The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act should be repealed and American companies should be allowed to compete on equal footing with their foreign competitors. No other country, even if it technically has an FCPA-like law on the books, actually enforces it to the extent the US does. It means that everyone is free to openly participate in bribery to win foreign markets, markets where bribery is just how business is done, while American companies have their hands tied behind their backs. This has overall been a major hamper on American competitiveness while being a huge boon to middle-men and white collar criminal defense lawyers who specialize in working around the laws and defending against prosecutions.
It's not about our laws, it's about their laws. Whether bribery is legal or otherwise tolerated seems to be a question properly for the country whose officials are being bribed. It may be hard to imagine, but this is just how it works in some countries. They don't pay their public officials enough, and everyone expects that they pad their inadequate official salaries with corruption. I certainly wouldn't want my country to be run that way, but it's just how some societies work.
Yes, the bribery is technically illegal in most of those countries, but thinking that is is of primary importance is mistaking western legalism for a universal ethos. In many other places, the technical requirements of the law are much less important. The real law in all cases is what is actually practiced, which in these societies can be quite different from what's on the books.
> mistaking western legalism for a universal ethos.
If our laws aren't reflecting a "universal ethos," then it seems to me we need to change our own laws. If, on the other hand, our laws are tuned to reflect our judgment that bribery is universally ethically and economically problematic for a multitude of defensible reasons (regardless of whether it's a common practice elsewhere), then perhaps we are doing the right thing.
Sometimes theory and practice come into conflict. Persuading others to adopt our policies, which we believe to be grounded in universally applicable ethics, through economic pressure is the best thing we know how to do that doesn't involve going to war.
Sounds right to me. In fact that’s one of the main reasons why we have different nations and borders in the first place. We should not assume our WEIRD values are universal.
> In fact that’s one of the main reasons why we have different nations and borders in the first place.
I'm not so sure about that. We have different cultures, to be sure, and certainly different governments to which we pledge allegiance, each with limited reach. But the modern concept of statehood and universally-recognized, clearly-delineated borders is a relatively new phenomenon, dating only back to the 20th century. Borders and distinctions between territories before then were rather blurry. See, e.g., http://www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/references/robinson_boundari....
But I don’t think this refutes the notion that ethics and morals are not universal.
Sure, rigid borders are relatively new but I don’t think we should get bogged down in terminology. Maybe I should have said “government” instead of nation and “territory” instead of “borders”.
I think the question is more about whether you have the same ethical framework when dealing with other cultures as when dealing with your own, not whether other cultures tend toward different ethical standards themselves.
Your consistent ethical framework can be to respect the laws (the de facto laws) of the places you operate in. For a whole country, part of any reasonable ethical code is something like not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, which means not exercising legal jurisdiction over actions that take place in other countries and don't really concern you.
I am against that. The result could be that US companies would go all in on bribing and make the countries even more corrupt. It would make the US even more hypocritical when they preach ethics to the world.
No, this reeks of putting money over ethics, and would likely increase corruption in the US. IMO, we shouldn't do business with countries via practices we view as corrupt, even if we were following their laws and would mean losing their business.
Yes. It's not our governments job to prosecute foreign bribery. It's the foreign government's job. And if they don't do their job, I don't see how that's my problem.
