Difference Between Obedience And Disobedience

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The difference between obedience and disobedience seems fairly obvious. Obedience is following orders, and disobedience is not following orders.Some authors, including Erich Fromm, Crispin Sartwell, Philip Zimbardo, and Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, offer their own opinions about obedience, and from these articles we can look at obedience versus disobedience. However, in some situations, there can be some confusion between the two. How can something as straightforward as the difference between obedience and disobedience get blurred? There are many authors that offer their own opinions on how there can be confusion between these two very different ideas. Using different perspectives on an event can change someone's opinion on whether or not they …show more content…
He explains, "Hitler didn't kill 6 million Jews, or King Leopold 10 million Africans. They used a bureaucracy and a media machine and, finally, people just like me and you" (119). Sartwell is saying that the authority figures got others to obey to commit their evil acts. To the people committing the acts, they were being obedient, and following the orders of their superior. On the other hand, to the victims and anyone else on the outside, those people are being very disobedient by killing millions of people. Another example of when someone was being obedient and disobedient at the same time is from the movie Cool Hand Luke. One of the characters was told that he needed to move the dirt out of a certain are, and once he was finished, he was told that he had to move the dirt back. This happened again, and then he was punished because he wasn't following orders (Rosenburg). To the superior, he was being disobedient because he didn't do the tasks the way the superior thought they should have been done, but to the man digging, and the others watching, he was doing exactly what he should have been told. The man was following one of the orders that the superior gave him, but in order to complete one order, he had to disobey the other order. It was impossible for him to be completely obedient, so he was being both obedient and disobedient …show more content…
Sartwell begins to explain that, "I am not profoundly different than these people, and if you think you are, then you are either a moral hero or you are profoundly self-deluded" (118). Sartwell understands that genocide is horrible, but he also understands that he isn't very different than the people who were convinced to participate in the genocides. Sartwell is essentially saying that even though genocide is a terrible thing to do, there is still the possibility of being obedient like the others before him. Fromm uses a similar thought about this idea. Fromm says that, "If mankind commits suicide it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because they will obey the archaic passions of fear, hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete cliches of State sovereignty and national honor" (125). Fromm is saying that even though people know that "pushing the deadly buttons" is wrong, there is nothing stopping them from following through because they want to be obedient. Something similar happens in A Few Good Men: the soldiers in the movie were following their orders to punish a fellow soldier who didn't follow their chain of command. The soldiers understood that they killed someone, but they weren't too distraught about it because they believed that they were just
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