Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 140

Tolerance Before Empathy, by Bryan Caplan

Suppose you have a ne'er-do-well cousin.  A long-term alcoholic and drug addict, he's been arrested about thirty times - though never convicted of a felony.  One day he comes to your door, and tells you a largely accurate history of his troubled life, from childhood to the present.  He admits that many of his troubles are his own fault, and accepts responsibility for them.

Then, he hits you up for money - as he's done many times before.

How do you react?  If you're like most people, you'll feel a blend of frustration, impatience, and pity.  Sure, he came from a broken home.  Sure, he's had bad luck.  But if these were his only problems, he'd wouldn't need your help.  And you've helped him so many times already.  Looking at your cousin fills you with sadness, but the thought of bailing him out for the umpteenth time fills you with disgust.

Trapped between your conflicting negative emotions, you hesitate long enough for a nosy neighbor to wander over and ask, "What wrong?"  Before you can stop him, your cousin repeats his story.  The nosy neighbor's face turns red with anger - at you.  He reads you the riot act.  "How can you be so lacking in empathy?!" he asks.  "You were born on third base, yet you fault your cousin for failing to hit a home run!  You sicken me."

Should you help your cousin?  Reasonable people are likely to disagree.  But whatever you'd decide, your nosy neighbor is plainly and completely out of line.  Yes, there are some plausible reasons to say yes to your cousin.  But there are also plenty of plausible reasons to say no! 

It's tempting to ask your neighbor to show some empathy for your awkward position.  But what's awful about Mr. Nosy is that he fails to show you something more basic: tolerance.  Instead of preaching at you, your neighbor should admit that there are decent arguments on both sides, and butt out.

At the individual level, I doubt many people will dispute my perspective.  Why bring it up?  Because in his recent piece on poverty, Nicholas Kristof perfectly plays the part of society's nosy neighbor.  After acknowledging the connection between poverty and bad choices, Kristof lashes out at people who oppose a renewed war on poverty for their lack of empathy:

Too often wealthy people born on third base blithely criticize the poor
for failing to hit home runs. The advantaged sometimes perceive empathy
as a sign of muddle-headed weakness, rather than as a marker of
civilization.

And:

This
crisis in working-class America doesn't get the attention it deserves,
perhaps because most of us in the chattering class aren't a part of it.

There are steps that could help, including a higher minimum wage, early childhood programs, and a focus on education as an escalator to opportunity. But the essential starting point is empathy.

If you had a ne'er-do-well cousin, I'm almost sure Kristof would be a tolerant man.  He'd acknowledge the moral complexity of the situation.  He'd admit that you might be right to refuse your cousin.  Whatever you decided, he'd keep his opinion to himself unless you explicitly requested his counsel.  My question: Why can't he be equally tolerant of people who say that "the crisis in working-class America" is not their fault and not their problem?  

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Our Poverty and Theirs, by Bryan Caplan

I regularly praise Nicholas Kristof's courageous essay on Third World poverty.  While First World immigration policies and Third World economic policies cause enormous harm, the global poor exacerbate their woes with grotesquely irresponsible behavior.  Kristof:

[I]f the poorest families spent as much money educating their children
as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children's
prospects would be transformed...

...Here in this Congolese village
of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is
about to be expelled from school because his family is three months
behind in paying fees...

...The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves
straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He
said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and
is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.

The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost
two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can't afford
the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for
each of their three school-age kids.

"It's hard to get the money to send the kids to school," Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed...

In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village
bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine... almost as much as the family rent
and school fees combined.

I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.

Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man
in the village...

I was disappointed, then, to learn that Kristof's view of American poverty is rather fatalistic:

One delusion common among America's successful people is that they triumphed just because of hard work and intelligence.

In fact, their big break came when they were conceived in middle-class American families...

Kristof is far more forgiving of Rick Goff of Oregon than Georges Obamza of Congo:

Rick
acknowledges his vices and accepts responsibility for plenty of
mistakes: He smoked, drank too much for a time and abused drugs. He
sometimes hung out with shady people, and he says he has been arrested
about 30 times but never convicted of a felony. Some of his arrests were
for trying to help other people, especially to protect women, by using
his fists against bullies...

A
generation or two ago, Rick might have ended up with a stable family
and in a well-paid union job, creating incentives for prudent behavior.
Those jobs have evaporated, sometimes creating a vortex of hopelessness
that leads to poor choices and becomes self-fulfilling.

