We know we are in the world with others but we seek, by barriers of conscious design and impulses of unconscious fear, to live like hermits. And yet, we do not, at least most of us do not, physically retreat to the mountains and live as hermits. We are, as best I can tell, conflicted. The ideology of individualism makes us into pseudo-hermits, isolated, alienated automatons. The social lives we live entail being in the world with others, making as we go, a world in which we are learning to understand the Other as we try to understand ourselves. It is the necessary relation to the world of the Other that makes hermetic life conflicted.

In the world with and of others, there are those we stand with and those whom we stand against. When we articulate our view of the world, what we feel and see, we find that we are not in the world alone. We learn that our personal world-view is actually a social construct, a perspective that is shared. When we engage in the discourse of commonality, searching for the place where we might stand together, we make communities. It is the discourse of commonality--moral discourse--that makes us aware of community and aware of its absence.

We live in a world that asks us to place our faith in the secular religion of individuality. It is when we are able to call ourselves individuals that we claim to be real, complete, and whole. We talk, and sometimes act, as if we live on moral islands. In the moral world of individualism each of us is said to have our own ethics. You have your ethics and I have mine. The lawyer has her ethics and the client has hers. But even as we systematically socially recreate ourselves as moral isolationists--as moral hermits--I want to explore whether it is possible in the conversation ethics to use moral discourse to see whether it is possible to find a place where we might stand together.

The builders of the Gothic cathedrals found a place to stand (and build) together. The key is to find the modern equivalent of Gothic cathedrals. I am interested in the idea of community and moral discourse as a response to the ideology of individualism, to the impulse toward separation and disconnection, and to the experience of alienation in modern life. In the absence of community we would have no need for ethics. Ethics is rooted in the sensibility that we gain from a life with others. We learn ethics from and with others, in the presence of other human beings. The conversation ethics (and the search for a language of moral value alongside a language of commerce and transaction) reflects a persistent desire for community, a desire that can, albeit painfully, be submerged and denied.

When we engage in the discourse of commonality, searching for the place where we might stand together, we make communities. It is the discourse of commonality--moral discourse--that makes us aware of community and aware of its absence. Communities of discourse are constructed (and they can be destroyed). It is in the world with and of others, that we find a place to stand, those to stand with and those whom we must stand against.

I remember vividly the first meeting of a faculty ethics seminar at my university. The university-wide faculty seminar was created to discuss ethics in the university. The seminar constituted a small community, albeit, a temporary and transient one. A young philosophy professor convened the meeting and asked each of us to say something about what brought us to the meeting and what we would have the group do together. There was a good deal of excitement as we shared our thoughts about the seminar. I think we were all a little astonished at the common concerns of dentists and lawyers, sociologists and literature teachers that emerged during the brief introductions that we each gave. It seemed, as we slowly made our introductions, that we came together because of a phantasy, a hope, that some common ground might be found and that this group of teacher colleagues might find a place to stand together, bound by interest that transcended our disciplines and professions.

Our community languished as we limped from meeting to meeting. Even in our first hopeful meeting there was evident tension over how to proceed, how to "find" a way to talk about ethics. Instead of staying with this question of how to proceed, and how we could imagine ourselves together over time, or how being together might change our lives as teachers and professionals, we moved quickly to dispel the anxiety of our uncertainty. There was an insistence to find out what "ethics" meant, to define ethics so that we would have, in one colleague's words, "a common language." The group seemed willing to assume that we brought nothing with us to the seminar from which to build a community of our own, to develop a sense of ethics from our own conversations, our own troubles (in and out of the classroom), and our mutual concerns for education. No one suggested that it was what we carried with us into the room, our own moral sensibilities and ethical outlooks, our own choices about what and how to teach, our own values and beliefs, in essence our own experiences, that could provide the basis for a conversation.

Before the conclusion of the first meeting we had asked the philosopher (who had convened the seminar and was acing as moderator for our discussion at this first meeting) to tell us how philosophers defined ethics so we would know what we were talking about. The assumption that philosophers know about ethics and that it is ethics "out there" that would be the subject of our conversation overwhelmed us. Implicit in what we had accepted was the assumption that ethics consists of a language (definitions) and a set of problems best known to philosophers. Ethics, following this assumption, is just another discipline with its own language, concepts, and methodology. While the group's decision was vigorously protested we could not escape our own academic enslavement to the culture of expertise. We assumed that the philosopher was an expert on ethics and that hearing from the expert would be an appropriate way to begin our conversation.
The seminar struggled on over the months. Attendance lagged. Those who began with enthusiasm and a sense of promise went back to their disciplines. Another conversation and another community had failed.

