Reading Comprehension

Source: Aristotle RC 99

The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault, may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behaviour that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting of his own volition may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders. An act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than spontaneous action.

The important task, from the standpoint of a psychological study of obedience, is to be able to take conceptions of authority and translate them into personal experience. It is one thing to talk in abstract terms about the respective rights of the individual and of authority; it is quite another to examine a moral choice in a real situation. We all know about the philosophic problems of freedom and authority. But in every case where the problem is not merely academic there is a real person who must obey or disobey authority. All musing prior to this moment is mere speculation, and all acts of disobedience are characterized by such a moment of decisive action.

When we move to the laboratory, the problem narrows: if an experimenter tells a subject to act with increasing severity against another person, under what conditions will the subject comply, and under what conditions will he disobey? The laboratory problem is vivid, intense, and real. It is not something apart from life, but carries to an extreme and very logical conclusion certain trends inherent in the ordinary functioning of the social world. The question arises as to whether there is any connection between what we have studied in the laboratory and the forms of obedience we have so often deplored throughout history. The differences in the two situations are, of course, enormous, yet the difference in scale, numbers, and political context may be relatively unimportant as long as certain essential features are retained.

To the degree that an absence of compulsion is present, obedience is coloured by a cooperative mood; to the degree that the threat of force or punishment against the person is intimated, obedience is compelled by fear. The major problem for the individual is to recapture control of his own regnant processes once he has committed them to the purposes of others. The difficulty this entails represents the poignant and in some degree tragic element in the situation, for nothing is bleaker than the sight of a person striving yet not fully able to control his own behaviour in a situation of consequence to him.

The essence of obedience is the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another's wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as culpable for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred, all of the essential features of obedience-the adjustment of thought, the freedom to engage in cruel behaviour, and the types of justification experienced by the person (essentially similar whether they occur in a psychological laboratory or on the battlefield)-follow. The question of generality, therefore, is not resolved by enumerating all of the manifest differences between the psychological laboratory and other situations, but by carefully constructing a situation that captures the essence of obedience-a situation in which a person gives himself over to authority and no longer views himself as the cause of his own actions.

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Q. In the context of the points being made by the author in the passage, the phrase "absence of compulsion" (line 36) refers to:

A. the lack of punishment in psychological experiments.
B. obedience that is willingly given to one's superior.
C. the freedom to disobey the orders of those in authority.
D. one's ability to consider the moral implications of an act.
E. having the free will to do what one wants.

Please provide reasoning for your answer.

OA after some discussion.