Morality and Survival

If the option is kill or be killed, the choice is clear. But the option is rarely so clear. The probability of surviving an encounter with police is vastly improved by complying with their orders, no matter how wrong, confused, conflicting or distasteful they may be. No, no innocent, law-abiding person wants to be forced to lie in the dirt, and any cop who fails to grasp this is an idiot. But better to have to wash your clothes than have your loved ones lay out clothing for a funeral.

And before anyone else points out the obvious, no, compliance doesn’t guarantee survival or even that you make it through the encounter without physical injury. But it still greatly enhances the likelihood you will, and that’s about the best we can do until we come up with a better way to all survive.

This view, I learned from a public defender, is immoral. Not wrong. Not mistaken. Not ineffective or impractical. Immoral.

But the appropriate moral response to this sort of thing is not to give helpful tips on how you might reduce the odds that armed agents of the state will murder you with impunity. It is to demand justice

Priests and philosophers do morality. Lawyers do law. At least that’s how it used to work before  passionate lawyers decided that they were the new priests of morality. Morality, like its first cousin vagaries, justice, decency, dignity, respect, and now it’s second cousins, racism, sexism and the various phobias du jour, have a benefit that pragmatics do not. They can be hurled with abandon and are never wrong since they have no parameters beyond their most extreme fringes.

Is it moral to tell people publicly to engage in conduct likely to cause them pain, suffering and even death? What kind of twisted person advises others to die for their feelings? A person who wraps himself up in the mantle of morality, obviously. After all, as long as you and those who like you agree that the moral thing to do is what you want them to do, how can it be anything other than moral? And if some poor asshole is put in a cast, or a hole, because he listened to you, well, that’s the price of morality. Your morality.

Of course, it’s certainly possible for someone whose passion exceeds their humility to argue that one should simultaneously “demand justice,” whatever that means, while not getting killed or maimed in the process. Dying for the cause is good for producing martyrs, but is a particularly poor way to enjoy the fruits of one’s passions. Then again, playing the voice of morality on social media doesn’t evoke much personal physical risk. That poor schmuck in the street who resists, who makes demands, who follows a lawyer who tells him that’s what he should do if he’s moral, takes a very real risk. It’s always easier to be tough and bold when it’s someone else’s body that will endure the pain of your morality.

I’m neither priest nor philosopher. I’m just a trench lawyer. I have a moral compass, but it’s mine and there’s no reason why my view of morality is any better or more valid than yours. I can tell you what the law states, but I will not tell you my fevered dreams of what a more “moral” law would demand because that might get you killed. Misleading you into perdition or harm is not what I consider moral, but that’s just me.

Who are you to use your cred as a lawyer to tell others what morality requires? Who are you to tell other people to risk their lives for your morality revolution? How dare you tell other people to put their lives at risk as if you are the voice of morality. Over the past few years, I’ve watched as young lawyers, filled with narcissistic entitlement, deliberately lie to people in furtherance of your personal dreams of Utopia. You tell stories that ignore the facts. You explain the law as you believe it should be instead of how it is. You implore people who don’t know any better but share your feelings to take wild risks and put their lives on the line, and you call it morality.

Maybe I’m out of touch. Maybe I’m wrong. But my morality is to tell the truth, to fight for what I believe to be good law and good policy, but not at the expense of other people’s lives. As for your claim to be the voice of morality, if you’re a lawyer telling other people to engage in conduct that enhances the probability that they’re going to be beaten or killed, you’re in the wrong business. As lawyers, we do what we can to keep people alive. If you want them to kill themselves for your personal version of morality, join the priesthood.