My premise would suggest that the folks who have decided, or settled, on the practice of the law do not have any inherent inclination towards evil.
The lawyers you see today, were once wide-eyed impressionable folks, like the rest of us, before they stepped into the institution known as law school.
Once they went to law school, they came to be acquainted with the construct of the reasonable man.
Ah this reasonable man. It seemed, to the law student, that society is tailored to give the reasonable man the utmost of respect.
Why so? For, whatever the reasonable man said could be done, the law was crafted to allow as such.
So, the reasonable man assumes greater and greater importance to these wide-eyed impressionable law students.
Such that, the reasonable man grows to assume its mantle as a guide to the standard of behaviour by which folks acquainted with the law aspire to.
Friends of the reasonable man
This is despite the fact that a reasonable man says that he need not save a drowning baby because he did not cause the baby to be drowning in the first place.
That reasonable man may also whisper in your ear to tell you that it is reasonable to omit to give someone material information as long as it can be established that the omission does not cause harm.
Unfortunately, many fail to see that laws are tools created by humans to regulate social behaviour.
As it is impractical and highly utopian to even attempt to socialise human behaviour to regulate humans into becoming angels overnight, as a compromise of sorts, laws are used more as tools to discourage behaviour that is unwanted, i.e. intrinsically offensive or harmful to others.
Thus, law is employed to work on a "lowest common denominator" basis, as a tool to weed out the lowest forms of behaviour that cannot be tolerated by society.
But what happens when people adopt the conduct of a reasonable man as their moral compass?
Is it right to say that as long as certain behaviour is not unreasonable and not criminal, that it's fine?
That seems to be the moral basis by which certain people in this world have decided to live their lives by. And definitely more so for people who think they have been educated in what is legal and what is reasonable.
To friends, families, and anyone important in our lives, does it suffice if we are merely reasonable towards them?
Or should we owe them a fiduciary duty of the utmost good faith?
Is it good enough, if we tell ourselves that everyday, we just have to be "reasonable" and not commit crimes?
When a lawyer omits to tell his friend something he knows his friend would like to know, he knows he has failed to act in his friend's utmost good faith. But can he still say he at least acted reasonably, because even if he did not disclose that information, he knows that his friend would not have relied much on it?
The lawyer would reason that his behaviour is "not unreasonable", and it is definitely not criminal.
But if you asked me, it reeks of reprehensibleness.
I ran this argument by Mrs RetailTrader, who is a lawyer by trade.
She smiled and would only say that my premise is "not unreasonable".
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