Defending the Guilty: a moral justification

Abstract

There are certain acts necessary to exercise the legal profession within an adversary system that are usually morally condemned by public opinion. If the lawyer knows that his or her client is guilty and is aware, therefore, that he or she deserves punishment, defending him or her appears to imply some sort of deceit or interference in the attainment of a just result. The hypothesis defended in the present paper is that the strategies that are usually adopted to rebut public condemnation have not been successful on account of the moral costs involved in assuming each of them. Strategies based on ‘role morality’ are not an exception. The purpose of this paper is to offer a rebuttal of the condemnation argument that does not entail any moral cost. This novel counterargument is based on the prospective conception of obligation developed by Michael Zimmerman.