The interesting question thus becomes: why have the British so far been among the less corrupt peoples of the world, and what has changed to make us worse? One important factor has been that we so commonly endow individuals with an expanding set of rights. A right is a rule that sustains some kind of demand, and although international declarations and local judges define what rights are, demands for new rights are increasing. When members of the House of Commons were criticised for claiming absurd expenses, they all came up with the same chorus: "We didn't break any rules." In some cases they did not, indeed, but many clearly lacked moral integrity, and it is integrity we need to consider. 

What is it that makes people behave with integrity? At the most accessible level, it is the attitude taken when people say "I'm too proud to beg" or "I'm too proud to take a bribe". Underlying these utterances about one's own identity will be found a morality of honour. The great achievements of our civilisation often result from failure, and the interesting failure in this case was that Europeans never managed to agree on a single system of rightness. Even agreeing that we ought to do the right thing, of course, opens up endless disputes about what this might be. But in the European monarchies classically described by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), the individualist criterion of honour was also recognised as a distinct element of the moral life. The famous case cited by Montesquieu was the St Bartholemew's Day massacre: a clash between doing the right thing (in this case obeying the king of France) on the one hand, and the dishonour that would be involved in obeying Charles IX's order to kill Huguenots on the other. 

Honour began, no doubt, as a claim to superiority by those who fancied themselves superior, but in modern times, versions of it (such as conscience, pride and integrity) have become part of the ordinary equipment of many Europeans. And it depends not on status, as in the so-called "honour killings" in some Asian cultures, but on identity. Doing the right thing may thus come into conflict with doing the honourable thing: it is a matter of identity or, to express this point most precisely, honour is the recognition of one's duty to oneself. And it is in the morality of acting in terms of duties to oneself that Western life has, at least until recent times, been distinguished from other cultures.