Bribery is a controversial but ultimately illicitly demonized practice. I've explained why bribery itself, as a method, is not sinful unless one uses it to bring about an immoral outcome [1]. There are specific business-based objections to bribery that I want to dismantle (one of which I addressed in the footnoted post, but I included it anyway).
The first objection is based upon the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: it is the charge that bribery causes poverty and/or is correlated with corruption in developing countries. One must first of all remember that a correlation between two or more things in no way necessitates a causal connection between them. One can use logic to discover, even prior to examination of business history or contemporary politics, that there is no necessary connection between bribery and poverty or corruption. Bribery and material flourishing can coexist, and since a corrupt thing is something that is evil, bribery cannot by necessity lead to corruption, since one can make a bribe to bring about something that is not unethical.
To argue otherwise a person must merely assume that bribery is itself an evil, yet there is no way to do so apart from logical fallacies and mere assertions. Preferences, social norms, emotions, and consensus do not demonstrate that something is wrong, and no one can argue that bribery is intrinsically immoral apart from these fallacious grounds. It is also worth noting that poverty can be a result of other factors besides just political/social corruption, like scarcity of resources or mishandling of money. The position I am articulating certainly does not, for instance, deny the evils of withholding basic necessities until bribes are given, to be sure. It is just that bribery does not inherently lead to either poverty or corruption.
There is also the claim that bribery advantages some firms over others and thus is unethical for this reason. Yes, a bribe could enable a larger, more established company to secure work that a smaller organization will be excluded from. However, all business decisions exclude some party by the very nature of what business decisions are, and it does not follow just from a bribe disadvantaging a firm without plentiful resources that it is intrinsically evil.
If a company used bribes (either the giving or receiving of them) in order to maliciously destroy another corporation, the company would, in operating out of malice, be using bribery with morally illicit motives. But simply using a submission of money to guarantee a contract, or a job, or a partnership of some sort is not a malicious activity and does not violate any actual moral obligation.
Yet another possible objection to bribery is that viewing bribes as legitimate might diminish the drive to make quality products, since a firm could simply rely on monetary persuasion instead of product quality to determine contracts. This objection could be paired with the previously addressed one about bribery giving more power to larger organizations that can expend resources more easily, since, if a firm has a vast amount of monetary resources to use in its business endeavors, it is possible that it might sacrifice the quality or safety of its products.
First of all, bribery not being inherently wrong does not mean that a company will use the amorality of bribery as a method as an excuse to create products that are unsafe, easily breakable, or otherwise of a poor quality. Second of all, bribery being morally neutral on its own does not mean that those who use bribery to conceal dangerous products or product misinformation should not be held accountable. Unjust harm and intentional marketing deception are wrong, but this does not mean that bribery causes these things or that companies that use legitimate bribery will at some point engage in them.
There are no logically or Biblically sound objections to bribery in itself. Unfortunately, bribery is just one of several things that might be demonized without basis by Christians and even non-Christians who don't know how to correctly reason.
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/02/understanding-bribery.html
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