Authority In A Few Good Men

At a young age, children are taught to obey their parents and students are taught to obey their teachers. As a race, humans are naturally inclined to obey. Obedience is an attribute numerous people strive to achieve; however, the possibility of a negative outcome from blindly obeying orders is prominent in life and in the movie A Few Good Men. In the movie, Private Louden Downey and Lance Corporal Harold Dawson are charged with murder, conspiracy, and conduct unbecoming of a U.S Marine. These charges stem from the marines completing a “Code Red”—a punishment for misconduct or fallacy—on a fellow marine, which was issued by the greatest authority in their unit. As seen throughout A Few Good Men, and according to authors Kelman, Hamilton,

Numerous examples of the system of authority exist today: the American government is a system of authority and even the staff of a school is a system of authority. There is always a person one rank higher, a person to please. The best example of this would be the Marine Corp, as demonstrated in the film A Few Good Men. A prime example would be Colonel Jessup; as the commanding officer every marine knows to obey his commands. Col. Jessup’s arrogant behavior and need to receive respect demonstrates how authority can distort human behavior; his power not only corrupted him, but it also provoked the order of the Code Red which kills Santiago. According to Rod Powers, a US Military expert, Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice states that willfully disobeying a superior officer is considered a crime (Powers). This justifies the actions of Dawson and Downey as they were simply obeying authority and risked punishment if they were to disobey or refuse to carry out the Code Red. Stanley Milgram, author of “The Perils of Obedience”, discusses how the subjects in his experiment were in fact against administering the shocks; however, they could not disobey the experimenter who was conducting the experiment (Milgram 86). This supports the decision Dawson and Downey reached to obey Lt. Kendrick’s order to complete the Code Red on William Santiago. Authors Kelman and Hamilton also

The nature of obedience is an enormous point of interest even countless years after Milgram first conducted his experiment. By challenging conventional ideas as well as creating new avenues of exploration, the experiments carried out by Milgram and Zimbardo and the analysis of the My Lai Massacre by Kelman and Hamilton forever changed the way obedience is viewed. As Milgram said, human beings will “go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority (Milgram