4 - Adversaries

Summary

A lack of regard for truth is a feature not only of problematic grading practices but also of aggressive advocacy as some people understand it. Liberals favor adversarial advocacy, in the courtroom and elsewhere. And a natural law concern with fairness prompts us to see adversarial practices as frequently valuable. But while the practice of aggressive advocacy by attorneys might yield positive results, attorneys themselves might still sometimes act unreasonably in engaging adversarially. The same may be true of professional adversaries of other sorts. Chapter 4 evalutes one positive proposal regarding adversaries’ ethics, seeking to show how natural law theory might help to clarify the moral status of some adversarial practices.