Duty Kant contrasted “doing your duty” with “giving into your emotions” or doing what you feel like. The key Kantian assumption is autonomy – literally self-rule, or “making a choice according to reason”. The only good thing, said Kant, was the good will, or the motive of treating others as you would like to be treated because it is intrinisically good or good in itself. This dutifulness creates a happy society because it entails respect for others.

Duty “Action, or act, that is due by moral obligation; that which one ought to do.” OED “The action or conduct due to a superior”.

Milgram’s experiment 1961 Stanley Milgram took 40 males aged 20 to 50 and invited them to join in an experiment. It was, he said a memory test and the volunteers had to administer electric shocks when a wrong answer was given. The shocks increased gradually from 15 to 450 volts (enough to kill someone). The person behind the screen was in fact an actor. A man in a white coat ordered the participants to continue with the experiment when they wavered.

Watch the experiment recently re- run by Michael Portillo ature=related ature=related cU3Y&feature=related cU3Y&feature=related

The two meanings of duty come into conflict Meaning 1: obey a superior (without thinking) Meaning 2: obey the moral law – do the right thing (think it through)

What were the prompts used by the professor? "Please continue." "The experiment requires that you continue." "It is absolutely essential that you continue." "You have no other choice, you must go on."

What question was Milgram seeking to answer? How many people would simply follow orders? "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority" (Milgram, 1974).

How many complied? The experiment has been re-run several times. The conclusion has always been the same: 65% continued to administer the shocks to the fatal level of 450 volts.

Milgram’s ethical conclusion "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.“ –Stanley Milgram, 1974

Adolf Eichmann invokes Kant You can re-enact Adolf Echmann’s defence at his trial in 1962, that he was only doing his duty, by printing the transcript on the philosophicalinvestigations website, click here.here What would Kant have said of Eichmann’s argument?