Prometheus 6

It’s highly significant that the destructive force in question is (fake) electricity. Electricity is epistemologically and morally tricky — shocks can be painful, as a brush with a cow fence or a Taser hit is — but they are used and morally justified in many sectors as a form of discipline. Electric shocks for a 1963 working-class man — who rewired his own lamp, if not his own house — were not uncommon. (My grandfather climbed electrical poles for a living, sometimes in storms, and he had plenty of midcentury big-shock stories.)

So how is this New Haven guy the next Eichmann again?

The Milgram subjects are absolutely right to defer to authority on the question of whether the shocks are dangerous. They very well might not be. And in fact the authority figure says they’re not! Intuition may be a good guide to some kinds of suffering, but it’s not a good guide to electricity; experts are. The subject believes he’s causing the man pain, but not hurting him.

Milgram, the Torturers of New Haven and the Truth of that Obedience Experiment
By Virginia Heffernan