It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience.

The sentence warns that “obedience” is not automatically moral: it can be a virtue when it reflects conscientious respect for legitimate authority, shared rules, or ethical duty, but it becomes a vice when it is unthinking, servile, or used to excuse wrongdoing. The phrasing implies a moral taxonomy—obedience has qualitatively different forms depending on motive, object, and consequence. In practice, the quote presses readers to evaluate commands and institutions rather than treating compliance as inherently good. It also gestures toward the perennial tension between social order and individual conscience: a healthy society needs some obedience, yet moral agency requires the capacity to refuse or resist when obedience would violate higher principles.