Legal vs Ethics Paper
Howard Walker LDR 520 – Organizational Ethics Arnold Berenson September 8, 2003 Legal vs. Ethics Paper Martinez (1998) contends that “law and ethics cannot be reconciled because of the fundamental tension that exists between public duties/law and private and private duties/ethics. Whereas moral decisions are value-based decisions that are content-and context-specific, legal decisions are just the opposite: procedure=based decisions that are dependent upon historical precedent.” To amplify the difficulty in reconciling law and ethics regarding the distinction between legal and ethics, the author (Martinez 1998) cites Dworkin’s (1978) assessment that because of stringent rules, public power cannot substitute for or sanction lapses of a “purely moral or private matter. He states that “if the public servants acted solely on their own often ill-defined, perhaps inarticulable, private ethical precepts, society would lose the great virtue of positivist legal rules, namely their well defined, explicated characteristics. ... The author predicts that because of the differences between the two concepts, tension between law and ethics will continue to be examined and questioned by scholars and practitioners.