It has been recognised that teaching legal ethics should not be restricted to teaching legal professional codes of conduct, but that it oft en is so treated when legal ethics form part of a compulsory curriculum. As Deborah L. Rhode writes:

However, this emphasis on the cognitive and theoretical itself has been criticised as too narrow.

In this chapter and the next the broader aspects of ethics are the focus of attention – those components of effective moral action characterised as moral motivation and moral character by Rest. It is probably in this area of ethics, the area that impinges most upon the personal morality and identity of students, that anxiety about the proper limits of academic action is most acute. It is also in this area that detailed knowledge of professional codes is irrelevant except as illustrative material. It is in this area that an undergraduate degree designed to support the personal identity development of students is most clearly justified in educational terms. Finally, the systemic impacts of legal education are likely to be important in this area, as a failure to support students in developing an ethical set of priorities invites the adoption of unethical values by young people.

TEACHING MORAL MOTIVATION

To be morally motivated is to care about some moral or ethical value more than other values that are present in some situation. In this context ‘values’ mean anything that someone treats as having value.

It is important to remember that the four-component schema for ethical action is an analytical construct. It may not reflect psychological causality, nor a sequence of events in practice. A particular risk of distortion comes from our cultural narratives of moral heroism. In the words of Samuel and Pearl Oliner: