Running head: CORRUPTION IN PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES 1

Corruption in Professional Activities, an Analysis from Latin-American Actual Situation

Daniel Proaño-Guevara

Universidad Politécnica Salesiana

Ingeniería Electrónica

2018
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Abstract

In this manuscript is presented a brief concept of corruption, this is a major problem in Latin

America, and in the last days, some scandalous cases have been revealed. Is also presented de

concept of profession and professional and how they could corrupt and be corrupted, the possible

cause is presented to be Akrasia, as a lack of self-moral control, loosing one’s authenticity and is

presented some solutions to this major problem.

Keywords: Corruption, Akrasia, Professional

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Corruption in Professional Activities, an Analysis from Latin-American Actual Situation

As is well known, Latin America is unfortunately famous for its corruption, and this sphere

of corruption affects the professional practicing. One of the recent cases of corruption in high

government spheres is the one caused by Odebrecht, where almost all the countries accepted bribes,

so this company could make all the public bidding works (Menéndez Quevedo, n.d.).

But first the concept of corruption must be defined.

Corruption

“The corruption consists in the limited violation of an obligation from one or more of the

decision actors with the aim to gain a personal benefit” (Salcedo Megales, 2012).

This makes us talk about the actors and the decisions they could take under their

capabilities. First of anything, the potential corrupt, are those people due their position in a

determined ruled system, have a special power to achieve or not with the obligations that this

entails. Unfortunately, the recognition of a corrupt act is only considered under a juridical aspect,

ignoring completely the ethics and moral under this concept. This means that, nowadays, someone

could find an error, or an argumentative hole in the laws and take advantage of it (Manzetti &

Blake, 1996). In the order that new normative systems that rules social practices, in all of them

corruption could be find. But we should notice that every time we talk about corruption, our speech

gets full of moral expressions, this should mean that intrinsically, the corruption is not only a

normative affair, but a moral one. Considering only from a juridical aspect, when the corruption

is judged, we should only attain to the facts, but for the corruption to be a fact, is necessary an

intrasystemic damage. This damage could only be recognized when the system is legitime. In
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other words, the corruption is always illegal, but is only immoral if the system affected is legitime

from an ethical point of view (Salcedo Megales, 2012).

Professional Corruption

Now talking about the professional corruption, there is a high probability that the professionals

will become corrupt and corrupt the institutions of which they are part because the only reason that

they are human. This concept will be expanded further in this work. Getting back to the theme,

the professions are institutions by themselves that have authority for producing a specific social

good. The profession is an access structure from a benefit, what the profession asks to the society

is to get the exclusive authority about the production ways and objectives about that product. In

exchange the society asks to the professional institution to ensures that they could have the

confidence that the mentioned authority will be exerted without causing perjuries (Salcedo

Megales, 2012).

Unfortunately, in the world aren’t any guides of how a professional can be a good

professional in the respective areas, there are behavior normative, recommendations and so on, but

the final decision about any conflict should be taken only under the personal professional criteria.

This may lead to misunderstanding about the way a professional is working and judge it as a bad

action. So, the professional negligence is judged when the professional doesn’t act according to

the desired professional criteria. Therefore, the professional should find a balance in between what

is expected from he or she to be done and what he or she believes it’s the correct manner to do

something. At the end, we can conclude that the corruption is primarily a moral phenomenon, and

the corrupt professional is not only someone who doesn’t follow the rules looking for personal

benefit but is someone who perverts and degrades the foundational professional values and harms
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an ethically legitim institution (Gabbioneta, Prakash, & Greenwood, 2014; Salcedo Megales,

2012).

Akrasia

Now we should ask, why does people act this way even knowing what’s good and bad?

The reason must be that we are told, or maybe we just aren’t told, to live in Akrasia. Akrasia is a

concept introduced by Aristotle that says that one may know how to do good, but this doesn’t mean

that he or she is going to do the good. This may mean that someone, before doing a bad action,

could know that what it’s going to do is really a bad thing, but motivated by his or her passions or

looking for personal benefit could just ignore this, do what’s wrong and then feeling bad about

doing that. This means mainly that the mentioned person is not authentic; this can be caused by

the society itself, the medium in which he or she is raised, like here, in Latin America, where when

someone tries to do some good that can fall in the societies moral gray zone, the society harass

that person and forces him or her to act as everybody in the society, even if it’s not correct or

ethical. The only way for someone to overcome Akrasia is to be taught to maintain the personal

believes and overcome social pressure, based in well-founded principles and values, recognizing

the personal ethic and sometimes forcing oneself to act correctly, finding the reward in a higher

spiritual level (Amukowa & Gunga, 2010).

The only way to correct these problems is changing the educational system, that

unfortunately, has been almost the same for various centuries (Heyneman, 2004). If we, as society,

want to overcome this huge problem, we should teach with the personal behavior, not only during

class, but in every action in the life; in the classroom, at any educational level, the students should

acknowledge the moral dilemmas presented in every situation, and more than only teaching what

should be done, encourage the students to represent this behavior in everyday situations, so they
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can gain “moral strength”, get used to act ethically and finally overcome Akrasia (Amukowa &

Gunga, 2010).

As final words, I can tell that the only way to avoid professional corruption in our countries,

is changing the education model, from one who sees ethics and moral as a subject of study, to

someone who lives the ethics and encourages everybody to do so. Unfortunately, in our countries

the corruption is an endemic problem, and almost everyone finds some kinds of corruption as

acceptable, or at least necessary for personal success. The society is corrupted to their bones, so

the only way to correct this problem, is with strict educational models based in following the

teachers example. Some control systems might be a good aid to the solution, but as themselves,

may become part of the problem.

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Heyneman, S. P. (2004). Education and corruption. International Journal of Educational

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