The British paradigm for respecting duties to oneself has long been sport, which was indeed self-consciously used by Victorian headmasters to encourage something called "character" in the conduct of their charges. By contrast with the serious business of life, sport might well seem to be the kind of frivolous pastime that would not tempt the players to cheat or lie. Nothing important hangs on who wins, it might seem, however passionate some players might become. The ideal lay in the playing, not in the winning, and this respect for the rules of the game was to be carried over into all areas of life. And so indeed it often was, in those innocent days before people knew that they had rights. The appearance of large financial stakes has, of course, significantly changed that.  

The standard motive given for corruption these days is often said to be greed, possibly because declaring it to be such a vice gives a certain moral cachet to the speaker in question. It also picks up the idea that our whole capitalist system is based on this particular vice. But moral clichés ought to be avoided, and in the case of some corruptions, vices are certainly not the whole story. When teachers go (and pay to go) to conferences on the examining system given by the examiners, motives of interests will no doubt be present on both sides. Schools depend on meeting examination result targets, and exam boards compete for schools to use them. But one clear motive of many people involved is almost the opposite of greed. It is something like decency, compassion, niceness — the desire to help one's students. The same motive is likely to play some part in the remarkable explosion of students — up to one in three — graduating with first-class honours degrees. Most of these events are not corrupt according to the economic criteria discussed by Ian Senior in his brilliant IEA pamphlet on this problem — Corruption, the World's Big C: Cases, Causes, Consequences, Cures — but they are certainly corrupt in the moral sense that concerns me. 

The point may be put in this way: there is a generally understood ideal structure specifying how to engage in most activities in a modern society, from playing a game to a business transaction. Everybody knows that lying about the score, harassing the referee, pretending injury and various other tricks of the professional sporting trade, for example, are not "playing the game". Every public official with a duty to perform knows that he ought not to demand a bribe before doing it. These ideal specifications of how an activity ought to be conducted most plausibly take the form of a schedule of duties. That is the reason we must invoke the concept of duty in explaining the rise of corruption. The concept of a right, as I keep on emphasising, is no help — indeed, sometimes it is mischievous. Having a right can be used to justify the claim to a bribe by a complaint about the low level of wages paid to whoever demands the bribe. Or it may be invoked as support for the claim that the corrupt practice is merely part of some recognised system in the culture. It is only the concept of duty that clarifies the dishonesty involved in corrupt conduct.