The Routledge Companion to Business Ethics

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Corruption, bribery, and moral norms across national boundaries^*

Wesley Cragg

There are few issues in business ethics that are more clearly on the public agenda than that of corruption and bribery. Neither are there many topics to which both business and government have given more attention over the past two decades. Corruption in the world of business is of course not an exclusively modern or contemporary phenomenon. Evidence of its moral and ethical significance can be found in the Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament (e.g., Leviticus 19:35 ff.) and the code of Hammurabi (e.g., the Oman Tablets), both of which prohibit the use of false weights, lying and other forms of dishonesty in business dealings. The contemporary significance ...