Hierarchical situations are a complex example for determining individual responsibility, as typically a superior communicates a plan, and a subordinate executes it. Thus, the superior bears responsibility for the decision but is distanced from the outcomes, while the subordinate experiences authorship over the action but may not experience responsibility for its outcomes. This chapter focuses on how authority is wielded and how decisions are made by commanders in order to understanding the dynamics of obedience. By reviewing the claims made by some leaders of genocide, this chapters show that despite their high position in the hierarchical chain, they are frequently trying to reduce their responsibility for the atrocities conducted. Neuroscience research further showed that giving orders leads to a reduction of the sense of agency and moral emotions towards the pain of victims. These results show how hierarchical situations can allow people to commit actions that could transgress moral conducts, as agency and moral emotions are split across two individuals.

The “just following orders” argument has been used across many documented wars and genocides around the world. It suggests that the justifications given by perpetrators perhaps reflect, at least in part, a reality in their brains that would be shared across all the members of our species. The brain is a complex structure composed of trillions of neurons that controls our thoughts, our feelings, our decisions, our memory, our senses, and that regulates our body. Even though a wide range of environmental and social factors can modulate how our brains process information and computes decisions, the brain is nevertheless the central processing agent. By providing a novel perspective on what is happening in the brains of those obeying orders, I seek to reveal the mechanisms leading to immoral behaviors under obedience at a deep and individual level – that is, at the neural level. This knowledge can be used to develop personalized interventions that take into account unique neurobiological profiles.

This chapter shows how human obedience is captured in an experimental setup, and how such research methodology can help us understand how people can comply with orders to hurt another person on a neurological level. By reviewing past experimental research, such as the rat decapitation study of Landis, the studies of Stanley Milgram on destructive obedience, and the Utrecht studies on obedience to non-ethical requests, this chapter shows that under certain circumstances, a majority of individuals could be coerced into inflicting physical or psychological harm on others at levels generally deemed unacceptable, even without any tangible social pressures such as military court or job loss. The chapter also describes a novel method where people can administer real painful electric shocks to someone else in exchange for a small monetary reward, and describes how such a method allows neuroscience investigations that would focus on the neural mechanisms associated with obedience.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which English infantrymen understood duty and how their perceptions of their military role drew both on military and civilian culture. It underlines the differences between officers’ and other ranks’ understanding of their obligations. The army itself defined duty, like morale, as a set of ‘moral’ criteria. Officers’ duties were defined in their commissions and the King’s Regulations; their duty, at least to their men, was of an infinite nature. In contrast, the rank-and-file’s ‘contract’ with the military was finite and secular. In 1914, regulars viewed their job with a clinical and professional eye. However, for reservists and the civilian soldiers that followed them, the idea of ‘doing one’s bit’ came to dominate their perception of duty. Importantly, though, the cultural pressure of ‘respectability’ (drawn from both the military and civil society) informed their rationalisation of service. ‘Military cultures’ were also influential, particularly those of cheerfulness and obedience, which informed men’s actions, attitudes, and performance. What is more, the need to maintain ‘good character’ also exerted its own pressures. Men’s wartime record would influence their prospects once peace returned. Significant, too, was the soldiers’ perceived duty to England. After all, they were the defenders of the homeland.

This chapter investigates monastic experience, which has been a deliberate pursuit of religious life for most of Christian history and also appears in other religious traditions. It argues that monasticism is especially characterized by structures of stability that are achieved through communally shared rules and vows of stability. The tasks of prayer and labor – often accomplished in silence – mark monastic life and often interpenetrate each other, as prayer becomes labor and work is infused with prayer. The monastic self is shaped through obedience to the rule, shared communal practices, and mutual love. It is a profoundly communal religious way of life to the point that the individual is entirely absorbed into the monastic community. In this regard, it carries human plural experience – usually pursued in a more temporally limited fashion – to its height.

Hobbes condemns liberty of conscience by stressing its incendiary repercussions on social stability and political sovereignty. Religious dissenters fashion themselves as sovereigns, emboldening them to do whatever they want rather than obey the state. For Hobbes, invocations to conscience are mere assertions of opinion – deeply held and felt, such that individuals insist on acting in accordance with them, but opinions nonetheless. While Hobbes anticipates the danger of liberty of conscience, he also offers a potential solution to this very problem – civic education – and invites us to reflect on how we might cultivate consensus through attempts to shape the conscience of dissenters. The possibility of peaceful co-existence becomes, at some point, about the project of persuasion, for Hobbes, such that invocations of conscience will abate over time and the threat of liberty of conscience to political authority may be tamed.

Societies are transformed by total wars, which mobilize entire populations, penetrate society as a whole, and involve both civilian and military populations as direct targets of aggression, as well as resources for inflicting harm and destroying the enemy. Total wars bring about enormous (forced) movement of populations, as well as changes in gender roles and social class relations. Because most men are directly involved on the front lines of the war effort, new opportunities are created for women to become active in areas from which they were previously excluded. Also, because of the enormous sacrifices made by the general population and the real possibility of national defeat at the hands of the enemy, the rich also become more ready to make some sacrifices. During total wars, the rich–poor divide becomes smaller, as the rich make larger contributions toward the war effort. However, as discussed in this chapter, evidence suggests that this increase in political plasticity is only temporary. The rich–poor divide has increased enormously since World War II.

