PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ETHICAL PERSPECTIVE OF CORRUPTION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32782/psy-visnyk/2022.6.5Keywords:
corruption, moral defect, corrupt behaviour, power, toleranceAbstract
The work reveals the moral aspects of corruption based on the psychological and ethical analysis of historical and modern scientific research. The purpose of the work is to reveal deep psychological anomalies of corrupt behaviour rooted in «human nature», to consider corruption as a moral pathology. Psychological analysis makes it possible to identify specific moral defects that are inherent in a corrupt type of behaviour, because a deeper study of a specific type of moral deformation reveals the hypertrophy of some defects over others. The study of the psychological components of corruption crimes shows that the basis of corrupt acts is primarily a hypertrophied passion for profit and personal gain. It is shown that in corrupt behaviour there is not so much economic expediency as a desire for personal gain, which becomes an irrational passion. And as an irrational passion, this aspiration is capable of completely covering a person, subordinating the whole circle of his life goals and values. The psychological and ethical analysis shows that the specifics of corrupt moral defects include such characteristics as venality, desire for personal gain, benefit, injustice, and selfishness. These moral defects of the personality are characteristic of a considerable number of people, but corruption acts are a specific environment of negative properties, where the above-mentioned defects are legitimized in a certain way. As a result, a negative attitude of people towards the government as a whole is formed at the household level, and an idea of total venality and corruption is formed in the mass consciousness. As a result of unsuccessful attempts to achieve the necessary results or decisions in an honest way, and, conversely, as a result of the effectiveness of corrupt interaction, a significant part of the population gradually develops a stereotype of corruption as an ethically acceptable form of solving problems, the understanding of the social danger of this phenomenon is blurred, the threshold of moral tolerance of the population to bribery is removed. This is the main moral vice of corruption – legitimization, which negatively affects the decline of general social morality.
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