Cash for vasectomy....

[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.