A prominent theme in the mirror literature is the exceptionalism of the king’s position, a point often presented as the result of divine selection or favour. Many mirror-writers evoke, in various articulations, the notion of the divine mandate – the proposition that the king ruled by virtue of divine choice and with divine support. But the authors bring very different perspectives to this idea; even when they invoke a common repertoire of formulae and metaphors, they employ them to create different meanings. Several authors insist that the singular bounties that the king enjoys are counterbalanced by unparalleled, and burdensome, responsibilities. The texts in this chapter are drawn from Pseudo-Māwardī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; al-Thaʿālibī, Ādāb al-mulūk; al-Māwardī, Tashīl al-naẓar wa-taʿjīl al-ẓafar; Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; and al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj al-mulūk.

“Passivity: The Passion of Oroonoko and the Ethics of Narration” recovers a historical meaning of “passive obedience,” a precursor to modern theories of civil disobedience, and it uses this concept to read both the protagonist, an African prince enslaved in a new world colony, and the narrator, a colonial woman writer, of Oroonoko. It argues that the narrator of Oroonoko, and by inference novelistic narration in general, is based on assumptions about the ethics of individual detachment (or ironic distance) from political action. In recovering the idea of passive obedience and the figure of Christ’s passion as a model for novelistic narration and a conservative ethics of citizenship under liberalism, this chapter offers a critique of liberal theories of political action as well as an argument against the novel’s foundation in liberal theories of individualization and agency. It also takes up the problems of racism and slavery as central to understanding both the liberal/conservative dynamic and the development of the novel form.

This chapter argues that Aquinas’ conception of eternal law implies a particular way of understanding human freedom, reflected in his treatment of natural rights. To make this argument plausible, it is necessary to show that Aquinas does endorse some notion of subjective natural rights. While he does not have a theory of natural rights, he does have a working knowledge of the legal norms of his time, including practices of claiming and vindicating natural rights. He accepts, seemingly without question, that individuals can, under certain circumstances, claim something or resist the claim of another on the basis of a natural or divine jus, or right, including most notably a right to material necessities of life, and a right to make decisions for one’s young children. Importantly, these are not just asserted as objective duties; he defends the power of individuals to assert these rights without fear of punishment or coercion, even in cases in which one asserts a right to do something wrong. These aspects of Aquinas’ thought raise illuminating connections between the theological conception of eternal law and an account of natural rights, taking Aquinas’ remarks as a starting point.

As Lobban explains, Austin thought of jurisprudence as the study of concepts, principles and distinctions that are common to various, possibly only mature, legal systems. He considers Austin’s command theory and concept of a sovereign and Austin’s thoughts on the relation between law and morality and on legal reasoning and judge-made law. On Austin’s analysis, laws properly so-called, as distinguished from rules of positive morality, are commands issued by the sovereign to the subjects, and that something is a command only if there is a sanction behind it. Lobban considers the objection that the idea of a habit of obedience cannot account for the legal authority of the lawmaker, for the idea of a succession of lawmakers or for the idea of a legally limited lawmaker. Austin argued that there is no necessary connection between law and morality, defended a version of rule-utilitarianism and held that the principle of utility is a good index to divine law. He advocated a textual approach to the interpretation of statutes, holding that the law in a precedent is to be found in its ratio decidendi and that customary rules do not become legal rules until they are recognised by courts.

Tamanaha discusses the thesis of social efficacy. Having explained the import of the thesis, he argues that it is problematic in a number of ways. To begin with, not only are many legal systems not socially efficacious, because in many situations significant parts of the population do not obey the law, but it is also the case that two (or more) legal systems may be efficacious in the same society. Moreover, he argues, law-obedience, which is required by the social thesis and which involves as a conceptual matter at least a conscious attempt on the part of the citizens to follow the law, cannot be squared with the true empirical claim that many, perhaps most, people do not really know what the law requires of them; and this in turn means that we need a different conception of social efficacy, namely, one according to which the social efficacy of law is to be found in the constitutive use of law by government officials in combination with the activities of legal professionals who work to facilitate the aims of the people and organisations that hire them.

Chapter 6 considers the most controversial topics in the study of social influence, obedience to authority. The chapter reviews empirical findings concerning obedience in children. These demonstrate how children adopt a complex cognitive assessment of obedience in everyday life. This is countered by what are seemingly more rudimentary processes demonstrated by adults in one of psychology’s best known experiments: Milgram’s obedience demonstrations. The chapter goes on to examine the social identity account of obedience following a review of the Utrecht studies. The latter replicated Milgram’s installation in an ecologically more valid set-up using mediated expression of violence. The chapter concludes by arguing that the obedience response to authority is primarily 'natural' and necessary for human sociality; it enables communities to thrive by working towards the realisation of common goods through unquestioned acceptance of authority by consent. Only secondarily, obedience processes can morph into dysfunctional 'authoritarianism' that thwarts human potential.

Locke regarded the Law of Nature as divinely given and, hence, inherently rational, universally binding, and eternally valid. This view of the Law of Nature informs his natural law theory, which presents both biblical and natural theological arguments. Yet, he believed in the superiority of the Law of Faith, delivered by Christ, over both the Law of Nature and the Law of Moses. To Locke, Christ not only affirmed the Law of Nature completely and unambiguously, but also assured humanity of otherworldly rewards and sanctions and of God’s forgiveness of the repentant faithful. Thus, the Law of Faith effectively promotes the practice of morality and the development of moral character and enables human beings to pursue salvation. Maintaining the necessity both of good works and of acceptance of God’s assisting grace for salvation, Locke rejected predestination, denied original sin, and excluded the satisfaction theory of atonement, which he described as a disputed doctrine, from his account of Christianity in his public writings. However, some of his manuscripts demonstrate his dislike for the satisfaction theory, to which he preferred the Arminians’ governmental theory of atonement.