While lawyers may act as moral counselors to aid their clients in legal decisionmaking under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, little direct evidence exists on what moral counsel those clients might find instructive in legally fraught circumstances. This Article presents empirical evidence on ethical reasoning in situations with legal repercussions. Using a nationally representative survey of almost 1,000 workplace participants, this Article examines how workers approach ethical dilemmas by utilizing a conjoint experiment that examines preferences for four ethical frameworks, which are often included in management training (utilitarianism, deontological universalizability, virtue/value-based ethics, and ethical egoism), in conjunction with the legality or illegality of potential responses to a dilemma. Conjoint results find strong support that both the legality of a situation and each ethical framework are influential in ethical decision making, with legality showing the strongest effect and egoism (interpreted through a lens of company profit seeking) the smallest effect. Subgroup conjoint analyses also largely track the main empirical findings, although the results show some heterogeneous effects, mainly between participants with divergent political views and between participants with different levels of religiosity. Additional analyses of self-reported data from survey questions find that decisions are more likely to be made based on company virtues and values over utilitarian, deontological, or egoistic reasoning. Together, the findings have strong implications for both instructors in business ethics and attorneys offering moral counsel related to legal representation.

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