[mgraupner]

But most of all, the legal profession has failed. Democratic governance depends upon responsible individuals throughout the entire system who understand and uphold the law, not who understand and exploit it.

Sigh. One of the most puzzling questions I have to deal with in my mind. Why is there so little moral left in this world?

[glup]

This question gnaws at my bones, too. Best answer so far wrt the upper middle class: logics of capitalism (competition, accumulation) combined with ethnic/cultural/ideological/socioeconomic isolation makes it hard to identify with (most) other people. With reduced empathy for those affected by exploitation, we construct a new set of mythologies to normalize the exploitation (increasing efficiency of markets). Moral objections are then dismissed as quaint, naive, and/or utopian.

It also seems like material scarcity and instability make it harder to converge on norms like morality (for good game-theoretic reasons). But why would a private individual with $10M have a position in a company that provides payday loans? Beats me.

[enraged_camel]

>>But why would a private individual with $10M have a position in a company that provides payday loans? Beats me.

Payday loan firms are enormously profitable, because they prey upon people who are in dire need of cash. The private individual you mention has managed to accumulate his wealth by exploiting those people.

[yompers888]

Can you support this claim? I don't dispute the fact that the interest rates are astronomical, but I am skeptical about how the profitability pans out once you deal with the enormous risk of the borrowing group. I imagine most of the upside lies in trying to prey upon people who are in less dire need of credit than they think, because then they can have their enormous upside without as enormous a risk. Your assertion suggests that there's money on the table if only someone will step up to take it, and I find that to be a damning implication for an argument, absent strong proof.

[psadri]

Why should there have been any morals in the first place? Does nature by default have morals?

[glup]

Nature by default doesn't have nuclear weapons, stock exchanges, global supply chains, industrial manufacturing, central banks, etc. Humans need morals (and norms more generally) in order to ensure that the above serve us rather than hurt us. Morals are a cultural technology like language or counting, and like those they may be (at least in their strong form) uniquely human.

[kbenson]

Morals are a intellectual shortcuts designed to help circumvent our natural proclivity for short term thinking over of long term thinking. As such, they change to some degree depending on the culture and society they arise in, to better suit the long (or medium, depending on your scale) goals of that society. Ancient Mongols were not immoral, fist differently moral than many of their contemporaries (and probably not as much as you would think), but that propelled them to the apex of human nations (based on what that meant at the time) for a while.

[tmptmp]

>>Nature by default doesn't have nuclear weapons....

While I agree with your sentiment, just would like to point this out that nature does have nuclear weapons, pretty scary ones for that matter: the stars.

Also, if we take these things to their logical conclusion, then the nuclear weapons created by human beings are, of course, created by nature - in this case, indirectly, using the humans.

This is just to point out the logical aspects of the arguments. Other than that, I do agree with you that we, the humans, need morals to sustain a better life for most human beings.

[return0]

These are nuclear, but not weapons. Nature doesn't have an enemy.

[tmptmp]

>>Nature doesn't have an enemy.

How are you so sure? Have you talked with Nature by any chance? Has Nature given you this statement, say, in English? I am not trying to be sarcastic here, I am dead serious.

I for example, think that Nature likes to fight many of its creatures against each other. e.g. polio viruses against human beings

I may be wrong, but one cannot be so sure.

[return0]

" Nature likes to fight many of its creatures against each other

Anthropomorphising can only go that far. Do you know any physical law that has volition?

[woodman]

It seems pretty common among social animals, violators get cut from the herd or monkey stomped.

[woodman]

You are going to have a tough time finding the answer unless you really pin down your terms. I'll skip that part and just pretend that you said "universal preference" instead of "morals". Yes, I think that there is universal preference - but to keep it simple we will just consider things of like kindness (inanimate objects, bacteria, humans, etc). For example: all things being equal, humans prefer life to death (ex afterlife). The only serious challenge to that, I've found, is the idea of the greedy gene - genetic immortality. Upon that rock you can build your church of moral precepts - but just a heads up, it will look very different from what we have now. I think that is why moral violations are so common, because they aren't consistent with reality - you face the same problem with violations of IT security guidelines that are similarly divorced from reality.

