"People are always personally accountable for their behavior. If they kill, they are accountable. However, what I'm saying is that if the killing can be shown to be a product of the influence of a powerful situation within a powerful system, then it's as if they are experiencing diminished capacity and have lost their free will or their full reasoning capacity." Full Story »
Posted by Kaizar Campwala
Zimbardo argues that every human being has the capacity to commit good and evil. Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and the Khmer Rouge are all examples where ordinary human beings, bearing the weight of powerful social dynamics, metastasize into monsters for the sake of self-assurance and self-preservation. Zimbardo helps us imagine a world so lawless, extreme, dire, and challenges us to embrace, however uncomfortably, a basic set of moral values, a social contract to allow us to coexist peacefully. Some, however, might consider such reactionary morality just another form of prison.
