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

I like Esther's comparison to criminal defense lawyers, which is counter-intuitive because at first glance there's a huge difference between a (probably impoverished) non-white-collar criminal and a big corporation. But I think it works nonetheless because it lets us see the problem of working for a big firm as a special subset of the broader ethical problem: the lawyer's ethical identification with his/her client. A lawyer is supposed to do what's best for the individual client even if that may not comport with a more general vision of what is just or otherwise good for society.

So no matter who you're working for, you're in an ethically risky area. Working for a large law firm can exponentially add to that risk because of how much autonomy you're surrendering. After all, if you're promising to put a client's interests above almost all else, you should think long and hard about who that client is and what its interests are. But at a large corporate law firm, people often can't do that. This makes such work morally risky. Not necessarily immoral--that probably depends on what kind of law you're doing, and at what kind of firm, and with what kind of client, and other such details. But the risk that it's immoral goes up.

I would hesitate to say that corporate law work is inherently immoral because of the details I mentioned, but more importantly because I think it feeds into a binary mindset where corporate=bad and public interest/government=good, which isn't entirely accurate. To state the obvious, the government has blood on its hands and is known to falsely imprison and torture and otherwise violate people. And not all self-declared do-gooders actually do good, even if they think they do. Moral risk exists in varying degrees across a spectrum, it's not something that's only there in large corporate law firms. Again, this is an obvious point, but it's easy to overlook in all the focus on not selling your soul for a firm job.

-- AnjaliBhat - 26 Feb 2009

Alex teases out two ideas that are often conflated, namely whether one's work is morally just and whether it is personally satisfying. The two concerns don't always track neatly. Like Alex says, many corporate lawyers actually enjoy their work -- but I disagree that the work is always morally neutral. Likewise, people may pursue justice, but find the bulk of their day just as stultifying as corporate work, or frustrating for other reasons (Robinson does not appear very happy).

-- AndrewCase - 24 Feb 2009