Catatan Kuliah-Belajar Mandiri

Pertemuan Kelima & Keenam (27 Oktober & 3 November 2020)

Dosen: Tanius Sebastian

Konsepsi Etika Hukum (Legal Ethics)

Catatan kuliah ini berisi penjelasan dan panduan untuk memahami pustaka rujukan kita, terutama Bab 1
yang berjudul “Defining the Problem”. Bab tersebut dibagi menjadi tiga sub-bagian, yakni (1) tentang
konsep moralitas dalam peran profesional; (2) tentang konsep etika dan moralitas dalam hukum; dan (3)
tentang ranah “etika hukum” dan “hukum yang mengatur ahli hukum”. Catatan pertemuan kelima
sekaligus yang keenam ini mengulas gagasan-gagasan utama bagian (2).

1. Notice something about all of these arguments: They appeal to considerations of ordinary
morality and the circumstances of the real world in which professionals practice. They do not
simply fall back on the separateness or special quality of professional ethics, but seek to explain
why, in moral terms, lawyers have the duties they do … Here is a metaphor that may be helpful
in understanding the issues regarding role-differentiated morality. Imagine two different
“lands” or domains of value, connected by a bridge, as in Figure 1.1.
This image emphasizes that the lands are separate, but there is – and indeed there must
be – a connection between them. If there were no bridge, then these two worlds would be totally
separated, normatively speaking. In that case, there would be no reason why society as a whole
would tolerate the profession, no matter how rigorously it was governed by a code of “ethics.”
… The bridge ensures that the principles of ethics by which professionals conduct themselves are
acceptable to the wider society of which the profession is a part.
a) Cermati kembali macam-macam argumen yang membenarkan tindakan/sikap moral dari
pengemban profesi hukum yang menjalakan peran sebagai pembela klien yang
sebenarnya bersalah, namun justru orang lain yang tidak bersalah yang dihukum atas
kesalahan klien tersebut. Konsep etika profesi hukum dari peran itu adalah moralitas
peran;
b) Di dalam potongan teks ini digambarkan hubungan antara moralitas peran dan moralitas
biasa. Hubungan tersebut tampak dari gambar jembatan. Apa fungsi dari jembatan
tersebut untuk menghubungkan kedua konsepsi moral tersebut, khususnya untuk
keberlangsungan peran moral dari pengemban profesi hukum?

2. … how much traffic has to flow across the bridge or how tight or direct the connection has to be
between professional ethics and ordinary morality. A different way to consider the question
might be to ask how frequently a professional must cross back over the bridge into the land of
ordinary morality to ensure that her conduct is acceptable by general ethical standards.
Sometimes theorists talk as though a person crosses the bridge once, becomes a professional,
and then no longer has to go back to the land of ordinary morality. Others have pointed out,
however, that people literally and metaphorically move between different roles frequently in
their lives. A lawyer comes home and becomes a spouse, parent, neighbour, friend, member of
a softball team, and the like. It may be psychologically taxing to switch back and forth
frequently between different domains of value if they differ to any significant extent. One

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 response might therefore be to adopt a stance of detachment with respect to both worlds, which
is not a particularly attractive vision of the ethical life.
a) Ada beberapa cara memahami dan cara menerapkan keterhubungan dan lalu lintas di
antara dua sisi dari jembatan moralitas, yakni sisi moralitas profesi dan moralitas biasa.
Sebut dan jelaskan cara-cara yang dimaksud!

3. … we can remain unconcerned, for our purposes, with issues of metaethics. Metaethics concerns
such matters as the justification of ethical principles (are they grounded in rationality, the
character of a person, a divine command, widely shared sentiments, or something else?); the
right way to understand moral utterances such as “slavery is wrong” (do they express truth-
functional propositions, the attitude of the speaker, or something else?); the relationship
between values and facts about the natural world (are values part of the furniture of the
universe, do they supervene on natural properties, or are they projected onto the natural world
by human subjects?); the relationship between justification and motivation; and so on … These
are extremely interesting questions, but the debates in legal ethics have by and large proceeded
independently of metaethics. Legal ethics proceeds by assuming that all of these issues have
been worked out or can be worked out on the ordinary morality side of the bridge, and the hard
question is whether and how they apply to people acting in a professional capacity … Another
way of putting this point is to say that legal ethics belongs to the branch of moral philosophy
called normative ethics;
a) Di dalam refleksi etika dan kaitannya dengan etika profesi hukum, kita perlu memilah
beberapa ranah kajian, yakni kajian metaetika, kajian etika hukum, dan kajian etika
normatif. Etika profesi hukum yang kita pelajari termasuk ke dalam ranah kajian yang
mana dan mengapa?

