Making the Undoable Doable
重新解读米尔格拉姆的服从实验，揭示其与纳粹大屠杀的关联，指出“代理状态”实为道德选择，并强调理解法律理性权威的条件性对解决现代性悖论至关重要。
This article interprets Stanley Milgram's laboratory experiments on obedience, and their significance in understanding the Holocaust and the ways by which governmental systems enable people to do things they would otherwise find undoable. Milgram tended to conflate “proximity”—between participants and learners—and sensory perception, and overlooked the difference between physical and emotional distance. Neither Milgram nor his commentators have fully recognized the importance of the shock generator in these experiments. Milgram's paradigm shows why the Nazis' search for increasingly “productive” killing means, which minimized levels of sensory perception among immediate perpetrators, was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition of the Holocaust. Milgram's key concept of “the agentic state” is reinterpreted as an act of moral choice, rather than as a psychological state of mind. An understanding of the conditional nature of legal-rational (bureaucratic) authority is essential if ways are to be found of resolving “the paradox of modernity.”