There
has been considerable progress in material standards over the decades.
When I was a kid, there were still occasional neighbors living in shacks
without electricity or plumbing, and that's no longer the case. But the
drug, incarceration, job and family instability problems seem worse.

Why can't people like Rick escape from poverty through old-fashioned puritanism?  Kristof just changes the subject: 

Obviously,
some people born into poverty manage to escape, and bravo to them. That
tends to be easier when the constraint is just a low income, as opposed
to other pathologies such as alcoholic, drug-addicted or indifferent
parents or a neighborhood dominated by gangs...

Yes,
these men sometimes make bad choices. But just as wealthy Americans
inherit opportunity, working-class men inherit adversity.

The knee-jerk response is to demand consistency: Either blame the poor - Americans and African - for their bad choices.  Or excuse the poor - Americans and African - on account of their bad upbringing. 

But the mere demand for consistency ignores a key fact: From cradle to tomb, Africans endure far harsher conditions than Americans.  Poor Africans grow up physically malnourished.  They have little exposure to sober bourgeois habits - even in school.  Once they enter the labor market, their prospects are grim unless they somehow escape to the First World.  Poor Americans, in contrast, are almost never hungry.  Their teachers expose them to the bourgeois way of life.  And in the labor market, poor Americans earn incomes that poor African migrants bet their lives to enjoy.

Even if you maintain that African and American poverty are both forgivable, then, you should still concede that African poverty is more forgivable than American poverty.  While the African poor could sharply improve their lives with better choices, even perfect choices are not a reliable way for them to escape poverty.  Poor Americans, in contrast, can reliably avoid poverty with basic prudence: finish high school, work full-time, delay child-bearing, and stay sober.  "I couldn't escape poverty even if I tried" has to be more forgivable than "I could have escaped poverty if I tried, but I sadly wasn't raised to try."

P.S. Critics often ask me, "Who cares who's to blame for poverty?  How does that help us fix the problem?"  My deep response is to reject their moral monomania.  Questions of moral blame are intrinsically interesting and important even if better answers won't help us 'solve problems.'" 

My direct response, though, is two-fold.  At minimum, blame provides a compelling criterion for the rationing of limited charity.  If we can only help 100,000 people, we should prioritize the morally blameless, and put unrepentant libertines at the bottom of the list. 

In addition, though, blame helps us correctly identify "problems."  If your suffering is entirely your own fault, the main "problem" is not your suffering.  The main problem is that the guiltless may feel guilty for failing to help you.  Thus, if a woman catches her husband cheating and resolves to divorce him, the morally relevant danger isn't that the husband will feel sad, but that the wife will feel sorry for him.  If your habitual drunkenness destroys your family and career, the morally relevant danger isn't that total strangers fail to help you, but that the fallout of your vices will weigh on the consciences of innocent passersby.

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The Ethics of Individualism, by Bryan Caplan

Last question before GenCon: In Haidtian terms, what is an "individualist"?  Insiders' knee-jerk reaction is probably to say "low in Care," or maybe even "low in Fairness."  But per Sebastian Nickel, isn't "low in Loyalty" the better answer?

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Haidt and the Moral Foundations of the Welfare State, by Bryan Caplan

Great questions from Sebastian Nickel:

I
recently asked whether accusations of excessive "selfishness" are to be
understood as accusations of insufficient "altruism", or rather as
accusations of insufficient "groupishness".

A related question:
When Jon Haidt asks questionnaire respondents questions meant to gauge
how much they care about "the poor", where "the poor" specifically
refers to "the *local* poor" (in the respondent's country),
should he really chalk those answers up just to the "Harm/Care"
foundation, or should he also attribute them to the "Loyalty"
foundation? (Especially if other questions were to reveal that the
respondent in question is happy to sacrifice interests and rights of
foreign poor people when they see this as benefiting local poor people?)

I've previously challenged Haidt's view that liberal ethics hinge on Harm/Care and Fairness (here and here, along with Haidt's reply).  But Sebastian now makes me think that Haidt's analysis is more wrong than I realized.  Consider Haidt's words:

yes, liberals can do ingroup, but mostly just contra
conservatives and racists. And they don't do it terribly well. The
Democratic Whip has a much harder job than the republican Whip. Social
conservatives take to it so readily. Liberals and libertarians can do
it, but not as readily or as reliably. Liberals in particular are
universalists; they are morally opposed to tribalism, although they can
kinda do liberal tribalism. So yes, liberals would consider voting for
a republican as a kind of treason.

