Was the Stanley Milgram Experiment Ethical? an Approach Through Descartes - Four Rule

In the Descartes-Discourse on Method, Descartes states that there is a need to have a set of methods to be followed as approaching the truth and defines four principles. After reading this, I questioned myself for things I accepted without knowing their certainty and without questioning. For example; in the social psychology class, an important social experiment was examined by the instructor this semester; Stanley Milgram experiment. Instructor pointed out that the experiment was not ethical and cannot be conducted today. I did not question the ethical issues about the experiment and accept the information which the instructor gave and written on the book. First, it would be useful to explain the Milgram experiment briefly. Stanley Milgram claimed to measure the willingness of the people to obey an authority that leads them to take an action conflicting with their own conscience. By the help of this experiment, Milgram aimed to observe that whether the soldiers in German Nazi army were just obeying the orders of the authority. Basically, three people was involved in the experiment; teacher, student and experimenter. Only teacher chosen from the participants, and s/he was told the experiment would be about the effects of punishment on learning and memorizing. The participants were ordered to give electrical shocks starting from 15V to 450V whenever the students make an error. Briefly, Milgram claims to observe how long will participants continue to give shocks to another person if they are ordered to do so by the experimenter who was the authority in the experiment (Milgram 62). However, this experiment begun to be questioned by the social scientists whether it was ethical or not. Finally, the experiment was not found ethical and decided that it would not be allowed at all. When I first heard the Milgram experiment, I found rational it to be unethical without knowing the certainty of the ethical issues of psychological experiments. However, I had not scrutinised the subject because I accept the argument which scientists construct as true.

According to the first rule of Descartes, I do not know the truth with certainty and I made a hasty judgement about the ethics of the experiment. Thus, I began to doubt about my thoughts. To be able to say something is unethical, first I must make the definition of ethics then I could say something is ethical or not. However, it is not easy to define ethics. Philosophers have made many definitions of what ethics is. It would be more useful here to make my own definition than to look at the definitions made by ethics philosophers. According to me, ethics is briefly an unwritten natural law defining what is good and bad for humanity and the nature. So far, my opinion on the ethics of Milgram experiment has become more difficult to determine whether it is ethical or not. By Descartes method, dividing the problem into parts at this stage is significant to be able to solve it.

In the second rule of Descartes, dividing the problem as much as possible will be much more useful to solve it. Hence, I have to look carefully at the all reasons why the experiment is not ethical for me. When I look at the reasons, I can collect them in three main titles. The first is whether the deception of the participants is ethical. The second is the psychological harm that will occur in participants after the experiment and the last is to cause people to empathize in accordance with the result of the experiment and to consider themselves in the same position as the Nazi soldiers and make them to feel guilty on the Holocaust. Trying to solve these reasons one by one will make the situation easier to solve whether it is ethical or not.

According to the third rule, I proceed from the beginning to the end by solving the three parts, which I have separated in order to question whether the experiment is ethical. So, I start with the easiest title of which I questioned

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