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IsBeingACorporateLawyerImmoral 8 - 27 Feb 2009 - Main.LeslieHannay
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I think Professor Moglen once said that the concept of giving money to the poor while earning money as a corporate lawyer is all good, but it assumes that the work itself has a neutral moral value. Does that imply that being a corporate lawyer is (or could be) immoral? What is so different between being a corporate lawyer and being a blue collar worker? We respect people working in the Ford factory because they work hard to make an honest living. Aren’t they both trying to make a living to support themselves and their family? Is there more difference than their income? | | | -- GavinSnyder - 27 Feb 2009
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> | This idea that "someone has to do it, and so why not me?" was troubling to me when it first appeared in this thread. Thank you, Gavin, for the SS analogy. There's nothing like comparing Big Law to the Nazis to get me out of my chair and into the conversation. Like the German youth 1942 (at least the ones eligible to be in the SS, i.e. the youth who were not being systematically targeted, marginalized, imprisoned, etc) we, the lottery winners, have the choice to participate in the machinery of death, run away (dropping out and moving to Argentina is my current daydream) OR use the power that we have to dismantle the machine.*
Where the 'if not me, then someone else' rationale misses a step, I think, is in its assumption that (1) the machine is inevitable (we have been over this already, at length), and that therefore (2) our participation in it is neutral in effect and has no weight as a moral decision (ditto). **
What is interesting to me is that the “someone has to do it, and so why not me?” line of thinking played a major part in convincing me to come to law school in the first place. My reasoning was as follows: 1) most of the people who are fortunate enough to be able to get into a top law school will do so in order to make a lot of money by serving the corporations that are destroying everything that I love about, well, everything; (2) someone has to get educated in a way to work effectively to fight back; (3) since the number of people who are in this class of lucky people is relatively small, and as I happen to be among that group, I might as well throw myself into the fray.
*Just to be clear, of course I'm not saying that Big Law = Nazis
** I was going to try to link to our threads on these points but the server's slow right now so I'll have to do that later.
-- LeslieHannay - 27 Feb 2009
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