Kath Hall, a professor at Australian National University College of Law, has posted a book chapter on SSRN entitled, "Why Good Intentions are Often Not Enough: The Potential for Ethical Blindness in Legal Decision-Making." It will appear in a forthcoming book, Reaffirming Legal Ethics: Taking Stock and New Ideas (Reid Mortensen, Michael Robertson, Lillian Corbin, Francesca Bartlett, Kieran Tranter, eds.)
The chapter offers an excellent overview of some important psychological research on ethics and how it relates to lawyering. Here's the abstract:
This chapter takes as its starting point the question of how otherwise
experienced and principled lawyers can make blatantly unethical
decisions. As recent research has shown, lawyers can become involved in
legitimizing inhuman conduct just as they can in perpetuating
accounting fraud or hiding client scandal. To an outsider looking at
these circumstances, it invariably appears that the lawyers involved
consciously acted immorally. Within the common framework of
deliberative action, we tend to see unethical behaviour as the result
of conscious and controlled mental processes.
Whilst awareness is always part of our actions, this chapter
challenges the pervasiveness of assumptions about the power of
conscious processes in ethical decision making. Drawing on a range of
psychological research, it focuses on two important findings: first,
that automatic mental processes are far more dominant in our thinking
than most of us are aware; and second, that because we do not generally
have introspective access to these processes, we infer from their
results what the important factors in our decision making must be.
These findings challenge the notion that individuals can be fully aware
of what influences them to act ethically or unethically. It also
suggests that we need to concentrate upon those conscious processes
that we do know influence decision making in deepening our
understanding of how to improve ethical awareness.
The book will also contain contributions from our own Brad Wendel and Alice Woolley.