With Sebastian's questions firmly in mind, Haidt's claims seem fanciful.  What percentage of self-styled liberals are genuine "universalists"?!  5%?  2%?  You could say that liberals have relatively inclusive definitions of citizenship, but when they say "the poor," they still almost always mean "our country's poor."  This is plainly true for average liberals.  But despite honorable outliers, even elite liberals like Paul Krugman and Michael Lind heavily prioritize relatively poor natives over absolutely poor foreigners.

The best response to Sebastian, I suspect, is that there is a big difference between people's surface and deep justifications for the welfare state.  The surface justification is the rationale people blurt out when they're first asked; the deep justification is the rationale they embrace if pressed.  For conservatives, the surface and deep justifications for the welfare state align: Loyalty to fellow citizens.*  For liberals, in contrast, justifications diverge.  They start with Care: "We have to take care of people."  When pressed, however, they retreat to Loyalty: "We have to take care of our people." Caring for our people imposes immense suffering on foreigners?  Oh well, every country does it.

If you know of facts relevant to Sebastian's inquiries, please share them in the comments.

P.S. I'm off to GenCon, so I won't be posting again until next week.  If you see me in Indy, please say hi.  Or join either of my two games - there are still plenty of spots.

P.P.S. If you think normal conservatives oppose the welfare state, you are badly failing the Ideological Turing Test.

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Machismo vs. Appeasement, by Bryan Caplan

I suspect that the ultimate objection to pacifism and appeasement is that they are unmanly.  A "real man," brimming over with machismo, stands up for himself no matter what the consequences: Never retreat, never surrender. 

The emotional appeal is undeniable.  Who can forget this scene from The Return of the King?

Gamling: Too few have come. We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor.

Theoden: No. We cannot. But we will meet them in battle nonetheless.

Intellectually, though, the glorification of machismo has no appeal at all.  Who are the most macho of men?  Criminals.  Thugs.  Conquerors.  I've never heard anyone question the masculinity of Genghis Khan, but he was one of the worst men who ever lived. 

Manly values have their uses every now and then.  Let us never forget the deeds of Claus von Stauffenberg.  But only when the manly values of courage and determination are subordinate to the nerdy values of objectivity and justice.

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The Fiscal Prognosis, by Bryan Caplan

Here's how bad the CBO's now expects the long-run fiscal crisis to be:

The unsustainable nature of the federal tax and spending policies specified in current law presents lawmakers and the public with difficult choices. Unless substantial changes are made to the major health care programs and Social Security, spending for those programs will equal a much larger percentage of GDP in the future than it has in the past. At the same time, under current law, spending for all other federal benefits and services would be on track to make up a smaller percentage of GDP by 2024 than at any point in more than 70 years. Federal revenues would also represent a larger percentage of GDP in the future than they have, on average, in the past few decades. Even so, spending would soon start to outpace revenues by increasing amounts (relative to GDP), generating rising budget deficits. As a result, federal debt held by the public is projected to grow faster than the economy starting a few years from now, and because debt is already unusually high relative to GDP, further increases could be especially harmful.

What would it take to avert crisis, starting in 2015?

To put the federal budget on a sustainable path for the long term, lawmakers would have to make significant changes to tax and spending policies: reducing spending for large benefit programs below the projected levels, letting revenues rise more than they would under current law, or adopting some combination of those approaches.

The size of such changes would depend on the amount of federal debt that lawmakers considered appropriate. For example, lawmakers might set a goal of bringing debt held by the public back down to the average percentage of GDP seen over the past 40 years--39 percent. Meeting that goal by 2039 would require a combination of increases in revenues and cuts in noninterest spending, relative to current law, totaling 2.6 percent of GDP in each year beginning in 2015 (without accounting for the economic effects of the reduction in debt or of the policy changes that might be used to achieve it); in 2015, 2.6 percent of GDP would equal about $465 billion. If those changes came entirely from revenues, they would represent an increase of 14 percent from the revenues projected for the 2015-2039 period under the extended baseline. If the changes came entirely from noninterest spending, they would represent a cut of 13 percent from the amount of noninterest spending projected for that period. A similar level of debt in 2039 would result under the third scenario discussed above (a $4 trillion total reduction in deficits excluding interest payments through 2024, with the amount of deficit reduction in 2024 as a percentage of GDP continuing in later years).

