Abstract
This study sought to interrogate the paradoxical assumption that obedience to legal or institutional authority can shield an individual from moral responsibility for wrongful conduct. The study arose from a jurisprudential problem made visible in the Nigerian context by the 2018 JAMB Makurdi controversy, where the alleged disappearance of public funds was attributed to a snake, raising questions about institutional instructions, personal judgment and responsibility. The study addressed this problem through jurisprudential analysis of legal authority and moral agency, Hannah Arendt’s account of thoughtlessness in Adolf Eichmann, and Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement. It found that authority may explain why an individual acts, but it does not, without more, justify the act or extinguish the actor’s responsibility. Obedience becomes morally problematic when individuals surrender judgment, displace responsibility onto superiors, or construct excuses that distance them from foreseeable consequences. The study further found that responsibility may be shared and differently weighted according to knowledge, intention, coercion, capacity and degree of participation. Consequently, neither superiors nor subordinates can automatically transfer responsibility to the other. The study recommended that legal and public institutions cultivate more effective and responsible obedience through ethical training, internal reporting mechanisms, protection for conscientious dissent, transparent institutional accountability and clear limits to the defence of superior orders. It concluded that a credible legal order requires not blind obedience, but morally responsible obedience.
Keywords: Authority, Responsibility, Thoughtlessness.
Author name(s):
Lubem Agishi,
Department of General Studies, Federal Polytechnic, Wannune; Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Federal University of Lafia, Lafia.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23153894
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.