If we inquire more broadly as to what might cause the rise in corrupt behaviour in Western states, one inescapable consideration must be that it results from a more general collapse of moral understanding. At its simplest level, the mistake consists in taking one's bearings from nothing more sophisticated than a belief about what other people generally do. A standard instruction to those issuing exhortations or warnings to the public in general is that no message should take the form of saying, "Too many people just throw their litter away, or try to take a train journey without a ticket. It's a serious problem." The result of such remarks as these is likely to be that many will take such supposedly common practices as a licence for doing the same.

More generally, the collapse of many conventions about sexual life during the liberations of the 20th century has often been generalised to the belief that all moral judgments are merely matters of taste or "values". But no one has the slightest doubt about such things as professional responsibility. Nor do we have any doubt that most crimes are also very seriously wrong. Nonetheless, this generalisation from the more relaxed social conventions of our time has created pseudo-moral doctrines such as disapproval of a vice called "judgmentalism". And it is an important part of this broad spread of moral incompetence that pragmatism has taken such a hold of public policy that the state often controls people by paying them to do what is in one way or another their duty. Obese people, or those who might have sexually transmitted diseases, or young people who ought to be staying on at school can be and some have been induced to do the right thing by the offer of benefits. As the social workers sometimes put it: "Well, it's effective. It gets results." Or as Woody Allen expounded a version of this doctrine in a recent film, the principle is simply "whatever works". Yet to pay people to do what they ought anyway to do is to corrupt them. It suggests that one ought to be provided with incentives to do the right thing.   

The most comprehensive triumph of this collapse of any understanding of the moral life can be found in the medicalisation of fault. A public figure recently caught stealing goods from a supermarket succeeded in turning this event into a kind of publicity triumph by apologising, and proclaiming, "I need help." But reality was already way ahead of him, in the form of a charity called Crisis Counselling for Shoplifters. The very term "shoplifting" is a morally evasive euphemism for stealing. In our public rhetoric, there are very few bad acts that cannot pass for forms of addiction, and perhaps we should not be holding our breath for the moment when child abuse makes the same claim. Corruption is thus flourishing amid a kind of dottiness in Britain that threatens to turn us all into components of the rehabilitation industry.