[r0muald]

But there have been morals for a long time.

So either humankind is part of nature, and then it's safe to conclude that nature has morals (no matter how little right now, it's certainly part of humankind), or we're out of nature and there's no advantage in pointing out that nature has no morals.

[T-A]

Or there have been claims of morals for a long time. As in, "what serves my interests is moral".

[phn]

The question is, do we want to be like the rest of the animals, survival of the fittest and all that jazz. Or do we want to hold ourselves to a higher standard?

I don't condemn people who accept the first option as the absolute truth, but I'd like to believe we can make this blue marble a better place than that somehow.

[marcosdumay]

Hum, unavoidable natural law vs. what some people want.

I guess we don't have much of a choice here. The best we can do is hack natural selection trying to get some collectivism out of it. And if we want to hack natural selection, the GP question is exactly the kind of stuff we should be trying to answer in order to develop the (social) tech we'll need.

[enraged_camel]

Some primates have demonstrated understanding of moral concepts such as fairness. In one experiment, two monkeys were "paid" (in bananas) for doing some type of work. The twist was that occasionally, one of the monkeys would get paid nothing despite doing the work. After a while, the monkey getting more bananas started to refuse them if the other monkey didn't get any.

[keane]

>>[mgraupner] Why is there so little moral left in this world?

>>[psadri] Does nature by default have morals?

Morality is the differentiation of actions proper and improper; generally defined 'morals' is that language that contains imperatives: what humans should do (as sentences, called 'norms').

When we wonder why there seems to be a lack of behavior that follows these morals in the world, we approach the concept of morality from a descriptive sense (we observe that human behavior has changed). Increased insight in this pursuit is found when we examine how humans themselves have approached morality from a normative sense (what is actually proper and improper). When humans have considered morality they have come to understand that the morals humans proclaim—again, language that contains imperatives—either correspond to real, objective moral facts ("Moral Realism") or are merely invented delusions expressing human emotions ("Moral Nonrealism").

Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a category of accepted knowledge outside of empirically observed nature (e.g., the non-natural, supramundane, supernatural, etc). The Enlightenment itself was a shift in human thinking that rejected this category as invalid, switching our criteria of acceptable knowledge to the material, to the empirically observed.

The shift in thinking did not happen all at once. Certain beliefs remained, held over from earlier times—somewhat as dependencies—until they could be examined and dismantled individually if they lacked empiric evidence. Western society's assumption that objective Moral Facts existed in a material universe remained for some time until examined by David Hume in 1738 in his A Treatise of Human Nature. Here Hume observed the difficult reality of the relationship between facts (that which is) and values (that which we claim ought to be), concluding that we cannot assert prescriptive or normative values based on descriptive facts.

Hume's Is-Ought observation upset the world, and has resulted in our modern condition. If empirical observation is categorically never able to locate oughts, a world that accepts Empiricism alone is one forced from Moral Realism to Moral Nonrealism: morals no longer correspond to Objective Facts, but can only be understood as invented whims and emotions, which—apart from society's ability to enforce or inflict punishment for as a conditional consequence (what Kant termed 'hypothetical morality')—can be ignored without consequence.

The transition from a society whose intellectuals and leaders held Moral Realism (viz, Christendom) to one where artists, philosophers, and intelligentsia hold Moral Nonrealism (the Modern West) has been a long, painful process since 1738. The Marquis de Sade astutely summed up the painful condition of man following Hume's revolution in thought saying "If there is no God, then everything that Is, is Right" and the majority of Western thought since then has either been in reaction against this belief (i.e., revivals of Evangelical Christianity) or experiments exploring this accepted world (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Modern Art, Existentialism, Egoism/Individualism/Anarchism, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, etc).

