On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> And not all the criticism is misguided. Lots of lawyers are
> creeps and lots of the things we do are creepy. So if some sort of
> relativism is at issue here, I don't see how this example helps. After
> all, you approve of judges letting guilty defendants go if their rights
> have been violated or plaintiffs' lawyers suing sleazy Drs., etc, and
> how could that be possible if lawywerrs were a walled off subculture
> immune to praise or blame fromthe outside? jks
I don't mean to say that every culture is a world unto itself, completely walled off from other cultures. To the extent that I share values like fairness or justice with the lawyer brigade, I can participate in some meaningful language games with and about them. However, the force of my argument--whether or not my argument is construed as a good one--is still determined by the local social context, not by the content of my argument itself.
For instance: if I say "Judges shouldn't let obviously guilty defendants go free because of a violation of constitutional rights", how will the statement be construed? At a professional association meeting for lawyers, I'd be laughed off the stage; at my father-in-law's house, I'd get a "damn straight" and another beer. This doesn't mean that my father-in-law's crowd is wrong (or right) about the issue; it just means they share different beliefs and actions than lawyers as a group do.
Sure, people are going to have criticisms of lawyers. But should these criticisms have practical or moral authority over lawyer culture? That's a difficult question, strangely analogous to the female genital mutilation issue I brought up earlier. On one hand, lawyers are a knowledgeable subculture; they've thought legal issues through far more rigorously than nonlawyer "outsiders". Why should the outsiders impose naive constraints on lawyers (e.g., a stipulation that a lawyer shouldn't effectively defend a client if the lawyer thinks the client is guilty)?
On the other hand, lawyers are not a completely isolated culture, and if their beliefs and actions have a negative impact on others (as judged by the outsiders), I think there's a reasonable moral argument for external authority.
I acknowledge that this is a complex moral dilemma. I guess I tend to lean toward the former position because of the practical value I place on social diversity. Yeah, it's a buzzword right now, but I think the analogy between social diversity and biodiversity is apt: Just as an ecosystem effectively adapts to changing conditions if it consists of diverse plant and animal species, human societies can effectively adapt to new social conditions and come up with creative solutions to problems if the societies consist of people with diverse beliefs, values, and perspectives.
Miles