Cash for vasectomy....

[Existentialist]

The difference between a bribe and an incentive is legality.

Not really. I would say a bribe is offered using a lower standard of ethical integrity than an incentive.

[Minimalist]

Bribery is a crime.


Incentives are given at grocery stores.

[Existentialist]

Bribery is not exclusively a crime. In fact, come to think of it, a bribe can also be an incentive. It depends on the context. I would say an unethical cash inducement is definitely a bribe, including paying drug addicts cash sums to induce them to have vasectomies.

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Yes - bribing.

I completely disagree. Society pays women to have children all the time and we don't call that a bribe. What's the difference between paying a drug addict to have a slew of children and paying one to make it so he cannot have children? What about clinics that offer money for sperm? Is that a bribe? Offering cookies for blood? Is that a bribe?

I don't see what the objection is. I wish a shitload of people would do this. As a person who is raising a practically absent mother's child (she has five others, three live with her and their lives are horrifying), I can tell you that this is a good idea. I hope they start doing it for women. That way I don't have to pissed that they let neglectful mothers keep their kids anymore. They just won't have them to begin with.

Personally, I don't want any children of my own. Unfortunately, I'm not a drug addict, so I would have to pay to be sterilized.

Society certainly pays women who have children - if you mean child benefit and tax credits, usually because vast numbers of women and children would live in poverty without those benefits. That's different from paying women to have children. I think a bribe is something that drags down the ethical integrity of an incentive: paying a drug addict to undergo an operation that destroys his/her reproductive capability is pretty shabby and I don't see how genuine consent can be obtained.

It's a bribe.

[Rhizomorph13]

Definitions of bribe on the Web:

•make illegal payments to in exchange for favors or influence; "This judge can be bought"
•payment made to a person in a position of trust to corrupt his judgment
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

•Bribery, a form of pecuniary corruption, is an act implying money or gift given that alters the behavior of the recipient. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribe

•The Bribe (1949) is a American crime film noir directed by Robert Z. Leonard and written by Marguerite Roberts, based on a story written by Frederick Nebel. The drama features Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, and others.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bribe

•The Bribe: variations and extensions on Spillane is an album by American composer and saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist John Zorn, consisting of music created for three half-hour radio plays produced by Mabou Mines theater company in 1986. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bribe_(album)

•Something (usually money) given in exchange for influence or as an inducement to dishonesty; To give a bribe to
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bribe

•bribery - the practice of offering something (usually money) in order to gain an illicit advantage
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

•bribery - the making of illegal payment, or bribes, to persons in official positions as a means of influencing their decisions
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bribery

•offering something such as money or a favour to influence a decision or action of dishonesty.
http://www.sacc.to/glossary/glossary.htm

•A payment made to person, often a government official such as a customs officer, to induce favorable treatment.
www-personal.umich.edu/~alandear/glossary/b.html

•f. far away
http://www.bangkokpost.com/education/lat...fb1599.htm

•The act of paying a secret commission to another individual. It is also used to describe the secret commission itself.
education.qld.gov.au/strategic/eppr/legal/lgspr007/definitions.html

•a payment made to somebody as a bribe ( informal )
encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861724352/payoff.html

•bribery - Involving a company from an industrialized country offering an illicit payment to a developing country's public official with perceived or real influence over contract awards. Bribery may range from gifts to large amounts of money.
wps.pearsoned.co.uk/ema_uk_he_hollensen_globalmark_4/64/16425/4205002.cw/content/index.html

[Existentialist]

Because getting something for making a decision that will be economically advantageous in the near term is bribery.

While we're at it, can we call giving someone money for undertaking an action of their own free will?

Where I come from, that's work. You always have a right not to work (and they always have the right to not pay them).

Bribery is something used to coerce someone into doing a disadvantageous, immoral or illegal action.

This has nothing even close to that.