Bottom line: Not a catastrophe yet, but a probable catastrophe given the myopia of American democracy.

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The Quantum Leap of Logic, by Bryan Caplan

Quantum mechanics is often used as a club against common sense.  I've heard dozens of variations on Scott's:

After all, quantum mechanics doesn't sound plausible either---but it's true.

Seriously, though, how does this argument amount to anything more than:

Common sense is an unreliable guide to claims completely outside of ordinary experience.  Therefore, common sense is an unreliable guide to claims well within ordinary experience.

As Merlin says in Excalibur , "You'll have to do better than that."

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Common Sense: As True As It Seems, by Bryan Caplan

Scott once again scoffs in the face of common sense economics:

Common sense is almost useless in the field of economics. Never dismiss
an economic theory because the assumptions about human behavior don't
sound plausible.

Notice, though, how Scott tries to persuade you of this conclusion: By methodically making an economic theory's assumptions about human behavior sound plausible!  And he does a nice job, too:

[People] don't find it plausible that people would save more if the
budget deficit increased, and indeed they are even skeptical that the
public would be aware of the fact that the deficit increased.

If I ask my students whether they find RE to be plausible, they almost all answer "no."

But suppose I ask them a different set of questions:

1. Do you expect to get back all the Social Security that you have been promised?

Almost all say they expect less than what has been promised.

2. Then I ask whether that perception affects their willingness to save money for retirement, outside of Social Security.

Almost all say they are more likely to save for their retirement
because of the perception that Social Security is on the road to
bankruptcy.

But if you put these two answers together then you have Ricardian Equivalence!

If Scott really put no weight on plausibility, he would scorn his own Socratic efforts.  What's the point of reconciling economic theory with common sense if common sense is "almost useless in the field of economics"?  All you've shown is that economic theory is consistent with something of no particular importance. 

My point: We should heed Scott the educator, not Scott the methodologist.  Common sense is the foundation of all reasoning.  If you want to reject a common-sense claim, you'd better do it in the name of an even stronger common-sense claim. 

Quantum mechanics, for example, ultimately rests on the core common-sense belief that repeated careful observation reveals the world as it really is.  So does every other scientific claim; none build on the slogan, "Who are you going to believe - me or your own eyes?"  If an economic theory seems to contradict common sense, decrying common sense just makes you sound dogmatic and senseless.  The sensible response is to show that the alleged contradiction is illusory.  Don't tell me you can't show this.  It's easy if you try!

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My Life of Appeasement, by Bryan Caplan

Morally speaking, I think taxation is theft.  The government has a lot of bad excuses for taking my money without my consent, but no really good reasons.  Still, every year, I pay my taxes. 

Why don't I stand up for my rights?  The obvious reason: If I stood up for my rights by refusing to pay and attacking anyone who tried to make me, I would end up dead or in jail.  That's the way the government deals with tax resistors. 

Given this bleak forecast, I never openly defy the government.  Instead, I practice the opposite strategy: appeasement.  I find out what the government demands, I comply, and I resume living my rich, fulfilling life.  Yes, my rights have been violated.  But I'd rather live on my knees than die on my feet.  Indeed, I would consider dying on my feet to be not only foolish, but wicked.  Life is a gift, even if the government insists on tarnishing it.

Didn't the Munich Agreement prove for all time that appeasement doesn't work?  Hardly.  Despite its well-hyped failures, appeasement is an incredibly effective social strategy for dealing with the unreasonable and the unjust... also known as 90% of mankind.  Whenever someone makes bizarre demands upon me, my default is not to argue.  Instead, I weigh the cost of compliance.  If that cost is small - and it usually is - I let the babies have their way.  If you bump into me in the grocery store, I say "Sorry." 

Doesn't that open the floodgates to additional demands?  Not in my experience.  One symbolic gesture is enough to placate most of the unpleasant characters I encounter.  After my concession, we usually go our separate ways.  And even when I repeatedly interact with the same unreasonable, unjust person, at least my appeasement makes it hard for them to imagine that they have to get back at me for my past wrongs.

Despite their scorn, almost everyone knows that appeasement works.  How do I know this?  Because everyone appeases to cope with social realities.  Recall your day.  Did you experience some unreasonable, unjust treatment?  Probably.  If so, did you escalate the conflict until reason and justice prevailed?  Probably not.  Why not?  Because it would be a Pyrrhic victory, likely to leave you unemployed and alone.

