Shared Knowledge

Knowledge can be separated into two distinct categories: shared and personal knowledge. Personal knowledge is gained through one’s own experience and comes from the circumstances of the individual such as biography and interests. However, shared knowledge is the product of more than one individual: it includes a set of norms, values and cultural mores (Santrampurwala et al 34-38). Our knowledge and ideals of ethics which are moral principles that guide our decision-making process come from these two categories (Lagemaat 364). Ethics are primarily based on intuition, however, a huge part of our ethical behaviour is derived from our gained knowledge. Many claim that our personal knowledge can be shaped through shared knowledge. Evidence from

Perspective on ethics often comes from authority figures, the conclusion can be made that one’s ethical behaviour can be heavily influenced by those who have power over a person’s thinking. To further prove that authority figures play a huge role in the determination of ethics, one can refer to the ‘Psychology of Obedience’ which, according to Milgram, states that subjects are more likely to obey when commands were given by an authority figure rather than another volunteer or when the authority figure was present in the room with the subject. Volunteers were recruited for Milgram’s research. Each volunteer was paired with another, one being the ‘learner,’ who was actually a confederate of the experimenter and the other being the ‘teacher.’ The ‘learner’ was strapped to a chair with electrodes and asked questions. The teacher was told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake. Volunteers were being watched by an experimenter who would ask the teachers to continue whenever they hesitated. The volunteers were also asked to raise the level of volts as the experiment proceeded. Two-thirds of the participants (teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts. However, when the experimenter was put into another room and the ‘teachers’ were now being instructed through a telephone from another room, the

One ethical issue was deception; Milgram made his subjects believe that they were really shocking the ‘learner,’ when the ‘learner’ was actually a confederate of the experimenter. Milgram conducted an interview afterwards to evaluate the effect of deception, 83.7% of participants said that they were “glad to be in the experiment” (McLeod, "The Milgram Experiment”). Their eagerness to participate in an experiment in which they were asked to harm another individual indicates that these participants may have obeyed orders regardless of if there was an authority figure within the room or not. Furthermore, the experiment was designed to put the participants in a great amount of stress (McLeod, "The Milgram Experiment”). Researchers have found that stress can alter one’s decision-making process, causing them to focus on the positives (money the participants gain) rather than the negatives of the experiment (the harm that may be caused to the ‘learner’) ("Stress Changes How”). The stress that the participants were put through may have impacted their ethical decisions more than the authority figure within the