| | One reason Eben gave for not working at a firm was that firms do morally undesirable work, and that in working for a firm, one's work would actively be contributing to that overall morally undesirable work product. For example, if one was a big-firm lawyer over the past five years or so, one most likely actively contributed to the financial crisis by providing the legal work for allowing grossly unchecked mortgage-backed securities to be created and flipped for fast profit.
My question: Is it true in every job, you are always morally complicit in the work of the company? Note than an answer of yes would mean that when you work for an organization that actively does good, you are also actively doing good. Is there ever any way to dissociate oneself morally from the work of the company in which one participates? | | | the position you're now taking. Your larger difficulty is being
morally dissociative and without autonomy. | |
<
< |
- You say here that the larger difficulty is being morally dissociative and without autonomy. What if one does not morally dissociate? Then wouldn't moral complicity become a problem? Or are you taking the more hardline position that if one has to ask the question, then clearly one has not learned how to avoid moral dissociation yet? (Since if one had learned to avoid dissociation, one would not even be contemplating doing something that would require dissociation.)
| >
> |
- You say here that the larger difficulty is being morally dissociative and without autonomy. What if one does not morally dissociate? Then wouldn't moral complicity become a problem?
Not for me, because as Ron observes below—and
despite much outraged resistance based on the contrary
assumption—I'm not purporting to tell, or even advise, you on
what's moral for you. I do sometimes talk about what seems morally
important to me, because—as I said on the first day—I am
the lawyer whose experience it is easiest to summon to the aid of
your inexperience. But my concern is for your autonomy, not your
morality: if you are not dissociating, I don't care what you're
complicit in, because that will be your
problem.
Or are you taking the more hardline position that if one has to ask the question, then clearly one has not learned how to avoid moral dissociation yet? (Since if one had learned to avoid dissociation, one would not even be contemplating doing something that would require dissociation.)
I don't know what makes that "more hardline," but
that's my position. | | | -- ChristopherCrismanCox - 05 Feb 2010
Added a comment box. Hope you don't mind bud. | | | -- RonMazor - 06 Feb 2010 | |
>
> | I don't know about the other instances, but on this
point you have understood me correctly, and I appreciate the
simplicity and forcefulness of your
restatement. | | | Ron: law and morality are not the same thing, though they may at times serve the same function, i.e. constraint. Nor are they both necessarily post-facto ways to rationalize reality. Hobbes, for example, didn't describe nature/reality as he saw it, whatever he may have said to the contrary; his concept of the sovereign and its law marked a departure with the past. (The same applies equally to, say, Bodin.) Legal reasoning -- let's stick with the example of a judicial decision -- may be such a post-facto rationalization, but legal reasoning, though it may inhere in the law, does not the law suffice. | | | I don't know that Eben would ultimately couch his point in terms of morality, or at least that he would reply on an explicitly moral argument at the expense of not convincing us to try a more creative route than that provided by the big firms. But Eben does believe deeply in the value of freedom, and I'm assuming that underlying his belief is a strong moral sentiment. That said, aside from the tendency of large law firms to "restrict individual agency and sharply curtail potential," there remains the fact that, in many cases, there are moral consequences -- if we retain our articulation of morality -- in the practice of big law with ramifications beyond one's own freedom. Mergers and acquisitions, deregulated markets, securities transactions -- all these have consequences. Things, including lawyers, are what they do, and too often what lawyers do leaves others unfairly dispossessed and disempowered, though such results may not immediately present themselves in the well-maintained interiors of those law firms whose photographs you posted the other day. And the attempt to label morality as transcendental nonsense seems just another convenient way to allow the souls of too many lawyers -- and probably too many of us -- to rest content.
-- GloverWright - 06 Feb 2010 | |
>
> | Which is why, in my view, if you retain your right
to choose your clients, rather than delegating that crucial choice to
someone else or to the economic interests of a partnership in which
you are too smal a proportion to be autonomous, you have a chance to
deal with the issues presented by the consequences of your
professional actions in a systematic, long-term, strategic way.
And why, if you have learned how to be creative rather than merely
responsive in your legal thinking, you can use that freedom to build
strategies that are comprehensive, benefiting not only the clients
to whom you are responsible; and you in your material, professional
and moral personalities, but your community and society as
well. | | | |
|