Moral icons: a comment on Steven Lubet's reconstructing Atticus Finch.

• Author: Simon, William H.
• Position: Response to book review by Steven Lubet in this issue, p. 1339 - Classics Revisited - 1999 Survey of Books Related to the Law

Atticus Finch's conduct would have been justified by the bar's conventional norms even if he had known Tom Robinson to be guilty. That fact, however, is not the source of the admiration for him that To Kill a Mockingbird has induced in so many readers. That admiration depends on the clear premise of the novel that Finch plausibly believes that Tom Robinson is innocent. Thus, the bar's invocation of Finch as a sympathetic illustration of its norms is misleading. The ethics of the novel are quite different from those of the bar.

Steven Lubet does a good job of showing that the novel's ethics are somewhat out of step with contemporary liberal sentiment. In order to be confident of Robinson's innocence, we have to take for granted aspects of Harper Lee's portrayal of his accusers that today smack of gender and class bias. I differ somewhat with Lubet over the significance of this failing for ethical discussion in two respects.

First, if we treat the novel as a professional responsibility hypothetical, then I think Finch's conduct is ethically plausible -- not just in terms of the bar's norms, but in terms of the more ambitious conceptions of justice that the novel and Lubet invoke -- as long as he had any doubts about Robinson's guilt. Unless Finch knew for certain that Mayella Ewell was testifying truthfully, he would have viewed his cross-examination as an effort to test her credibility (or if he was certain she was lying, to expose her). Yes, he did traumatize and humiliate her. This is a major injury, and in many situations it might be unconscionable to inflict it. But in 1930s Alabama, an accusation of rape by a white woman against a black man was tantamount to a demand for the man's death. Even a truthful rape victim should understand that the stakes in this situation warrant efforts that may be painful to her to assure the soundness of the verdict.

Second, if we treat the novel as a depiction of an exemplary moral figure, my strongest objection is more general than the one Lubet raises. Lubet doesn't like it that Lee reduces her villains to "stereotypes." On the other hand, his principal disappointment is that she fails to make Finch into a fully consistent stereotype ("icon") of virtue. Up until the ending of the novel, Lee dearly tries to do this, and her effort no longer succeeds for...