Authority, heuristics, and the structure of excuses

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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. Our normative arguments build on arguments that Schoeman (1987) made in a fascinating but neglected article about attribution theory and the Milgram experiments. Schoeman argued that some psychologists exaggerate the relevance of the Milgram experiments for interpreting normative judgments about moral responsibility. We agree. But, drawing on the legal theory of entrapment, Schoeman also sought to identify some reason that the Milgram experiments provide a source of insight about the normative relevance of relying on authority for certain excuses. We argue that the entrapment model cannot explain the normative relevance of relying on authority in Milgram cases because entrapment