Improving professional or institutional behavior (and avoiding misbehavior) requires a coordinated approach based on a trinity of ethical standard setting, legal regulation and institutional reform. Such an approach recognizes that professional behavior falls into a normative continuum from the highest professional standards, through good work, sub par work, misconduct and criminality. It also recognizes that there is a professional practice range from solo to large group settings and that there are many distinctions among professionals important for ethical issues. The goal of the trinity is to raise individual professionals as far up the normative continuum as possible, using means appropriate to the particular profession and work setting.
A individual self assessment as the basis for determining continuing competence is a good example of a focus on continually lifting standards within a profession. Such a strategy is far more likely to be successful than a policy of deterrence based on punitive sanctions. Not only is it obviously better to avoid the opportunity for ethical failings than to deal with their consequences, there is some evidence that punishment can in fact be counterproductive. Imposing criminal sanctions, society should not primarily emphasize community disgust at the behavior condemned. Rather society should emphasize the positive values of the profession (and society) that have been betrayed. This is the reason why the individual has received a higher level of punishment than others who were not professionally committed to those values.
The majority of individuals (the virtuous actors ), an appeal to reason (persuasion) will be sufficient. The assumption is that the threat of deterrence in its various forms will be sufficient for the rational actor .
What is vital is the co ordination of the various approaches to improving behavior to shift as much behavior as high up the behavioral scale as possible. Ethical standards should set out the inspirational goals at the highest levels of the behavioral continuum; disciplinary codes and criminal sanctions should be addressed to the lowest levels of the behavioral field. Even for those who do not reach the highest ideals of the profession, other means should underpin and reward higher standards at all levels. The more successful a co ordinate approach based on ethical standard setting, legal regulation and institutional reform, the higher the overall standards of the profession and the fewer professionals at the lower levels committing crimes and ethical breaches.
Thus, in a well ordered profession, the aspirations of most practitioners will be to strive for the highest standards of the profession and this focus will keep individuals so far from the sanction minimum that there will be very few breaches, even by those who fall below the average. Criminal behavior will also be rarer if the occurrence of institutional temptations or dilemmas is reduced. The more effective is ethical standard setting and ethical education, the lesser the opportunity to resort to the excuse of ignorance. And the more effective is institutional reform, the less likely the profession acceptance of the excuse that the individual faced an ethical dilemma, alone and unsupported.
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