Bribery and Business

Synonyms

Bribery; Corruption; Extortion; Grease payment; Integrity

Introduction

The concept of bribery is important to our thinking about ethics, especially in professional contexts. This is in no small part due to the thought that, as Seamus Miller has put it, bribery is “a paradigm of corruption” (Miller 2018, pp. 4–5). Business persons and corporate entities are often evaluated by how well they remain free from, root out, and punish corruption – especially in democratic societies. It is a common thought, for example, that a democratic institution ought to be free from corruption. Since bribery is often thought a form – perhaps the paradigmatic form – of corruption, bribery, too, serves as a central concept in our evaluations of business persons and corporate entities.

Although there is no consensus as to what exactlyconstitutes bribery, theorists have at least converged on some common elements of bribery. This article will lay out three common elements which together are...