Once people retract the absurd claim that "appeasement doesn't work," they finally unveil their real objection: They have too much pride to appease.  "Why should I apologize when she's the one who stepped on my foot?"  When people express such attitudes, I usually just appease them and get on with my life.  But what I'm silently thinking is: "If you're truly awesome, you shouldn't care what unreasonable, unjust people think."

Does this mean that you should never stand up for what is right?  Of course not.  But you should pick your battles very carefully.  While fighting is far more impulsively satisfying that than submitting, you should restrain your impulses in favor of calm reflection.  You might be in the wrong.  You might be making a mountain out of a molehill.  And even if right and proportion are on your side, the real world is not an action movie.  You could easily fail - and you have a lot to lose.

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Lame Excuses: What's Wrong With the Adversarial System, by Bryan Caplan

Mike Huemer, my favorite philosopher, has a new working paper on the ethics of legal advocacy.  Lawyering may never be the same, for Mike challenges the central dogma of the adversarial system: Lawyers should use all legal means to help their client win.  (Except prosecutors, who are already held to a higher standard).  Mike begins by pointing out that the adversarial system obligates lawyers to act in ways that would plainly be wrong for non-lawyers:

Consider the following hypothetical scenario, which I shall call the case of The Murderer's Friend:

Sally and Joe have known each other for a few months and have become close friends. One day, after securing a promise of confidentiality from Sally, Joe finally confesses to Sally his darkest secret: he is a serial murderer. He has murdered six people so far. He asks Sally for advice about where to hide the body of his latest victim. Sally tries to convince Joe to stop murdering people and, moreover, to turn himself in. Joe refuses to turn himself in and remains noncommittal on future murders. Sally, good friend that she is, keeps Joe's secret and offers Joe helpful advice on how to elude the police.

I take it that most people would not even consider behaving in the manner of Sally in this example. There are two aspects of Sally's behavior that mark it as extremely wrongful.

First, it is wrong for Sally to keep Joe's secret; in so doing, she allows Joe, unjustly, to get away with his crimes, and she countenances an unacceptable risk of death for innocent others, due to the likelihood that Joe will kill again. Sally is morally obligated, instead, to turn Joe in to the police.

Second, it is even worse for Sally to actively assist Joe by giving him advice on how to elude the police. Here she not merely allows serious injustices to occur but actively promotes them.

My concern here is an ethical, rather than a legal one. The point is not that Sally would be legally required to report Joe to the police. The point is that Sally would be morally required to report Joe and not to aid him. This would be true even if Sally lives in a legal system in which such reporting is not required. Sally's obligation here does not result
from any special relationship she has with Joe, nor any special role she has taken on. It is simply a requirement for being a decent human being.

So why should we hold lawyers to a different standard?  The Argument from Uncertainty is not only wrong, but silly:

Some defenders of Devil's Advocacy appeal to a kind of external-world skepticism: it is said that a lawyer can never really know that a client is guilty. Even a client who confesses to his attorney might be lying, that is, there is a nonzero probability of this. Perhaps the client has falsely confessed because he is mentally disturbed or is protecting someone else...

This is a strange argument. Typically we do not eschew the pursuit of justice or any other value merely on the grounds that we cannot be 100% certain of what will promote or thwart the goal. In the case of the Murderer's Friend, surely Sally could not be excused for disregarding the demands of justice and the welfare of innocent third parties merely on the grounds that she was not 100% certain that Joe was really a serial murderer.

The "Better to let X guilty men go free rather than convict one innocent" argument may be true, but it evades the key moral challenge:

The interesting cases are those in which the lawyer is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the client is guilty - or, more to the point, the probability of the client's being guilty, on the attorney's evidence, exceeds whatever ought to be the appropriate threshold for convicting a person of a crime. In this case, the argument that "it is better to let many guilty persons go free than to convict one innocent person" cuts no ice, since that point has already been taken into account in identifying the appropriate evidentiary threshold, which we have stipulated that the lawyer's evidence surpasses.

The Arguments from Friendship and Contractual Obligation are lame:

Some view the lawyer as like a friend to his client. Often, a person will support a friend's cause, even when the friend is in the wrong. And to some extent, we may regard this as morally acceptable, even virtuous - specifically, as a manifestation of the virtue of loyalty. If a friend has overparked at a parking meter, it would not be virtuous to hail the traffic enforcer to ensure that your friend receives a ticket.

