If you're willing to buy the narrative that the experiment is "necessary for science" without questioning it, in the moment, then it's not an independent issue. They are obediently believing the authority figure without questioning the morality.
No, if we were to do the experiment in modern terms, you would place an actor in the chair and have a professor instruct their student that they are experimenting with correcting racist behavior out of the subject in a humane way. Would a liberal student reject this sort of experiment in 2020?
The Nazis were simply Germans. They were just like you and me. Many of their grandkids and great grandkids are still around. They're not any different.
Humans are dangerous when we start thinking in groups instead of as individuals. When we see ourselves as part of one group but see another group as particularly heinous, we become quite tribal and primitive.
Nazis like Adolf Eichmann were simply germans... who actually believed in what they were doing. Those who didn't but followed orders anyway were probably doing so out of fear, not simply because humans are order-following rubes.
> No, if we were to do the experiment in modern terms, you would place an actor in the chair and have a professor instruct their student that they are experimenting with correcting racist behavior out of the subject in a humane way. Would a liberal student reject this sort of experiment in 2020?
If you think a liberal student of 2020 would follow orders instructing them to torture a racist, but would reject an order that wasn't accompanied by a justification tailored to their ideology, then it sounds like you agree with my take. Given a free choice (e.g. no threat to kill their family if they refuse) people will follow orders if you convince them of the necessity of those orders by appealing to their ideologies and biases, but will refuse orders if the explanations for those orders are incompatible with their ideologies. But this is the 'water is wet' conclusion, not the attention grabbing conclusion Milgram sold to the public.
It wasn't simply out of fear. Sure, that may have motivated some people as the Nazis grew in power, but the phenomenon of humans viewing their outgroup as less than human is not unique to 1940s Germany. It has played out over and over in human history. Take the Aztecs, for example, who built pyramids for human sacrifice of lower tribal members. Or the Romans and their coloseums where they'd toss captured slaves in to fight to their death. It's really seen throughout human history and people do it with delight, even, if they are convinced that the others deserve it or that the outgroup is bad enough to warrant it.
Yes, humans do follow their biases and those tendencies are exploitable by sociopaths in positions of authority. That's the scary bit, to me, and that's what the experiment shows.
> Sure, that may have motivated some people as the Nazis grew in power, but the phenomenon of humans viewing their outgroup as less than human is not unique to 1940s Germany.
It is not that few people were motivated by fear in Germany. The nazi oppression apparatus was large and violent long before the war. People feared a lot, many of them, pretty much including those who also somewhat agreed with ideology.
Once Hitler got power, the first concentration camps were opened - for political opposition. And they were horrible places. The whole point was to destroy people and intimidate them. There was also large internal security apparatus in place to catch people who said something anti-nazi in random social setting. People reporting what others said and structures to investigate those repots. If someone was bullying a Jew in the street and you would try to help him/her, you would be targeted by literal violence too.
The level of control and pressure was large on non Jewish Germans. You could not have social or sports clubs unaffiliated with party, there was little safe space where you could say what you think. The nazi project took a lot of internal violence and intimidation to happen.
Also, they did their best to indoctrinate kids in schools to their ideology. Growing up generation of soldiers was focus of school system. Nazi ideology also taught empathy as feminine weakness, ruthlessness as virtue. All of that combines into values system where even if you are not watched, you still don't want to show empathy.
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Afaik, keeping up slavery takes considerable level of violence too. It did not happened outside of culture where you teach kids that what is happening to slaves is actually ok. Roman thinkers spend effort to explain why slavery is necessary and good thing, why slaves are naturally slaves.
Massive violent events don't just happen out of nowhere from nothing where originally pure unideological people are suddenly confronted with innocent choice.
No, if we were to do the experiment in modern terms, you would place an actor in the chair and have a professor instruct their student that they are experimenting with correcting racist behavior out of the subject in a humane way. Would a liberal student reject this sort of experiment in 2020?
The Nazis were simply Germans. They were just like you and me. Many of their grandkids and great grandkids are still around. They're not any different.
Humans are dangerous when we start thinking in groups instead of as individuals. When we see ourselves as part of one group but see another group as particularly heinous, we become quite tribal and primitive.