I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

I think the detectives who work with McCoy are examples of this. Of all the ones we've seen on the show, I think Reynaldo Curtis is the only one who's ever come close to making any sort of pronouncement about the nobility of what they do and even his comments to that effect were really vague. But Mike Logan, Lenny Briscoe, Anita Van Buren, Ed Green, Frank Fontana and the characters played by George Dzunda and Paul Sorvino (whose names escape me at the moment) all did their job because it was their job. In this regard, they do differ from their brothers and sisters on L&O: SVU and L&O: CI. Stabler & Benson (on SVU) talk a lot about the justice of what they do and I think Gorem (CI), at least, finds a certain nobility in it. But the detectives of classic L&O do what they do because their job calls for it.