other essential criteria, and so they generally fail to be moral actors. They do not negate the results of the experiment, but they do limit its scope, and we would be well to keep in mind the laws of logic before drawing erroneous conclusions from its results.
Seth,
It doesn’t deductively entail it, but it’s amenable to inductive reasoning and therefore suggestive.
The conclusion is tentative because it’s based on abductive reasoning, but that doesn’t entail that it’s erroneous. 😉
I think many of the posters in the earlier thread made a false dichotomy between conformity and contrarianism. Refusing to harm others when you are ordered to do so isn’t being contrary, it’s being non-conformist.
It’s cynical to attribute negative motivation to someone who refuses to harm others simply because you think you are part of the ‘agreeable’ group you know would push the button.
An example of the difference between non-conformity and contrarianism would be the Asch conformity task.
An ‘agreeable’ person might well give a conformist answer like the other subjects because of a desire to be liked but a non-conformist will give the answer they think is correct, whether other’s agree or not.
A contrarian, on the other hand, isn’t going take the opposite point of view – the way they might if it were a question of morality or taste where there’s no objective right or wrong answer – because the lines are demonstrably either the same length or they are not: to take a contrarian position would put them in a position where they might be proven wrong and look like an idiot.