ABSTRACT
The problem that frames much of the debate within theoretical legal ethics is the alleged conflict between the demands of impartial morality and those obligations that arise from the lawyer—s professional role and her relationship with a specific client. How can it be that simply being a professional makes a moral difference to the permissibility of one—s actions, when professional obligations arise independently of the moral content of the actions they require? Yet it is generally assumed that lawyers are justified in doing things that involve conduct that would otherwise be evaluated as a moral wrong, such as humiliation or deception. The dominant position within moral philosophy (represented by Richard Wasserstrom, Gerald Postema, David Luban, and Arthur Applbaum) has been that professional roles must be closely connected with ordinary morality. Metaphorically, there is a bridge between two worlds, the moral and the professional, and a great deal of traffic back and forth across the bridge as professionals seek a justification for their actions in moral terms. In response, some philosophers, including Tim Dare, have argued for a two-level structure of justification, in which the professional role is constituted with reference to moral considerations, but then the bridge is blown up and the professional role is allowed to operate as a more-or-less autonomous normative domain. This chapter largely accepts the two-level justification structure, but argues for constraints on the constitution of the freestanding normative domain of professional ethics, derived from facts about human needs, capacities, and vulnerabilities. It is therefore a modest form of role naturalism, in contrast with the dominant conventionalist approaches to professional roles.
