ETHICS AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY IN LEGAL PRACTICE essays

ETHICS AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY IN LEGAL PRACTICE essays In the decades following the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, endeavored to understand the psychology behind mass acceptance of and in large-scale moral atrocities. In 1967, Burt Ross' controversial "Wave" into group identification and blind obedience using high school students to offer insight into Nazi Germany. In 1972, Stanley Milgram designed a (filmed) experiments at Yale University, which dramatically illustrated the susceptibility of otherwise "normal" individuals to perpetrate brutality was ever conducted on the post-war German population, for whom the was initially intended (Luban, p.97). Almost simultaneously, in 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted another (filmed) experiments at Stanford University that were originally designed investigate the effects of captivity. Unexpectedly, they revealed dramatic relating to the intoxicating power of authority and the acceptance of behavioral realities that had to be terminated very prematurely for the and emotional well being of some of the subjects. Indeed, Zimbardo was so concerned about potential long term psychological trauma from the study maintained regular, periodic consultations with the participants for afterwards. Zimbardo's famous experiment involved the creation of a using undergraduates assigned randomly to be prisoners and prison guards. Under subsequent analysis, the revelations of all these pioneering the roles played by agency, authority, obedience, corruption of judgment, cognitive dissonance theory in human behavior suggest that as many as two- the human population is capable of accepting and participating in horrific conduct under the right circumstances and external influences. The also consistent with the findings of Hannah Arendt (Luban, p.104) who the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann prior to his execution in Israel. In the everyday practice of law, these principles regularly in...