The Article

Carey, Benedict. “When Death is on the Docket, Moral Compass Wavers.” The New York Times. 7 Feb 2006. 15 April 2007. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/health/psychology/07exec.html?pagewante…>.

“It’s something we do whether we’re for it or against it, and we try to make the process as humane as possible,” says Burl Caine chief executioner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, “The issue is coping, how we cope with it.”

We. This article from the New York Times touches upon the nature of morality, on how we as a society create and follow laws based on the number of other people we believe are following them. Laws were created in order to help better define the boundaries that allow society to run smoothly and cohesively. Like the models we have been studying in class, if an individual believes that most of his peers are following a set of rules, he too will follow this set of rules based on the instinct that if a good number of people are making a choice, it must be a good one. The difference here is that we’re no longer dealing with toaster ovens and fax machines, we’re dealing with the root of morality and it’s scary to find out that it’s a much more democratic, Kafka-novel-like, intangible thing than we had all hoped. If a group of students collaborate on a take home test or project, the students who aren’t in this group but are aware of the occurrence will fear for their own grades and will be under pressure to cheat themselves. They engage in “moral distancing” and seek solace in the fact that many others before them have made the same decision and redefine their moral standards. Ethics is something that seems to pop up more and more in academia with increased pressure to get good scores and technology providing more and more ways to cheat.

Michael Osofsky and Philip Zimbardo from Stanford University did a study on prison guards which seems to point to the collectivity of moral judgment. It draws on what researchers call “diffusion of responsibility.” In the study, they gave a series of 19 statements such as, “Nowadays the death penalty is done in ways that minimize the suffering” to prison guards who both have and haven’t been part of an execution team. The results showed that prison guards involved in executions were much more likely to agree with these statements than guards who had never taken part in an execution. This is a result of what many psychologists call moral disengagement, where people sanctify immoral acts in order to cope with what they have done.

It takes a “team” of 15 men to perform an execution, not because it is difficult to control the prisoner, but for the sake of the executioners. It turns out that performing the act as a group takes much of the burden off the executioners, allowing them to share the blame with other guards. This is exactly the sort of idea that we have been talking about in class. They are able to rationalize the acts that they are committing simply because of the number of other people making the same decision. Many of them are also deeply religious and rely on the supernatural to justify their deeds. While it would be hard for any sane man to kill another, these men draw on each other and the belief that there are many people out there who believe in the death penalty.

The article really causes one to question the roots of “morality.” Do people make decisions because they are compelled internally or because they believe that it is a decision that the moral majority would agree with? Are feelings of guilt based on societal conditioning or natural sentiment? Should morality be a democratic process?