Short context essay PLEASE HELP

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‘The ability to compromise is important when responding to conflict.’

Conflict often causes individuals to make difficult choices regarding their sense of morality. In some cases, individuals are able to abdicate moral responsibility from themselves and so are able to compromise their own moral compass to be subservient to authority. However, in other instances conflict causes people to prioritize their own sense of ethics over their feelings of obligation and duty. Ultimately, conflict forces individuals to make difficult choices and compromises that may generate a clash between their sense of morality and their obligation and deference to authority.

Conflict can drive individuals to compromise their own sense of ethics through the relinquishing of moral responsibility at the hands of an authority figure. Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiment is the most famous example of this phenomenon. In his experiment, subjects were repeatedly told to supply an electric charge of increasing voltage to another volunteer on the other side of a screen. As the voltage increased, the subjects expressed concern for the welfare of the victim. However, the examiners reassured the subjects that they would not be held liable for their actions. This meant that over 60% of the subjects knowingly supplied a fatal voltage to what they thought was a real person, despite the fact that it obviously contradicted their sense of morality. This shocked eminent psychologists at the time, who had predicted that less than 3% of people would go through with the fatal voltage. This presents a clear and fundamentally disturbing aspect of human nature – given a lack of moral culpability, some individuals will choose to avoid conflict and become subservient to an authority rather than stand up for their beliefs. Although it provides the opportunity for individuals to exhibit their personal principles and values, conflict also allows people to absolve ethical responsibility for their actions and compromise their own sense of what is morally virtuous.

Due to its personal nature, conflict often forces individuals to priorities their own sense of morality over their obligation to an authority. In Kate Grenville’s novel The Lieutenant, conscientious solider Daniel Rooke (based on real life first fleet astronomer William Dawes) is forced to reconcile his burgeoning moral conscience with the evil actions committed against the aboriginals by the British colonizers. Rooke elucidates the need for the relinquishing of any individual thought and conformity to authority when he states that “A man was obliged to become part of the mighty imperial machine” or become “either a bag of meat or a walking dead man.” Furthermore, Rooke illustrates his moral virtuousness most clearly in the hunting party scene. After a justified aboriginal murder of a colonist as a revenge killing, Governor Gilbert (based on real life figure Governor Phillip) orders a hunting party to bring back the heads of six aboriginals are retaliation. This awakens the conscience of the disgusted Rooke, who resolves to abandon the colony as he cannot be a “cog” in the “imperial machine”, as “to be a part of the machine was to be a part of its evil”.  The decision of Rooke to abandon the colony is a clear illustration of his moral conscience taking precedent over his obligation to duty, and highlights how a refusal to compromise personal morality can often lead to conflict against the authority.

When individuals completely surrender their sense of morality and submit to the authority in the face of conflict, often disastrous results can occur. This is evidenced in German philosophers Hannah Arendt’s research into the banality of evil, wherein she discusses the “terrifying normality” of those who propagate evil. While observing Adolf Eichmenn’s (the architect of the holocaust) trial in 1961, she raised the question of whether evil is not an excess of emotion but rather an absence of thought and critical evaluation of one’s actions. She argued that most of the people involved in the holocaust, and thereby most people who have ever been involved in an evil action, were not driven by hatred. Instead, they were motivated by a desire to conform to mass opinion and subsequently relinquished any individual moral thought to allow for this. Arendt argued that “there is an Eichmann inside all of us”, suggesting that if we all choose to compromise our morality in favour of deference to authority then we too are capable of truly evil deeds. Therefore, the ability for individuals to compromise between their sense of morality and their obligation to duty is important to prevent normal people such as themselves carrying out truly evil deeds.

When faced with conflict, individuals are often forced into a moral quagmire. They must decide whether to adhere to their moral compass and do what they think is ethically correct, or whether to submit to the authority and relinquish any capacity for individual morality and thought. Ultimately, compromise is necessary for individuals to satisfy their conscience in the fact of conflict, as without compromise there is a distinct lack of morality and ethical behavior that can precipitate disastrous results.