The hope, throughout the ages, has been to form communities in which our vision (and the set of prescribed values necessary to that vision) can be realized. Every community has a "normative bent," an ethos, or bundle of practices, sentiments, and conventions--particular ways of doing things--by which the community defines itself. An ethos mediates our relations with others and determine how we become a good person in the community. The legal profession and the world of lawyering is, in this sense, a community. It is not a community in the sense of a neighborhood, but community in the sense of being a way of understanding the world, a way of doing things and solving problems. It is our sense of professionalism that conveys how we are to judge the value and quality of the work we do as lawyers.

The ethos of a profession is derived from a particular methodology for solving problems, and more importantly, a common sense of what the problem is and how the person came to have such a problem. From an understanding of the nature of a legal problem, comes a shared sense of an appropriate "manner" to go about solving the problem. The legal profession provides what might be called "a framework of intelligibility." [A.S. Cue, Dimensions of Moral Creativity 11 (1978)]. Lawyering is a community with patterns of work which include identifiable forms of "moral practice." [p.13]. The philosopher A.S. Cue suggests that to understand the moral life of a community, we need to be aware of what is given--the "framework" in which the participants share certain moral attitudes, feelings and judgments. Agreement in a form of life underlies the intelligibility of moral discourse. [p. 11].

Professionalism is also, at the same time, an ideology. By ideology I mean those fundamental tenets and basic assumptions that provide a "deep structure" for professional practice, a structure which operates in the way grammar does for language. Ideology is that part of our belief system that lies beyond question. The power of an ideology, and its accompanying pernicious effects, comes from the fact that its underlying tenets and assumptions are taken for granted and critical examination is eschewed.

Some of the operative principles of any group are ethical in nature, that is, they indicate what one is allowed or prohibited from doing (differentiate right and wrong) and suggest what one ought to do to be considered a good person in the community. A professional ethos is formed from the interplay of individual values (a personal sense of justice) and the values of the community (expressed in institutions like law and the legal profession).

Legal ethics is a "descriptive ethics." It tells us something about the normative conventions, patterns, and relationships that constitute the status quo. Our need for a "descriptive ethics" derives from a desire to understand ourselves in terms of what we others do. Work is performed in the mirror of community judgment. We know how to act as professionals from what we see others do, from observations, rumors, gossip, and stories about how others act in particular situations and settings.
The communities we call professions produce an ethos which give character (and value) to the kinds of decisions that professionals make (and fail to make); decisions that define the moral fabric of professionalism.

The moral fabric of legal professionalism is woven with the woolen strands of Law. The Law is a way of seeing the world. When we combine Law as a way of seeing and as a way of doing, we find ourselves in the province of a craft community. A craft is practiced in a community; a skill of craft is taught and learned from others. A sense of craft evolves from accepted ways of doing things, from habits of mind that are social in origin. Crafts take place in particular settings and have a social history. The skill and mindfulness peculiar to a craft, whether it be pottery or law, must be cultivated--and practiced over time. Cultivation is a sign of inhabitation, and reflects a human history of purpose, design, intention, mistakes, and failure. The craft of law, reading law, and teaching law, are social activities, ways of doing, ways of working that can be understood in the contextual setting in which they take place and the histories of human vision and failure they replicate and re-produce.
We live in a world where others precede us. Our habits, virtues, and skills follow from and grow out of the life that others have lived, from prior teachings, beliefs, and commitments. I walk a path when I become a lawyer and when I teach. A path is a way, a direction, a history, a context in which my work, my doing, my skill takes place and is given meaning. My doing, my sense of craft, is grounded, rooted in the world so that it embodies a politics of reality, an ethic, and a social vision. A craft like lawyering seems to have a reality of its own, and it is in living with that reality and the false consciousness that it induces that makes the lawyer's adversarial ethic so powerful. We need to see lawyering for what it is, to honor it by acknowledging its reality, its specificity and particularity. "Like sailing, gardening, politics, and poetry, law and ethnography are crafts of place: they work by the light of local knowledge." [See "Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective," in Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology 167-234, at 167 (1983)]. The practice of law, like law itself, is suggestive of a world. There is a "feel" to practicing law, a "style," a method, a way of using words--one might indeed call lawyering a world.