From the introduction to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor by the American Heidegger-scholar and philosopher Charles Guignon:

Briefly put, the issue is this. Either God exists or He does not exist...if God does not exist, then the picture of the universe formulated by mechanistic materialism must be true. But, in this case, given the point of view of modern science (what Ivan calls "Euclidean reason"), the universe consists of nothing but meaningless material objects in causal interaction, effects follows cause according to the laws of physics, people are determined to do what they do, no one is guilty of anything, and so there are no such things as right or wrong, good or bad. Or, more precisely, the ideals of justice, goodness, benevolence, dignity, and so on turn out to be purely human inventions, the results of projecting our needs and wishes onto brute, meaningless matter, and so they are illusions lacking any basis in the order of things.

...Dostoevsky regarded [this] as the inevitable outcome of the perfectionist stance of detachment and moral superiority: the idea that, for higher people, "everything is lawful." [If] "God is dead"...then why not step outside the law and do whatever you want? From this standpoint, morality looks like a suckers game. The paradox [of] Westernized ideals, then, is that its austere discipline of detachment and self-transformation tends to undermine its own moral underpinnings. In the end this form of idealism spawns a self-serving moral nihilism.

[nyolfen]

Thank you for this truly excellent comment

[keane]

I'm very glad you found it useful!

[dragonwriter]

> Does nature by default have morals?

Define nature, and, particularly, what things are excluded from it.

[ryandrake]

Because of Moloch? http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[ccvannorman]

we are monkeys clamoring for attention and power in a constant prisoner's dilemma. At scale it pays for some people to be giant dicks

[libertymcateer]

I think it is a bullshit indictment.

I'm a corporate lawyer who does a lot of cross borders work. I'm ethical - the lawyers I work with are ethical. The vast majority of lawyers are ethical.

If anything, the Panama Papers should be an object lesson that one firm or group of lawyers can be responsible for a huge proportion of activity in a given sector. Do you think, for a minute, that other firms have this astoundingly high rate of forming off-shore companies? I can assure you it is not the case.

Accordingly, to extrapolate that because one law firm in a central American country is (allegedly) corrupt that the entire profession is worth throwing out is just nonsense of the highest order. It's childish and counterproductively naive. How can you possibly hope to reform a system when you paint it with such a broad brush you are utterly blind to its reality?

The strong odds are that there was chicanery (quite possibly, a lot of it) at Mossack Fonseca. However, my money is on the fact that the substantial, if not overwhelming, majority of companies set up by the firm were for legal purposes and no laws were broken. If you want to argue that these laws themselves are problematic - sure, I am right there with you. Let's talk about reforming the laws in these small tax-haven nations and meaningful internal tax reform in major western economies that will prevent off-shoring from happening in the first place. Those are productive discussions - lets have them. That the Panama Papers may have furthered these discussions is also great.

But the idea that we should be castigating attorneys for taking advantage of legal loopholes that exist in their clients favor is utterly absurd. If you fail to take advantage of those loopholes you wind up getting sued for malpractice, plain and simple.

While I am deeply interested in the further releases of Panama Papers, and I fully support tax reform, a huge strengthening of whistleblower laws, and a whole bunch of other things that puts me, as a lawyer, closer to the 'pirate' end of the spectrum than then 'legal maximalist' side of the spectrum - I have to say, when I read the words of the purported, unverified "John Doe" - he seems to me to be catastrophically naive in his critique of the legal profession and he is all too happy to assign blame with a fire-hose while appearing totally uninterested in performing a surgical analysis of the pressure points where, if achievable reforms were made, real change could result.

Fundamentally, this screed is not a mature call to action. It is a "fuck you" to the system writ large by someone who appears to be more interested in burning things down than figuring out how to fix them.

I'll stand by and watch the flames - but I do not, nor should you, expect that it will be anything more than a campground fire. In order to get real reform achieved - guess what? - you need the buy in of the lawyers too - not just incidentally, but centrally. We write and enforce the laws. Calling us all assholes is not a great way to start that conversation.

