Role of Obedience in Human Success

Obedience has without a doubt been one of the driving forces towards human success. The development of the human race has been foregrounded on hegemony which remains a widely practiced agency to establish control and dominance. It hence becomes a very important factor as to achieve eudaimonia, as it is premised on human agency. Yes, I believe obedience is a moral virtue as it contains the constituents that define the very term- The disposition to behave in the right manner and as a mean between extremes of deficiency and excess, which are vices as described by Aristotle. Obedience takes humans out of chaos, Opposing nature’s tendency to bring about chaos and destruction, obedience helps bring order And direction.

The Greeks in their moral philosophy describe eudaimonia to refer to the right actions that result in the well-being of an individual, thus becoming an essential value of human existence. From areas of military, or schooling of a child, it is obedience that helps bring some structure and regularity to the functioning of humans, which lies on the path left to be trodden by humans to achieve salvation and eudaimonia.

Having said this, obedience can also be highly contextual. Obedience is largely dependent on the higher authority and authorities are very much prone to be corrupt or immoral. Thus it becomes imperative to decide which virtue holds higher importance- morality or obedience. Taking the example of a corrupt higher official in a corporation who orders his or her junior to engage in an immoral activity for monetary profits and corruption- the junior is obliged and bound to him by obedience, but ethics would guide him towards refusal of the order, thus causing disobedience. Although obedience in itself is a moral virtue, ethics and conscience should take a higher stature. This is a plausible situation in which it is morally permissible to disobey an order given by a person or institution.

Answering the question about moral permissibility given about the pharmaceutical situation in the question, I believe it is morally permissible to blow the whistle and report the findings to an external agency. Although it is an act of disobedience, it goes against human ethics to continue allowing the manufacture of such harmful drugs. Morality is, in fact, the acting out of one’s own conscience, one’s internal policing. Morality in a very broad sense lies in responsibility- and the act of being responsible for the declining health conditions of a large section of the human population is more burdening than the act of disobedience. Here the disobedience is against an immoral institution, thus the defining factors of obedience being a moral virtue are shaken, and ethics and conscience become more important values to be withheld.