This Note examines a famous question posed by Charles Fried in 1976, “Can a good lawyer be a good person?” Fried, along with Richard Wasserstrom, launched a sub-discipline of legal ethics called philosophical legal ethics. Philosophical legal ethics examines the relationship between the “standard conception” of a lawyer’s role and “ordinary” or “common” morality. The standard conception depicts a lawyer’s role as a partisan advocate for her client, maintaining neutrality and not being held responsible for the morality of her client’s ends. Some legal ethicists like Wasserstrom hold that lawyers acting under the standard conception diverge from ordinary morality. This Note rejects this line of argument. It begins by presenting Wasserstrom’s argument for the amoral nature of the role of a lawyer. It then considers a moral theory known as intuitionism proposed by W.D. Ross and further explains what makes this theory attractive. Finally, it argues that if we adopt intuitionism in understanding ordinary morality, the standard conception of a lawyer’s role does not render them detached from common moral principles.

Examining legal ethics through the lens of philosophy is important because, as David Luban puts it, “[t]he study of legal ethics is part of the study of ethics, and the study of ethics is part of philosophy.” Moral philosophy is not only valuable for resolving specific ethical dilemmas that lawyers may encounter. It also prompts us to consider the meta-ethical question of whether the rules governing lawyers’ ethics are themselves ethical. Luban, however, observes that “only a handful of philosophically informed books and articles on lawyers’ ethics exist.” Therefore, it is crucial to provide a philosophical analysis of the relationship between a lawyer’s role and ordinary morality, a matter fundamentally grounded in philosophy, moral or political.

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