The Phenomenological Basis of Lawyers’ Professional Ethics

English abstract: The thesis of the paper is connected with the statement that the casuistic, quasi-legal model of legal ethics should be abandoned. What should be broadened instead, is individual and collective, namely corporate one, awareness of the specificity of legal experiencing of the values relevant from ethical-professional perspective and based on firm methodological basis. The conception of legal ethics presented in the paper gives up the attempts of describing it from the perspective which is forced by categories connected with legal positivism. This suggestion refers to the following: (1) phenomenological “thinking according to ethical-professional values”, (2) the notion of ethical-professional intuition and (3) the concept of a lawyer’s and legal corporation’s field of axiological awareness. The 20th century phenomenological philosophy and, closely connected with it, informal ethics of values, as presented mainly by M. Scheler and N. Hartmann, serves as the basis of the suggested ethical-professional concept. Phenomenological ethics, relying on individual experience of ethical values, based on individual acts of value preference in case of moral conflict, gives a chance to distance itself from a quasi-legal, casuistic perception of legal ethics. It, then, creates the possibility of necessary methodological independence of legal ethics from law.

Keywords: Lawyers’ Professional Ethics, phenomenological philosophy, ethical-professional values, ethical-professional intuition, field of axiological awareness