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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

That’s a totally mistaken understanding of lawyers’ roles. We are highly trusted components of a system for resolving disputes and governing society. That system isn’t for us. It’s for everyone else. Our only job is to ensure that the system operates according to the specification.

It’s not our job to leverage our trusted position in the system to advance our personal view of morality or ethics. Society doesn’t need us to be its conscience. Indeed, that destroys the very system we are supposed to serve.

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This seems remarkably close to those instances where someone describes a problem and then a respondent just repeats the problem back as if to frame it as an argument when it's really just an empty response. Viz:

> [We only] ensure that the system operates according to the specification

Right. That's the substance of the complaint.

Another way to look at this is the "goodness conservation" law: if you enable some lawyers to be agents of good, you'll also enable some lawyers to be agents of evil; you can't empower just one side. The alternative is when everyone is neutral.

But neutrality is imaginary in reality. Because law is a flawed reflection of society's morality

This is the attorney equivalent of "I was just following orders", which has been rejected many times as a defense against war crimes...

While your viewpoint is a reasonable interpretation of "the law", it completely ignores the higher-order responsibility for "justice" to serve as a moral compass and balance of power.

It’s not my “interpretation of the ‘law’” but rather the philosophical underpinning of how our legal system fits into our system of democracy. Lawyers have tremendous power over how the legal system operates. If they substitute their “moral compass” for that of the public, that undermines both the rule of law and democracy.

Your comparison to “following orders” is specious. Lawyers are bound by criminal laws the same as soldiers are bound by the laws of war. “Following orders” isn’t a defense in either case. But soldiers aren’t expected to independently apply their moral judgment. “War crimes” are defined by international consensus. And soldiers are bound to “follow orders” when they’re not being asked to commit war crimes.

Well put. Lawyers are like referees to ensure a legal contest followed the rules. Everyone wants guilty villains to end up in jail, but if the villain is tried in a biased and unruly proceeding then the villain’s sentence can be overturned. Giving even the most obviously guilty villain a competent defense ensures there’s no mistrial loophole in the process. Focusing on good and evil helps write laws, but in legal trial proceeding prosecutors and defenders need to proceed with nearly pure objective focus on facts and proof of intentional violations of written laws.

It's a strange day when I see a rayiner post I completely agree with, but... people just don't understand that not only is this how most lawyers view their role, but it is absolutely critical that they do so in order for our society to function as designed. Even the relatively more activist lawyers I know would agree at least in principle to some version of the thought process articulated above. They have to!

In fact, attorneys typically hold themselves to extremely high standards of ethics - just not the ethics people think of. I'm sure they exist, but out of all the many lawyers I've met, I have never met one who did not take things like attorney-client privilege, being an officer of the court, or duties surrounding disclosure and discovery and conflicts of interest extremely seriously. It's very much a case of "orange and blue morality"[0]: It's not that the rules they follow aren't taken seriously, it's that those rules are not the rules most people imagine.

So, the idea that attorneys should abandon the principles of the system they've dedicated their life to because some layperson's sense of ethics demands it is foolish, in that even if it might produce a "better" result to your sensibilities or mine, it's simply not going to happen, not because attorneys are amoral, but precisely the opposite: Because they are moral according to the morality of their system.

Look: People don't like the justice system because it doesn't always produce results that they agree with. They don't like or understand its convoluted, highly layered, self-referential sets of ever-shifting, multi-faceted rules and tests and interpretations and arguments about the technicalities of meanings of words. And that's fine. But a system of justice based on even the most altruistic "X seems right to me" is going to be an order of magnitude worse for at least some people, and I have yet to hear an idea for replacing our current system that doesn't boil down to either that or our current system, but it somehow magically always makes the decisions people personally want.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMor...

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