4. Speaking fairly generally, I understand ethics as having to do with what we owe to each other.
When we act, we sometimes do things that implicate the interests of others. Someone may say,
“hey, you can’t do that to me!”, and it is the task of ethics to articulate reasons that justify
actions to others who are affected by them. Those reasons have to be shared or be, at least in
principle, shareable – that is, they must refer to considerations that the affected person can
endorse. Being able to justify our conduct to others is what it means to act ethically. On this
view, ethics is not about something purely theoretical, like promoting the good, but is concerned
with concrete relationships among people and the way we regulate our interactions with others
to take account of their interests;
a) Untuk memahami secara tepat konsep dan cara berpikir dari “etika”, kita perlu
memahami keterkaitan di antara unsur-unsur berikut:
• Penalaran;
• Pembenaran;
• Tindakan;
• Interaksi;
• Kepentingan;
• “yang lain”.
b) Jelaskan hubungan antar unsur-unsur di atas sebagai suatu rangkaian dari makna etika!

5. … ethical reasoning is necessarily abstract and general in several ways. The process of giving
reasons in justification of one’s actions may be hypothetical only … Furthermore, ethical reasons
are necessarily impartial, in that they apply to all similarly situated actors. This means, in

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 connection with the process of justification, that we have to imagine an affected person being
able to stand apart from his or her own situation and reason from the point of view of all
similarly situated people …
The abstraction inherent in ethical reasoning may make it seem incapable of producing
standards of conduct in actual cases. It might seem that anything can be justified if we are
sufficiently clever in coming up with reasons or perhaps manipulating the categories of similarly
situated subjects … there is widespread concern that ethical reasoning is indeterminate – that
is, it does not yield standards that are specific enough to tell an actor what to do in a situation
of real perplexity.
a) Menurut potongan teks di atas, setidaknya terdapat tiga corak utama dari penalaran
etis/cara berpikir etika. Sebut dan jelaskan ketiganya itu serta paparkan pula
hubungannya satu sama lain!

6. … response regarding the indeterminacy of ethical reasoning is that, to the extent that there is
indeterminacy, it reveals something deep and important about the nature of human values,
namely, that there is more than one way of leading an authentically good human life and,
accordingly, that there are a diversity of principles and values that bear on ethical conduct …
Consider an example from Jean-Paul Sartre. A young man’s brother was killed in the war in
1940. Wishing to avenge his brother’s death and to fight the occupying German army, the man
considers joining the Resistance but, as the sole source of consolation to his mother after the
death of her other son, the man also feels an obligation to remain at home and care for his
mother.
The dilemma facing Sartre’s young man becomes particularly acute when we consider
decisions that have to be made not as individuals but on behalf of an entire political community
… This kind of ethical pluralism is not the same as relativism …;
a) Salah satu corak utama dari penalaran etis adalah indeterminatif. Apa hubungannya sifat
indeterminatif tersebut dengan dilema moral?
b) Di dalam potongan teks dijelaskan bahwa indeterminasi/ketakmenentuan dari penalaran
etis tidak sama artinya dengan relativisme. Apa maksudnya?

7. If one function of the law is to settle issues that arise when people with different moral values
and commitments live together in society, then it may follow that the ethical standards
applicable to lawyers are derived in some way from the function of law … a political conception
of justice ought to be independent to some extent of what he calls “comprehensive doctrines.”
… In a liberal society, citizens affirm different religious, moral, or philosophical comprehensive
doctrines. Thus, it would be impossible to ground principles of political justice, which apply to
all citizens in a society, on one of these contested comprehensive doctrines … that political
conceptions of justice may be justified if there is an overlapping consensus among citizens who
subscribe to different comprehensive doctrines … One possibility to be considered in this book is
that principles of legal ethics may be political in this sense. They may be grounded in an
overlapping consensus on a principle of justice – for example, the value of the rule of law – and
not on comprehensive doctrines of morality.
a) Jalan keluar dari problem pluralisme nilai moral adalah hukum. Dengan kata lain, hukum
berfungsi sebagai solusi atas perbedaan-perbedaan nilai moral. Namun, hukum tidak
dapat dilepaskan dari keadilan sehingga fungsi hukum demi keadilan perlu dikondisikan
berdasarkan “overlapping consensus” dan bukan berdasarkan “comprehensive doctrine”.
Berdasarkan potongan teks di atas, beri contoh dari “overlapping consensus” dan
“comprehensive doctrine” tersebut!

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b) Berdasarkan contoh tersebut di atas, jelaskan hubungan antara etika profesi hukum dan
tatanan sosial-politik! (Apa manfaat dari pembelajaran etika profesi hukum dalam
memahami hubungan negara dan masyarakat?).