Technical challenges for lawyers impact on our ethics. Some predict that singularity technologies will progressively merge human and machine intelligences. These may become evident in knowledge processing and therefore affect litigation, with potential for such merged intelligences to minimize moral accountability. Perhaps machine intelligences will progressively calculate which actions are ‘better’ in rigid consequentialist terms, ignoring competing moral frameworks described in this book, and government authority will be challenged. Speculation, of course, but there is unlikely to be a lessening in the need for moral leadership from law school deans, bar association presidents and leading practitioners, as Greater China strives for overall sustainability. Arguably, with our lawyers’ sensitivity to virtue and Confucian teaching we might conclude that narrow role morality is no longer enough. Our final social utility (and the reason for any social and economic privileges we retain as lawyers) may lie in our willingness to help whole communities access practical justice: that is, genuine equality of access to health, food, housing and education.

Pareto’s advocacy of ‘ethical neutrality’ in social science is well known, but, over the course of his scholarly career, he devoted more and more attention to accommodating the influence of sentiment (value judgement) within welfare theory. This paper plots Pareto’s evolving treatment of value judgement from his early economic works on production efficiency and collective economic welfare through to his mature sociological reflections on collective social welfare. Within that context, Pareto’s contribution to the ‘new welfare economics’, as a stream of what John Hicks called economic welfarism, is discussed; as is his attempt to accommodate the values of each individual member of society within his sociological approach to collective welfare. However, in contrast to the position taken under Hicks’s conception of non-welfarism, the policy advisor who adopts Pareto’s sociology of welfare is still obliged to follow an ethically neutral position when considering the values of individuals to provide advice on improving social welfare.