[bdhe]

I agree that calling all lawyers unethical is a broad generalizing stroke that serves no purpose in garnering friends. I did think it might be interesting if you addressed this specific point:

> Mossack Fonseca did not work in a vacuum—despite repeated fines and documented regulatory violations, it found allies and clients at major law firms in virtually every nation. If the industry’s shattered economics were not already evidence enough, there is now no denying that lawyers can no longer be permitted to regulate one another. It simply doesn’t work. Those able to pay the most can always find a lawyer to serve their ends, whether that lawyer is at Mossack Fonseca or another firm of which we remain unaware.

And you said this.

> But the idea that we should be castigating attorneys for taking advantage of legal loopholes that exist in their clients favor is utterly absurd. If you fail to take advantage of those loopholes you wind up getting sued for malpractice, plain and simple.

I agree that castigating all attorneys is going to far, but this comes dangerously close to two fallacies; that because it's legal, it's moral (namely that you can divorce your moral responsibility because you're acting in the letter of the law) and that you were just "following orders." If the consequence of failing to take advantage of loopholes is lawsuits for malpractice then that indicates a problem in itself. As a corporate lawyer you have to put yourself as an ethical person first, a lawyer second.

> I have to say, when I read the words of the purported, unverified "John Doe" they seem to me to be catastrophically naive in its critique of the legal profession and is all too happy to assign the blame with a fire-hose while uninterested in performing a surgical analysis of the pressure points where, if achievable reforms were made, could result in actual change.

I think it would be tremendously useful if you inject some needed surgical analysis into this. Any reasonable view point from the other side should be welcome into such a debate.

[rayiner]

> I agree that castigating all attorneys is going to far, but this comes dangerously close to two fallacies; that because it's legal, it's moral (namely that you can divorce your moral responsibility because you're acting in the letter of the law) and that you were just "following orders." If the consequence of failing to take advantage of loopholes is lawsuits for malpractice then that indicates a problem in itself. As a corporate lawyer you have to put yourself as an ethical person first, a lawyer second.

"If it's legal it's moral" is fallacious in general, but not as applied to lawyers. Their role in the system is not to assert their independent moral judgment, but to represent their client while staying within the letter of the law and protecting the integrity of the process.

You've actually got the "following orders" hypothetical backward. A soldier should not follow an illegal order. But he is not empowered to pass moral judgment and ignore a legal one. Lawyers are the same way.

I just watched the People v. OJ Simpson. Here's a man who was clearly guilty of a heinous crime. Yet, his lawyers' job was not to pass moral judgment on him, but to represent him. It was their ethical obligation to try and exonerate their client by exploiting every shred of doubt so long as they did nothing to undermine the integrity of the process (lying to the Court, etc).

[bdhe]

> I just watched the People v. OJ Simpson. Here's a man who was clearly guilty of a heinous crime. Yet, his lawyers' job was not to pass moral judgment on him, but to represent him. It was their ethical obligation to try and exonerate their client by exploiting every shred of doubt so long as they did nothing to undermine the integrity of the process (lying to the Court, etc).

As a people, we've made the judgment on the tradeoff that we should like the criminal system to behave this way because it's better off to have a thousand guilty men go free than jail an innocent person.

I believe we have strayed a little off track if we apply a similar sentiment to something like corporate loopholes.

[rayiner]

> As a people, we've made the judgment on the tradeoff that we should like the criminal system to behave this way because it's better off to have a thousand guilty men go free than jail an innocent person.

Blackstone's original quote was 10 guilty men, not 1000, but I digress. The whole point of the legal profession is to serve as a buffer between public opinion and individuals. If we had taken a nationwide vote on OJ, the results wouldn't be "better to have a thousand guilty men go free" but rather "life in prison."