If I am to find a place for myself in the world then I will need to know how to do things, how to employ certain skills, and attend to things with my own mindfulness before the product, the result, the answer will have any meaning. The fear is that the social and communal nature of law practice as craft work does not allow one to use one's own mind, purpose, and intention. That we are always operating, speaking, practicing within a context--community, tradition, discourse-- does not mean that all outcomes are determined, or that an iron law of history controls. Alasdair MacIntyre points out that "when an institution--a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital--is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict." [Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue 206 (1981). "A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodies argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition." p. 207]

In law we follow an implicit belief that law conserves, that law makes possible the preservation of that which matters, of those values and ways of being that are expressive of human life and its potential. (This ideal we hold of law is often juxtaposed against a more harsh reality.)

While we acquire moral identity in and through membership in communities this
does not entail that the self has to accept the moral limitations of the particularity of those forms of community. Without those moral particularities to begin from there would never be anywhere to begin; but it is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good, for the universal, consists. [Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 205 (1981)].

The critical perspective always asks us to go too far beyond" the community that we have adopted and to which we have adapted, the community where we have been able to locate ourselves as "belonging." To be critical you must be radical enough to throw out some of what you have learned and reject some of the conventions that you have been taught. Tradition, as the notorious example of slavery graphically demonstrates, can be profoundly immoral. Following tradition and doing what others do is not and has never been enough to avoid moral failure. And so we struggle with and against the communities that give us an identity and call for practices that would impoverish our moral lives.

While there is a need to view ethical problems in the context of normative conventions of like-minded practitioners of the art, there is a danger that sociological reality and its conventional ethic undermines the very notion of ethics. When we make an existing lawyer ethics, our ethics (and accept existing normative conventions) we fail to see that what we now call professional is the problem, a problem for which more professionalism can never be the answer. The conflation of a professional ethic and ethics leads to moral failure.

William Barrett offers the life of Solzhenitsyn and his writing as a moral example of ethics that comes from resistance to community. Barrett suggests that it is just in this resistance to power in the world today that ... moral will may bring a central message for our time. What else is the burden of Solzhenitsyn's life and writings? We may read his books as political reportage on the Soviet Union or to satisfy our sociological curiosity about the strange hierarchies of survival in the prison camps. But their deeper story is something else. They are above all moral documents--the story of a whole population struggling against the corruption forced upon them by a political regime. To survive under that regime is to practice continual duplicity, teachery toward one's neighbor, and to develop a brutal callousness toward life generally. And the miracle is that the moral will still survives in this people; that there are individuals who carry on the struggle for no more heroic reason than to stay decent-above all, "not to become a scoundrel." [William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique 246 (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978)].

In every community there are people who embody the convictions of the community, but in a new way; who share the vision of the community, but with new imaginative possibilities; who exhibit the traditions of the community, but with significant and sometimes radical differences. The lives that these people live and the stories we tell about them disclose the moral failures that have been accepted by the community and how these failures can be recognized in a way that enlarges the community's moral vision.

What kind of person--what kind of lawyer--would exemplify the moral vision portrayed in the life of an individual who is both inside a community and reflective about the moral character of its institutions and traditions? In Harper Lee's novel, To Kill A Mockingbird (New York: Popular Library, 1962), Atticus Finch represents Tom Robinson, a black man charged with the rape of a young white woman. The setting is Maycomb, Alabama in 1935. Atticus is trying to help Jem and Scout, his two young children, learn to live with the fact that some people in the community are using the n-word as a racial slur in their reference to him.

"Scout," said Atticus, "when summer comes you'll have to keep your head about far worse things . . . it's not fair for you and Jem, I know that, but sometimes we have to make the best of things, and the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down--well, all I can say is when you and Jem are grown, maybe you'll look back on this with some compassion and some feeling that I didn't let you down. This case, Tom Robinson's case, is something that goes to the essence of a man's conscience -- Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man."

"Atticus, you must be wrong...."

"How's that?"

"Well, most folks seem to think they're right and you're wrong..."

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions," said Atticus, "but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." [p. 109].

Thomas Shaffer, in commenting on the moral vision portrayed in the fictional lawyer hero, Atticus Finch, argues that Atticus sees lawyering as part of broader world order than the legal enterprise he practices as a lawyer.

