Stanley Milgram’s Purloined Letter: A Plea for a Normative Interpretation of the “Obedience to Authority” Experiments

Abstract

I argue here that the theoretically central aspect of Stanley Milgram’s “experiments on obedience to authority” continues to elude main current commentators because it does not fit into the current paradigm of Milgram’s studies: the presentation and the justification of a set of rules to the subjects. I argue that taking this fact into account radically changes the interpretation of the subjects’ conduct: they are not submitting to an authority, they are not obeying orders, but they are applying a justified rule. If such is indeed the case, the interpretation of the experiments should not be primarily psychological, but normative.