Abstract

Nearly everyone is at times an advocate. By professional role, some people act quite regularly as advocates: lawyers, legislators, executives, merchants, and, in many contexts, educators. Lawyers often consider themselves obligated to maintain a special “zeal” toward their clients' interests, and there are many laws and principles of legal ethics that govern advocacy by attorneys. This article concerns the ethics of advocacy, not its legal aspects. Indeed, I cannot even address the full range of moral issues raised by advocacy; I focus mainly on an area rarely addressed by writers in legal ethics and insufficiently examined in the genral literature of ethics. It is the domain of individual conscience, the arena of internal states and processes, such as desires, beliefs, and thoughts. I am particularly interested in how moral standards apply to the use of reasons in the practice of advocacy. My broadest thesis is that advocacy needs an ethics of reasons, and not just of external behavior