Ron, I'm still not so sure that morality lends itself to a similar critique, because I think that whatever it is, and regardless of whatever laws it may sometimes function in parallel with, we risk losing something important -- perhaps diluting what unique power it may have? -- in relying too much on our critique of the law.

Re Sartre vs. Kant, yes, agree to disagree. But I find Kant compelling to some extent because -- and here there's some similarity with legal reasoning -- he goes to great lengths to rationalize decisions that are more or less intuitive. He's putting his finger on something that seems at least to be moving in the right direction, whereas Sartre, I think, is losing something important in relying on bad faith at the expense of a true objective morality. There are, for example, as Adorno says, certain metaphysical injunctions -- thou shalt not cause pain, for one -- for which there would seem to be no room in a truly existentialist morality and from the loss of which follow terrible consequences.

So, yes, we must live with the consequences of our decisions, but there remain decisions that I think we can agree should not be made. And from that agreement I think follows the idea that moral compasses are not solely individual inventions, but something more -- which is not to say that they cannot be disregarded, or at least that one cannot avoid the consequences of acting contrary to one's moral compass. I'm reminded of Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanors:

"And after the awful deed is done, he finds that he's plagued by deep-rooted guilt. Little sparks of his religious background which he'd rejected are suddenly stirred up. He hears his father's voice. He imagines that God is watching his every move. Suddenly, it's not an empty universe at all, but a just and moral one, and he's violated it. Now, he's panic-stricken. He's on the verge of a mental collapse -- an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police. And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted. He takes his family on a vacation to Europe and as the months pass, he finds he's not punished. In fact, he prospers. The killing gets attributed to another person -- a drifter who has a number of other murders to his credit, so I mean, what the hell? One more doesn't even matter. Now he's scott-free. His life is completely back to normal. Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege."

So I think you are right that the reckoning we face is the consequences of our choices, and we may personally avoid the moral consequences even of those choices -- at least practically speaking -- that bad faith might lead us to eschew. But I do not think that, even conceptually speaking, we should make it any easier than it already is to avoid those moral consequences, and so I endorse morality's playing a great role in our professional choices as lawyers. Of course I realize that it must not necessarily play any role; but such, I suppose, is my own persuasive project here.

-- GloverWright - 09 Feb 2010