From the Editor

I have heard scholars remark that the most important questions surrounding Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments have to do with how we should understand them. The assumption seems to be that this understanding is required if we want to get anywhere with specific ethical questions about deception, scientific authority, and so on. I’m not sure there is much of a distinction here, though. Our understanding will surely be enhanced by our grasp of those ethical questions, and our choice to focus on this one instead of that one cannot be ethically neutral. There is something to be said, of course, for trying to view Milgram within a broad, historical narrative. He was in his time a celebrity, and he certainly is now. It is as common to hear references to Milgram in pop culture as it is in an irb meeting or a graduate seminar. Still, there are risks in supposing that we do understand what it would mean to say that Milgram’s narrative is also ours. I can’t be the only one who would like to be able to avoid cliches like “today we are all Milgram.”

A more significant risk is that we might then be tempted to narrow the narrative so that it fits with our beliefs about progress (we have progressed, and Milgram was along for the ride), scientific as well as philosophical. More than one scholar expressed his or her disapproval upon learning of our plan to focus on the Milgram experiments; the concern seemed to be that here we were, once more dredging up questions about research ethics. As one psychologist from Milgram’s generation put it, why are we still talking about this guy? Yet claims of moral progress are never easy to prove, and that fact returns us to questions about the narrative. An argument must be offered whether our project is to show that Milgram was an innovator or a rogue.

That argument would have to, at some point, touch on what will admittedly sound like familiar questions. There had been doubts about the ethics of deception before Milgram. In addition, Milgram was not the first to study morally relevant, and controversial, personality traits like obedience or conformity. It has always been dicey to account for the way that the world seems divided into one group, with privilege and scientific ambitions, and another group that serves the first one as subjects. And scholars are no closer now than they were in the 1960s to consensus on what benefits, if any, came from Milgram’s famous experiments. This suggests that we are not yet at the close-out date for ethical questions, and it is in that spirit that this issue showcases research on the Milgram experiments.

I owe thanks to all of the authors included here, but Diana Baumrind deserves special mention. In the 1980s, I read her first critique of Milgram and decided to switch careers and study philosophy. According to my take on the causal links, there would not have been a Theoretical & Applied Ethics had she not kicked off a fifty-year discussion. Even if not everyone will accept that take, I want to thank Diana for her contributions, both here and in research ethics.