It is true that some lawyers do bad things. But what you're ignoring is the great number of bad things that lawyers don't do because either a) they are afraid of the professional consequences, b) they can get their clients to easily back off because they say, "professional ethics!" and people know it's a real thing, or c) they get disbarred and can't act as a lawyer any more.
As an example, look at the Prenda Law guy, who was basically using his status as a lawyer to run a high-tech extortion scam. He's had his license suspended, and will surely be disbarred:
Or look at Jack Thompson, famous hater of video games, who got disbarred for making "defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate" people:
And of course there are plenty of people who have been disbarred for cheating and abusing clients.
I too would like the legal ethics to be stronger on the "do no harm to society" side. But there's no denying that legal ethics have real teeth. Our industry could learn something from them.
Sure, lawyer rules have a great deal of influence as to obligations of a contractor and the decorum they're supposed to operate with. Programmers could do better there.
That's not what the post I was responding to was talking about. It was talking about "all immoral or unethical activity", and specifically about surveillance, dark patterns, data aggregation, and cyber warfare.
Lawyers have signed off on all of those behaviors at their organizations (particularly the surveillance and cyber warfare ones). They've done contortions to get them "approved" in contracts. If the lawyers at those organizations okayed it, it's fascicle to pretend engineering ethics would've stopped it.
Further, when talking about "all immoral or unethical activity" it's entirely germain to point out lawyers routinely engage in both without consequence.
tl;dr: Lawyer rules are about professional standards, not conduct. You can represent the devil in his suit to rule the world, you just need to be polite and bill fairly.
> But what you're ignoring is the great number of bad things that lawyers don't do because either a) they are afraid of the professional consequences, b) they can get their clients to easily back off because they say, "professional ethics!" and people know it's a real thing, or c) they get disbarred and can't act as a lawyer any more.
Most lawyers don't do bad things because they're decent people. Ethics codes don't stop unethical behavior any more than laws stop crimes. There is some small percentage of the population who will shy away from a crime specifically because of the potential punishment, but most people wouldn't steal or murder regardless of the law. Ditto for lawyers.
Not at all. Codes of ethics are very helpful in preventing unethical behavior because they summarize a large amount of careful thought about ethics. That's one of the reasons so much of religious thought and literature, theistic and non-, is about the finer details of good behavior.
Being a decent person is a good start, but that's just not enough. It's a complicated world, and the obvious thing isn't always the right thing. Especially when people are embedded in an economic system that strongly rewards behavior that could easily be ethically dubious.
And unethical people tend to follow ethical guidelines?
Ethical guidelines can be useful for times when the person wants to do the right thing and the area is gray (e.g. should I represent a client I believe is guilty), but people who are content with unethical behavior will not be swayed by a code they promised to follow. An imperative to honor a promise implies intrinsic ethics.
Most of the actions that would actually get you disbarred are pretty flagrant.
> And unethical people tend to follow ethical guidelines?
This is a false dichotomy. Some people are deeply unethical. Some people are deeply ethical. Most people are just getting along in their lives and can be pushed in either direction by the practical and social context. Codes of ethics are helpful for everybody except the ardently unethical.
It's not a false dichotomy. You started by saying that ethical codes were responsible for stopping most/much of the bad things lawyers could do. I'm saying that's patently untrue. Most of the bad things lawyers could do don't happen because most lawyers are decent people.
Codes of ethics are helpful precisely when things are not clearly "bad", but in the gray areas.
> You started by saying that ethical codes were responsible for stopping most/much of the bad things lawyers could do.
Would you care to tell me where I said that? Because I don't see that at all.
Reviewing the bidding, gregwtmtno, a lawyer, said maybe we could use a professional code of ethics like his profession had. SomeStupidPoint suggested that ethics didn't matter to lawyers, and his proof was naming some things lawyers did that he thought were bad.
My point was that one can't say that legal professional ethics is totally worthless just because of when they've failed (or at least failed to prevent things you dislike). You have to look at its successes as well as its failures.
> Would you care to tell me where I said that? Because I don't see that at all.
That's how I read this: But what you're ignoring is the great number of bad things that lawyers don't do because either a) they are afraid of the professional consequences, b) they can get their clients to easily back off because they say, "professional ethics!" and people know it's a real thing, or c) they get disbarred and can't act as a lawyer any more.
> My point was that one can't say that legal professional ethics is totally worthless just because of when they've failed (or at least failed to prevent things you dislike). You have to look at its successes as well as its failures.
That's fair enough. I don't think codes of ethics are worthless either.
As an example, look at the Prenda Law guy, who was basically using his status as a lawyer to run a high-tech extortion scam. He's had his license suspended, and will surely be disbarred:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/prenda-lawyer-pa...
Or look at Jack Thompson, famous hater of video games, who got disbarred for making "defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate" people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(activist)
And of course there are plenty of people who have been disbarred for cheating and abusing clients.
I too would like the legal ethics to be stronger on the "do no harm to society" side. But there's no denying that legal ethics have real teeth. Our industry could learn something from them.