The same rationale applies in the business law context. Cupertino's mayor wants Apple to pay the city $100m: http://fortune.com/2016/05/05/cupertino-mayor-apple-abuses. Not because it's the law, but because public sentiment opposes the growth created by Apple's presence. Should Apple's lawyers advise them to pay more money because it's the "moral" thing to do? And how do we decide which companies to target for ad hoc moral judgment?

And how exactly do we hold lawyers accountable for "moral" rather than "legal" conduct? Do we punish the lawyer who files the complaint to foreclose on a building full of retirees and disabled veterans? What if the new construction on the site will house 10x as many people and create dozens of jobs? Who decides?

[nickpsecurity]

Exactly. I think it was a good tradeoff even if the system's workings could use some improvements. Bad things happen and people escape punishment for them all the time. We built the law to protect innocent from this in the first place. Better that we lean toward reducing rather than increasing wrongful convictions. Especially for anything with a death penalty.

[sievebrain]

The problem is that you can't define "loophole". It's a meaningless term.

What one man perceives as a loophole, another man perceives as the correct functioning of the law as designed. Ultimately trying to second guess the law is a bad idea and lawyers, in particular, should not be in the business of saying "this is legal, but you shouldn't do it because it violates my own personal ethics". Lawyers are supposed to advise on the law, not act as wannabe politicians.

[charlesdm]

Often these "loopholes" are there by design, i.e. through lobbying. Governments should make proper laws, and adjust where necessary.

[jsmthrowaway]

I don't know that I agree. Lawyers represent the interests of their client and sometimes apply the law to achieve it. Law is not machine code that operates a lawyer with no room for deviation; I would expect counsel to use discretion and ethics, and perhaps not use every law available to represent me in a way I do not prefer.

I don't think that's "politicking." I think that's jurisprudence. The law lets you do a lot but a lawyer has advice exceeding the law in many situations, and should advise you based upon your interests. I'm in a position to completely punish someone legally, for example, and the law is on my side; my attorney advised me of this but also illustrated some of the risks of doing so despite the legality. Another client might ride that lightning and be a dick, but she knows I'm not so she advised against doing it. That specific situation came down to just fairness and understanding me personally, not even ethics or law. Maybe I misinterpreted your comment, but it sounds like that's second guessing to you and she shouldn't have done it, in your opinion.

I would expect nothing less of counsel I retain, and I appreciate it. That's why we hire lawyers. Not law robots.

[nilved]

Probably everyone finds their own behaviour ethical, or they wouldn't be doing it.

[voodootrucker]

Exactly, these problems are systemic. The people involved aren't going to come out and make logical points against themselves. There are some debates that open discussion and scientific reasoning don't apply to.

[steveeq1]

> I'm ethical - the lawyers I work with are ethical. The vast majority of lawyers are ethical.

Please don't confuse "ethical" with "not illegal".

[charlesdm]

I find this an interesting argument. Shouldn't it be the governments responsibility to make proper laws? If you want ethics to matter when it comes to tax law (something to do with paying a "fair share") then they should make laws that account for that.

[NoGravitas]

> But the idea that we should be castigating attorneys for taking advantage of legal loopholes that exist in their clients favor is utterly absurd. If you fail to take advantage of those loopholes you wind up getting sued for malpractice, plain and simple.

This seems worrisome to me. It looks like one of those cases where the system is set up so that we end up getting exactly what no one wants. Moloch[0] in other words. I don't have a solution (no one has a solution to Moloch), but it's worrisome.

[0]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[hackuser]

This sounds like the response of another industry, Wall Street, when it is called out for its corruption and incompetence. Anger and hyperbole aren't convincing, and in this case not intimindating (the real point of anger). They also undermine everything else you say.

[bronz]

Would you mind explaining what he meant when he said "[...] there is now no denying that lawyers can no longer be permitted to regulate one another." I don't know anything about the law so I don't understand how lawyers are regulating themselves.

[_lce0]

> Why is there so little moral left in this world?

You can buy moral pretty much everywhere nowadays ;-)

[samstave]

However, it would appear that you cannot punish the lack of it anywhere....