But while the virtue of loyalty may license some degree of disregard for impartial justice in the service of one's friends, this license must be quite limited. It was in light of this thought that I mentioned the friendship between Sally and Joe in the Murderer's Friend case. In that case, Sally is a friend of Joe in a clearer sense than a lawyer is a friend of his client. Yet this hardly excuses Sally's complicity in Joe's heinous crimes. Whatever moral value there may be in Sally's show of loyalty, it does not come close to outweighing the moral importance of stopping a serial murderer. The same would seem to hold for many lesser but still serious crimes.

In addition, there is, as D'Amato and Eberle put it, "certainly something strange about an instant friend whose friendship is purchased by paying a retainer." While a preexisting close relationship may create certain ethical prerogatives to act partially on behalf of a particular person, it is implausible that such prerogatives are established by one's simply hiring someone specifically to help one escape justice.

Return to the case of the Murderer's Friend. We have already said that Sally's friendship with Joe does not seem to override her obligation to report Joe's crimes. Now suppose we add the following: Joe pays Sally $20,000 to keep quiet and to help him elude the police, and Sally accepts the money. Does this strengthen Sally's moral position, such that her
failure to report Joe is now ethically justified?

The "I'm Just Doing My Job in the Adversarial System" Argument is wrong.

The main argument, according to most proponents, appeals to the role of a lawyer in an adversarial justice system. It is simply the job of a lawyer to represent his client's interests, regardless of where he believes true justice in the given case lies. If one is unable or unwilling to perform this function, then one has no business being a lawyer (or perhaps one is qualified only to serve as a prosecutor).

By themselves, however, observations about the responsibilities attached to a particular job carry little weight. It is equally true that it is the job of a mafia hit man to murder those whom the Boss targets for elimination, and that those who are unwilling to do this have no business being hit men. But this does nothing to justify murders carried out by hit men. If a particular job description includes activities that we are antecedently convinced are morally wrong, the mere introduction of employment opportunities for people who perform those actions will do nothing to render them permissible; normally, it will simply mark the jobs in question as immoral jobs.

Lawyers should not have "faith in the justice system":

No doubt, the system usually works as intended, to punish the guilty and acquit the innocent. But there are cases in which it fails, and a lawyer can certainly be justified in suspecting that he is presently involved in such a case. This might occur, for instance, because the lawyer is privy to incriminating evidence of which the prosecution is ignorant, because the lawyer is in a position to take advantage of emotional reactions or other prejudices of the jury, or simply because the lawyer is more skilled than his counterpart on the opposite side. Of particular import, it is certainly possible, and must happen fairly often, that a lawyer is justified in attaching a nontrivial credence to the proposition that his own zealous advocacy will prove a key factor in enabling injustice to prevail.

The Rule Utilitarian case for unjust advocacy fails on its own terms:

[I]t is not at all obvious that rule consequentialism favors Devil's Advocacy, because it is far from obvious that the rule whereby defense attorneys ignore justice in the pursuit of client interests really has the best social consequences. This is commonly asserted but rarely argued for. Consider an alternative rule whereby defense attorneys pursue their clients' interests only to the extent that they (the attorneys) believe is consistent with the requirements of justice. Why, exactly, would this be worse than the status quo?

Does this mean lawyers should never defend clients they believe to be guilty?  No.  Defending the probably-guilty is morally acceptable in two kinds of situations.

First... there are cases in which outcome A has a higher probability of being unjust than outcome B, but in which if outcome B is unjust, it is more unjust than outcome A would be. For example, if a defendant is 75% likely to be guilty, then there is a 75% probability that acquittal of that defendant would be an unjust outcome, and only a 25% probability that conviction would be unjust. However, conviction of the innocent is much more unjust than acquittal of the guilty. Because of this, it is ethically justifiable to attempt to secure acquittal for such a defendant. This point applies as long as the lawyer has reasonable doubts as to the guilt of his client.

Second... even the guilty have rights; it is therefore ethically justifiable for a lawyer to represent a client for the purpose of protecting that client's rights, even if he is certain the client is guilty. The lawyer may seek to prevent overpunishment or other mistreatment of the defendant. In some cases, where the expected punishment for a crime is excessive, it may be less unjust for the defendant to be acquitted than for the defendant to be convicted, even though the defendant is guilty.

Defending clients guilty of breaking unjust laws naturally falls under the second heading, since the appropriate punishment for breaking an unjust law is no punishment at all.

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