Building Ethics Regimes : Capabilities, Obstacles and Supports for Professional Ethical Decision-Making

In professional life, as elsewhere, many distinct processes must be successfully navigated for principled moral action to take place. Professionals need to be sensitive to situational factors that call for moral consideration; they need to be capable of reflecting on those features to arrive at a justifiable course of action; they need to possess moral motives that prioritise this outcome; and they need to possess character traits that empower them to actually perform the action. In some cases, professionals may also need to possess a certain competence to achieve a morally successful outcome. Failures by professionals to live up to their professional duties and ethical codes can occur through a breakdown in any one of these several processes. Such a failure might be individual in nature, or it might occur because of a lack of the requisite social and institutional supports. This article develops a model of an ‘ethics regime' for the professions, describing the types of institutions, practices and initiatives that can be employed to improve professionals' functioning on each of the distinct processes - processes that together contribute to effective moral outcomes