I think a bribe is simply a financial inducement (or an inducement of some value to the recipient) designed to get them to agree to a course of action that breaks an ethical standard. The ethical standard here is a medical one: that if people undergo operations on their bodies, those operations should be carried out with genuine consent. A financial inducement is a deliberate interference with the principle of genuine consent. It's a bribe.

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Definitions of bribe on the Web:
(...)

and...?

[Minimalist]

And, there is an element of illegality about a "bribe" which is not present in an incentive.

[Existentialist]

A bribe need contain no element of illegality, merely an element of unethical action.

[theVOID]

I fail to see why you refuse to use words as defined and commonly used Existentialist, the reason we give these labels specific definitions is to make communication more coherent, using words in ways in which they are not defined and/or commonly used is to make communication much more ineffective than the norm. This very conversation is evidence of that, due to your refusal to use the word bribery as defined we first have to settle conceptual disharmony before we can discuss the actual issue.

As a bribe is defined specifically as an illegal incentive, bribery is therefore necessarily illegal.

To state otherwise is to engage in several fallacies at once, namely the law of non-contradiction, which is the foundation of such tautologies.

What you should be using as opposed to bribe is "unethical incentive". In doing so I assure you than rather wasting our time discussing the definition of bribery we will be able to actually discuss whether or not this incentive is unethical.

[Shell B]

Society certainly pays women who have children - if you mean child benefit and tax credits, usually because vast numbers of women and children would live in poverty without those benefits. That's different from paying women to have children.

Bullshit. Tell that to the hundreds, if not millions, of women who have child after child just to get that money. They still live in poverty because mommy spends my taxes on going out drinking and getting high with her boyfriend of the week. That's paying them to have children. They should be cut off. You should have to do community service to get that money if you are not disabled.

It's not a bribe.

[Existentialist]

I fail to see why you refuse to use words as defined and commonly used Existentialist, the reason we give these labels specific definitions is to make communication more coherent, using words in ways in which they are not defined and/or commonly used is to make communication much more ineffective than the norm. This very conversation is evidence of that, due to your refusal to use the word bribery as defined we first have to settle conceptual disharmony before we can discuss the actual issue.

As a bribe is defined specifically as an illegal incentive, bribery is therefore necessarily illegal.

To state otherwise is to engage in several fallacies at once, namely the law of non-contradiction, which is the foundation of such tautologies.

What you should be using as opposed to bribe is "unethical incentive". In doing so I assure you than rather wasting our time discussing the definition of bribery we will be able to actually discuss whether or not this incentive is unethical.

Your esoteric meanderings into the law of non-contradiction do not really have a great deal of relevance in this conversation, because I think you will find that the broadest dictionary definition of the word bribe allows for it to be merely a thing designed to lure. I think the word bribe is both defined and commonly used in this manner. There does appear to be a general feeling that this definition is a little broad, even though it is technically correct, since we all know that the word 'bribe' is not generally freely interchanged with the word 'incentive', therefore I am happy to qualify the term by some reference to its being unethical. However I cannot find any dictionary definition that requires the word bribe to be strictly boundaried within the realm of illegality. I accept that some contributors to this thread may choose to restrict themselves to this boundary, but I do not accept your or anyone else's right to so restrict my use of the word bribe to such a boundary.

I feel this is symbolically important for freedom of expression because the issue involves surgery on a human being that would be unlikely to take place if a financial inducement had not been offered.

I am therefore not going to water down my legitimate opinion that a financial inducement designed to encourage a drug addict to agree to have surgery on his reproductive organs can be legitimately described as a "bribe". I think anyone who might seek to prevent such an opinion being expressed would be acting in a most authoritarian and anti-democratic way. By the way, please do not generalise so freely about my refusing to use words "as defined" without submitting a shred of evidence for this allegation.

In my opinion (opinions being a thing that are allowed to be expressed on a forum that values freedom of expression) this financial inducement was a bribe, and a bribe it will remain.