Blah Blah Flowers

I'm currently reading The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil by Professor Philip Zimbardo. In the early seventies he was responsible for the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment and this book looks at that experience and also his time as an expert witness in the trial of one of the Abu Ghraib guards, as well as other examples of inhuman cruelty in the wider world to answer the question of whether people are born evil or made evil. I've always tended towards the latter, although my belief was somewhat shaken on learning in detail exactly what went on in the Nazi death camps in the Second World War. At the moment I'm only about a hundred pages in and a few days into the Stanford Experiment and it's amazing and somewhat shocking how far the students designated 'guards' and those designated 'prisoners' have already gone, but we can compare it with the testimonies of those released from Camp X-Ray to know that such behaviour is still prevalent, and mild when the rule of law still applies to put limits on the behaviour of those in the position of authority.

Labels: books, ethics, Iraq, Philip Zimbardo, prison, The War Against Terror, torture