Internecine Strife

Abstract

To an outsider, those within a profession seem of a kind: historians are historians, lawyers are lawyers, doctors are doctors. But to those within a profession, the nature of what it is to be a professional of a particular kind can be contested—with interesting ethical implications. It is a continuing disagreement in law whether lawyers should be hired guns, doing whatever needs to be done, even pushing against the law, to help their clients, or whether they are guardians of the law, with a higher obligation to justice. This kind of internecine dispute is a neglected aspect of professional ethics, but worth exploring because it is unclear how we can resolve such a dispute and because different conceptions of a profession have competing ethical implications. Indeed, competing conceptions of what it is to be a lawyer are founded on competing moral principles about what a lawyer ought to do. We thus cannot simply appeal to the norms of the profession because those are precisely what is in dispute. If a professional is of such-and-such a kind, a hired gun, say, then the professional is acting properly, ethically, to follow the relevant norms, but if a professional is of another kind, then another set of norms becomes relevant.