Why on Earth would we want people who have a poor grasp of the law, paired with the means and the license to arrest and kill be transparent about their work..?
E.g., I’d like to live in a works where lawyers are concerned with justice rather than “winning” but I’m not shocked when they act like winning is the goal.
How morality informs the law and the ways lawyers should behave (i.e, should they phone it in/decline the case in if they disagree ethically) is interesting but more difficult as a topic
With all that said, I think the original point still stands: in most people's minds, an 'ideal' system is one where all the lawyers are trying to seek justice. We just create a less-than-ideal adversarial system as a weak proxy for that given that human nature tends to make the ideal an unreliable expectation. I don't think that's fundamentally different from the PD transparency issue.
If a defense lawyer knows that his client is guilty, and successfully defends him anyways, that means there was not sufficient evidence to convict. Don't blame the defense lawyer for doing his job rigorously. Blame the prosecution for failing at theirs.
This assumes the jury is rational and objective. There's plenty of behavioral psychology that goes against this, but a more glaring observation is that lawyers do not seek to maximize the objectivity of the jury during selection. It's usually very much the opposite.
The goal of the district/trial court system is finding of fact. That's objective. Winning is about swaying the jury, which pulls on the levers of subjectivity. The system is, in part, designed to protect the rights of the innocent. Take the Blackstone ratio, which assumes it is better to let 10 guilty people go than convict 1 innocent. Verdicts cannot be purely objective in a system designed to be asymmetrical.
That’s partially my point. Ideally, yes, humans should act impartially and irrespective of incentive. That’s not the world we live in, though.