| | |
|
JobsAsComplicity 9 - 05 Feb 2010 - Main.JessicaCohen
|
| | One reason Eben gave for not working at a firm was that firms do morally undesirable work, and that in working for a firm, one's work would actively be contributing to that overall morally undesirable work product. For example, if one was a big-firm lawyer over the past five years or so, one most likely actively contributed to the financial crisis by providing the legal work for allowing grossly unchecked mortgage-backed securities to be created and flipped for fast profit.
My question: Is it true in every job, you are always morally complicit in the work of the company? Note than an answer of yes would mean that when you work for an organization that actively does good, you are also actively doing good. Is there ever any way to dissociate oneself morally from the work of the company in which one participates? | | | I think it would be fairly clear, if not immediately, then certainly after you worked in your industry for a few months. I've had several jobs over nine years, and it's definitely easy to learn the skeletons in the closets of the places you work. I remember a friend who works at Morgan Stanley telling me in early 2004 that these mortgage-backed securities were going to be a disaster for the economy and that a lot of people had been flat-out tricked into buying houses with mortgages they could never repay.
-- AmandaBell - 04 Feb 2010 | |
>
> |
Re: Andrew/Prof M's discussion about temporarily pawning one's license...I just want to say that this was always my plan (in so far as I had one, which isn't saying much). I always figured that I'd work for a few years at a firm and make some money...but more than that, I'd learn how such a firm operates in order to work most effectively against it in the end. This might seem totally convoluted (I think it does now). But I truly had decided that in order to be a successful lawyer, I would have to know how the law firms worked, because either I'd be working with them in a transaction or against them in some capacity. That, and the idea that having worked at a big firm would give me a certain amount of clout in whatever I chose to do next. I looked to lawyers who had "done their time" at a big firm and were out doing what they truly wanted and imagined that I could easily be like them. I guess this view relates to Andrews' taking the firms down from the inside. I'm thinking my money-making, ultimately happiness-bringing fantasy is totally unreasonable now.
-- JessicaCohen - 05 Feb 2010 | | | |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |