The master thesis Between Theory and Fiction: The Ethics of Legal Professions through Literature combines three separate scientific areas: the ethics of legal professions, aesthetics and literary studies. The aim of the thesis is to present literary characters of different legal professions and to examine them through the theory of the ethics of legal professions. Through this, I will clarify to which degree are theoretical standards and point of views recognized within literary works and illuminate their universal nature.
The second chapter provides a proper base for the above described research and serves as an introduction to aesthetics – the philosophy of art, beauty and taste. I shortly examine the main figures and movements of aesthetics and divide them between those who advocate the usefulness of art and its message and those who doubt its broader social value. A separate subchapter is devoted to literary cognitivism, which deals with the question what kind of knowledge can we gain from reading fiction.
In the next three chapters I present different literary characters through the ethics of the following legal professions: lawyer, judge and prosecutor. Each chapter is split into the ensuing structure: 1.) an introduction of the legal profession, 2.) an overview of the ethics belonging to that profession, 3.) a summary of the chosen literary work and 4.) the analysis of a character from that book through the appropriate professional ethics theory. The following literary works and characters were used for each legal profession: the lawyer Atticus Finch from to Kill a Mockingbird, the doctor of law and judge Balthazar from The Merchant of Venice and the public prosecutor from The Stranger.
The last chapter summarizes previous findings and emphasizes the relationship between the ethics of legal professions and literature. It enlightens the pathway to new knowledge which can be discovered by searching for parallels and meeting points between the two disciplines.
|
