prima facie undesirable as a character trait, since it tends to prevent 

one from making up one’s own mind. See Integrity and Personal Autonomy

BUT is often a situational virtue, because it can lead one to do right if 

one is living in a community with good values. Le Chambon is a prime 

example.

But it can also be a situational vice including the dispositions to

Be overly obedient to orders

Be overly conformist to the values of one's community

Be afraid of what others think

 

Socrates helps us to recognize the inevitable moral distortions introduced by any creed or ideology; including that of . . . “pragmatism.” He forces us to acknowledge that by far the greater part of both our activism and our apathy is unexamined. . .He is the enemy of all forms of self-righteousness, but especially of those that congeal around groups.

                           Dana Villa, Socratic Citizenship, pp. 4-5

And

Socrates was convinced that most, if not all, injustice was the result of conventional ideas of morality or happiness thoughtlessly applied rather than any “will to prove a villain.” “Thoughtlessness” here does not refer to any recklessness or blindness. Rather it refers to the essentially mimetic character of social life, to the fact that the greater part of our conduct is derived from custom, convention, and received opinion, and therefore has an automatic or intrinsically conformist quality.

                                    Villa, p. 21

But

Socrates’ goal is not to destroy the given just because it is given, nor is to invert all conventional moral beliefs. Rather Socrates tries to inculcate a certain attitude in his conversational partners, one which combined high moral seriousness with a corrosive intellectual honesty.

                        Villa p. 20

 

1. Being overly obedient:

In the mid 1960’s psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted what may be the most famous psychological experiments ever, surpassed only by Pavlov’s drooling dogs perhaps. He brought subjects into his laboratory and told them that he was conducting an experiment that would require them to administer shocks to other subjects. They were told not to worry about anything they heard or saw; it was all part of the experiment. Each subject was then seated in a chair and given an apparatus for administering what (s/he thought were) shocks. The apparatus had labels for each level of shock ranging from "mild" to "painful" to "health-threatening" to "lethal." As greater levels of shock were given, noises would be heard: first oohs then ouches then "stop, stop" then screams then. . . silence.

What Milgram found was and is extremely disturbing. Almost all subjects continued to administer shocks until told to stop by the experimenter, even when they heard screams, even when they heard the screams suddenly stop.

Apparently the laboratory situation was enough to cause ordinary people to inflict what they thought was extreme pain and even death on innocent others.

What this means is that the "banality of evil" thesis may be true in many cases: ordinarily decent people can be brought to inflict objective harm and evil on others if a perceived authority tells them to do so. What is the moral difference between these subjects and the "good Germans" of WWII who sent millions of Jews to the gas chambers because they were told to?

:

Early in the morning of March 16, the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter. Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals. There was no sign of the rumored Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired at Charlie Company all day, but they carried on. They burnt down every house. They raped women and girls and then killed them. They … disemboweled some villagers or cut off their hands or scalps. There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets. There were mass executions. Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women, and children, were machine-gunner in a ditch. In four hours, nearly 500 villagers were killed.*

                                                --Jonathan Glover Humanity p.59.

Glover comments that one cause of this evil was an overly strong tendency to obedience

Servility which is such a low level of self-respect that one does not feel one deserves to do what one wishes to do but only to obey others. In folk mythology this appears as the figure of Uncle Tom above--the black man who had so internalized the white belief in his inferiority that he spent his whole life bowing and scraping to whites, never asserting his own  desires.

Pressure to conform pulled the wrong way. Charlie Company was isolated and they depended on each other for their lives. A strong sense of comradeship grew up and later a number of them said the company was like a family. Their isolation and solidarity created a private moral world with its own social pressures. Michael Bernhardt, who refused to join in the massacre, described these effects of isolation:

What people think of you back home don’t matter. . .What matters is how the people around you are going to see you. Killing a bunch of civilians in this way. . . was wrong…And yet this company sitting out there isolated in this one place didn’t see it that way. . . This group of people was all that mattered It was the whole world. What they thought was right was right. And what they thought was wrong, was wrong. The definitions for things were turned round.

military ethos and loyalty: the Army & military in general, "Prussian generals do not mutiny"

personal loyalty: those who took the personal oath to the Fuhrer

patriotism=loyalty to Germany  especially in wartime: "My country, right or wrong;"

tradition: the civil service and government bureaucracy: a tradition of obeying orders

culture: Germans are reputed to be good followers and apt to follow law. They are not natural rebels. 

division of responsibility not only makes it easier to do evil but harder to do good: if I’m just a cog in the machine, what good would it do if I refused or protested? They’d just put me in jail and someone would replace me

fear: those unwilling or afraid to stick their necks out

But what of Loyalty? Where there is a moral choice to be made Is it ever right to obey a person simply out of loyalty to that person or that person's position or office  or to what she or he stands for? Or must one always independently decide whether it is right to obey? Certainly where grave moral issues are at stake, loyalty would not seem to justify obedience if that leads to doing wrong. The most famous instance of this idea is the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi leadership following World War II. The defense "I was just following orders of my lawful government" was rejected by the judges because the crimes they committed were so atrocious that loyalty could not serve as a defense. And isn't most terrorism a case of loyalty to a cause leading one to murder others?

See Adolf

See this link for an instance of severe pressure to conform. Cowardice

 

As a character flaw: cowardice. This will make people overly susceptible to obeying others and to conformity and to even minor threats.

As an external motivation. Even those who are not cowards can be brought to do evil if the threat is great enough, especially if that threat is not to them but to their families or other loved ones.

In the years of the [Stalinist] terror, there was not a home in the country where people did not sit trembling at night, their ears straining to catch the murmur of passing cars or the sound of the elevator.

-Glover p. 242

*Note on overstrong attachment to beliefs: see Critical Faculties, loss of. At the time, and for quite some time later, ardent supporters of the US Military and of the US presence in Vietnam either refused to believe tha the My Lai Massacre occurred or tried to downplay its terribleness or significance. They blamed slanted "liberal" media for example. That is, rather than believe in the evidence and have to give up their belief in the goodness of the US Army, they chose any possible alternative belief that would allow them to discredit the evidence that the massacre happened. (Note that this was unnecessary: one doesn’t have to believe the US Military is perfect and has never done anything wrong to believe that it is a basically good institution, nor does one massacre condemn the rightness of a whole war. They could have, as many other military supporters did, accept the reality of My Lai and simply try to put it in proportion, saying that under pressures of war, even the best armies will sometimes do things like this.)

    The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.                                ---Albert Einstein:

Read this on fear of cowardice as a spur to war