Atticus did not define what he was doing by reference to his profession. The story of Atticus Finch is the story of a man who is the same man at home as he is in town when he practices law. The values Atticus has as a lawyer are the values of a good neighbor and a gentleman, the values of a man who understands the community in which he lives and understands that many of his neighbors are infected with a "disease" (Maycomb's problem is referred to as "Maycomb's usual disease"--that is racial prejudice) that he does not share and does not want his children to inherit from their community. Shaffer notes that "Atticus, more than others in the town, saw what the truth was and told the truth." [Thomas Shaffer, The Moral Theology of Atticus Finch, 42 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 181, 188 (1981)]. The sources of Atticus's character were his faith, his community "which had unwittingly commissioned him to be its truth teller" and "his sense of himself as responsible for the weak (even those who were not weak . . . . ") [p. 221]

It is through an ethical lens that we re-examine the assumptions we have made about what we assume the community is and what it would have us do. It is Atticus's character (and his ethics) that pulls him away from the immoral provincialism of Maycomb's "usual disease" and from compromises too readily made, back to those ideals that reach beyond the norms of racial prejudice enacted in the name of community. Ethics pulls us toward some higher sense of ourselves and our work, toward a truth that a community must have even when it seeks not to have.

William May has used a metaphor to draw attention to ethics: ethics is a way of seeing. "The task of ethics in the professional setting," May argues, "might be called, at least in part, corrective vision." Ethics provides a "corrective lens" because it "relies heavily on the distinction between what is and what ought to be." [William F. May, The Physician's Covenant: Images of The Healer in Medical Ethics 13 (Westminster Press, 1983)].

It is one function of education to help us "see through" the received traditions of our communities. "Seeing through" comes with learning. It is built-in. History and philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology are each in their own way fundamental ways, a prism for "seeing through," and they are instructive in the discrete skills (that is methods) for moving beyond ordinary belief and everyday faith in things as they appear.

Each discipline/profession makes not only a claim to autonomous status as a discourse, with its own language and methodology, but also that it provides a perspective that is a way of seeing all else, or is in some way fundamental to all other disciplines. Thus, we are told that one cannot know philosophy without knowing its history. One cannot "see through" philosophy unless one has a knowledge of history, a knowledge that what we know now is rooted in events and persons of the past. To be in time is to have a history. The story of philosophy, or psychology (if we read Freud at all), or law cannot be told, history tells us, without a historical perspective. And it is in a similar fashion that we get psychohistory, a sociology of philosophy (a sociology of knowledge), and philosophical anthropology. We think of these juxtapositions of disciplines as positive (the value of interdisciplinary research and knowledge); I suggest here, it is also possible to see each interdisciplinary effort as a sign of the on-going struggle on the question of supremacy, the establishing of a perspective that can be used to "see through" all other perspectives.

It is in the day-to-day world of legal education that we take pride in "critical" legal pedagogy, a critical bent that characterizes American legal discourse. A young Chinese lawyer, studying law in the United States, lectures at West Virginia on the legal conception of human rights in China. He is asked after the lecture how the study of law in the United States differs from the way he studied law in China. He tells us that it is the "critical way we read cases" which makes the study of law in the United States distinctive. The history of legal education is integrally linked to the rhetoric of criticism, of evaluation and reform of law.

There has been concern in recent years that the "critical perspective" in legal education is a training of cynicism, that we make our students into cynics. The ability to pick every opinion apart (legal and otherwise), to question every decision and judgment, to make arguments on either and every side of a dispute is the legacy of our skill and its pathology. Paul Carrington fears that student alienation and disaffection will erode competence and professional development. [Carrington's perspective on student alienation is more fully presented in Paul Carrington and James Conley, The Alienation of Law Students, 75 Mich. L. Rev. 887 (1977) and Paul Carrington and James Conley, Correspondence: Negative Attitudes of Law Students: A Replication of the Alienation and Dissatisfaction Factors, 76 Mich. L. Rev. 1036 (1978)]. The conserving impulse in the community of law views alienation and disenchantment as symptoms of the student's illness, but not the illness of education.

The alienation of law students is misdiagnosed and misinterpreted. The disaffection, boredom, alienation, and disenchantment is a signal that no tradition is secure, no context beyond threat, no community that cannot be transformed.

It is within a tradition, a canon, a community, and a way of life, that struggle takes place. The boundaries of a context, of a world, are always in dispute. In a bound world disputes will be used to maintain, relocate, and eradicate boundaries. The periphery surrounding a core makes every context vulnerable. Dominant cultures and predominant contexts become so through struggle (sometimes rhetorical, always dislocated preexisting context and form). The rhetoric of law and its teaching is a conserving activity that tends to cover over violence, particularly violence in the service of power, the violence of those who cannot afford to allow the world to change.

