This article examines the growing disjunction between legal permissibility and ethical responsibility in contemporary legal practice, arguing that compliance-oriented frameworks and defensive role morality are insufficient to address the systemic harms that can arise through lawful professional activity. Drawing on recent philosophical and empirical scholarship, the article explores how professional norms shape lawyers’ ethical self-understanding under institutional, economic and regulatory pressures. Particular attention is paid to areas such as environmental law, economic abuse advice, state capture and digital platforms, where ethical concerns frequently emerge from routine, rule-compliant practice rather than misconduct. Against this backdrop, the article advances a reconceptualisation of professional responsibility that treats ethics as an ongoing practice of reflective judgement rather than merely compliance with professional rules. It argues that lawyers should be understood as both technical experts and moral agents within a public profession, whose responsibilities extend beyond client service to maintaining public trust and the integrity of legal institutions. Situating this argument within contemporary debates on role morality, liberal legal ethics and virtue ethics, the article concludes by considering implications for legal ethics education in the SQE era and identifies directions for future empirical and normative research on ethical agency and structural harm.
Anil Balan (Mon,) studied this question.