Traditions become corrupted, contexts must be mended, some "need" to be broken. "Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of the relevant intellectual virtues--these corrupt traditions, just as they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiments." [MacIntrye, at 207]

The desire to break a context is multifocal: an assertion of individuality, rebellion against authority, the effort for creativity, resolution of some on-going conflict created by the tenets of contextual authority, a perceived need for a "better way of doing things," corruption, boredom.

Law hides and conceals even as it promises to provide a performative discourse in which a just world can be envisioned. As law conserves it does so through means and for ends that are internally conflicting. The world which law makes possible (and its rationalization) falls short of its rhetorical promise. In taking the promise and hope of law seriously, the community of lawyers becomes a subversive one. Lawyering as a subversive activity goes forward within the context of an on-going and pervasive failure within the body politic of a sick world. It is the knowledge of subversion that makes this world of failure more livable. (Nihilism does not destroy the world so much as expose an existing world to itself.) It is in moral discourse that we explore whether and how it might be possible to live with the world we created.

Vital as it is, community tends to get lost when we start talking about values. The urge to form communities and the need to be in community is a base an ethical impulse, a movement toward human togetherness with attendant concerns for others. Without communities we would have no need for responsibility. Whenever there is talk of "professional responsibility" we can assume that the underlying problem is one of what we care for and relate to others within the communities that we inhabit. The care for others, and the harm that follows from being in the world with others forms the deep structure of ethics.

1. Traditional definitions of ethics and morals focus on the idea of collective, or shared sense of what is right or wrong. Alan Donagen, for example, argues that the concept of morality is without meaning unless it is rooted in the "mores of an actual ethical community." [Alan Donegan, The Theory of Morality 9 (1977)]. Donegan argues that morality "has to do with mores" or normative practices of a community.

2. Stanley Hauerwas argues that ethics can only be carried out relative to a particular community's convictions. The substance of ethics is vision and virtue, and "[t]he vision and virtue that form the self cannot be separated from the community from which the self springs." [Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue 6 (1974)]. Hauerwas, a theologian, is talking about the church, but it is easy enough to translate church to legal profession when he notes that the church "is not only a community of character but also a community of characters...." [A Community of Character, at 3].

3. Ethical problems arise in the context of normative conventions of various-minded practitioners of these conventions. The danger is that this sociological conception of ethics undermines ethics. Advocates of "descriptive ethics" grounded in a sociology of normative conventions fail to see that ethical conventions also protect lawyers from ethical awareness. The conflation of professional ethos (conventions of practice that are most commonly justified on moral grounds) and ethics leads to moral failure. We want to believe that lawyers do socially significant, publically-valued work that contributes to a just world. This view of lawyers is open to challenge. The moral nature of professional work must be subjected to critical scrutiny. Otherwise, ethics becomes part of the entangling net of personal and social deception created by a professional ethos.

4. A world-view is social, first and foremost, because it is expressed in language, a social medium. When we tell a story, say something about where we stand, or begin to articulate an ethical perspective, we use a socially constructed language of expression. We avail ourselves of shared meanings when we turn to language. Consequently, we become members of a social world when we speak, even of those experiences, feelings, and sentiments that appear as most unique.

5. The ethical world that lawyers inhabit is shaped not only by their individual ethical sensibilities but by the profession in which the sensibilities are tried and tested. [For a similar argument in medicine, see Robert K. Merton, Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays 65-72 (1976)]. "[T]he claim is not just that medicine involves matters of moral concern, but that the very practice of medicine entails moral convictions that shape its fundamental nature." ["Medicine as a Tragic Profession," in Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy 184-204, at 185 (1977)]

6. On finding common ground and standing together, the essays of Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, and literary and cultural critic are instructive. See Wendell Berry, Standing By Words (1983); The Gift of Good Land (1981); Recollected Essays 1965-1980 (1981). See also, Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974); Now Don't Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (1970); Wayne Booth (ed.), The Knowledge Most Worth Having (1967).

7. Citizenship, in the tradition of civic republicanism, requires "participation as an equal in public affairs in pursuit of a common good. . . ." [Frank Michelman, Law's Republic, 97 Yale L. J. 1493, 1503 (1988)]. It is through engagements with others that the political and moral self is constituted. Civic Republicanism is an appeal to normative conceptions beyond individual interest. [See Paul Brest, Constitutional Citizenship, 34 Clev. L. Rev. 1 (1986)]

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