Adopting 'When in Rome' Clause (Action 3) → Rome Clause Policy Enacted (Event 2)
In Case 60-9 we acted upon a domestic case under Rule 4 of the then-prevailing Rules of Professional Conduct, which was the same as the present.
From those principles we then concluded that the practice in Situation 1 was ethically permissible, but those in situation 2 and 3 were unethical.
It is now worth repeating the language used at that time to indicate the basic principles which should govern the question: 'The question of when a gift is intended to or becomes an inducement to influence one's impartial decision...'
NSPE Board of Ethical Review as analogical precedent for the current case
Domestic precedent analyzing three levels of gift-giving (business meals, cash payments of $25–$100, and a $4,000 automobile) under Rule 4 of the then-prevailing Rules of Professional Conduct; established the 'good taste' and 'reasonable men' criteria for distinguishing permissible tokens from improper inducements; applied by analogy to the present foreign-gift scenario
Case 60-9 precedent (1960) before current case analysis (mid-1970s)
Case 60-9 precedent established before adoption of 'When in Rome' clause
CausalLink_Adopting 'When in Rome' Clause
CausalLink_Deciding Whether to Offer Gift
CausalLink_Establishing Domestic Gift Pri
CausalLink_Rescinding 'When in Rome' Clau
CausalLink_Ruling Gifts Universally Prohi
Competitive Necessity No-Choice Defense Invocation
From the point at which the engineer considers complying with the gift demand through the ethics board's rejection of the no-choice defense
the defense to this activity has generally been that the companies making such gifts had 'no choice'
Competitive Necessity No-Choice Rationalization State
Engineer's (and analogous industrial firms') invocation of competitive necessity to justify gift-giving to foreign officials
Ethics board ruling that 'there is a choice — the choice of declining to be drawn into a seamy procedure for self-gain'
The rationale was 'We had no choice. Others were doing it, and if we did not we would not be considered.'
there is a choice — the choice of declining to be drawn into a seamy procedure for self-gain
without such action they would not have been able to secure the contracts because competitors in other countries would have complied with the practice
Engineer's recognition that foreign competitors are expected to comply with gift-giving practice, creating perceived competitive exclusion if engineer refuses
It would unethical for Roe to accept the contract and make the gifts as described.
Beyond the Board's finding that accepting the contract and making gifts would be unethical, the covert structure of the arrangement — where the gift condition is deliberately excluded from the written contract but communicated verbally — constitutes an independent violation of Roe's duty of honesty and transparency under the NSPE Code, separate from and in addition to the corrupt payment prohibition itself. The off-contract, deniable nature of the condition is not merely incidental; it is architecturally designed to obscure the quid pro quo from auditors, regulators, and the public. Roe's participation in this structure, even if he were somehow permitted to make the gifts themselves, would implicate him in a scheme of deliberate concealment that is independently incompatible with the honesty obligations the Code imposes. The Board's analysis focused primarily on the gift-giving act, but the covert conditionality doubles the ethical jeopardy: Roe would be both paying for a contract award and actively participating in hiding that he did so.
The Board's ruling implicitly establishes that the ethical prohibition on gift-giving to foreign officials is not merely a rule about the act of giving but also a rule about the systemic integrity of competitive procurement. By accepting the coercive gift condition — even under threat of poor cooperation and exclusion from future work — Roe would be ratifying a procurement system that structurally disadvantages ethical competitors who decline to participate. This means Roe bears a degree of ethical responsibility not only for his own conduct but for the competitive harm imposed on other firms that refuse to make gifts. His participation, even if rationalized as individually inconsequential given that other firms are already complying, actively sustains the corrupt system rather than merely failing to reform it. The Board's reasoning, while focused on Roe's individual obligations, carries the implicit corollary that each individual engineer's compliance decision has systemic consequences for the integrity of international engineering procurement as a whole.
The Board's conclusion that local custom and foreign legal permissibility do not excuse the gift-giving practice carries an important but unaddressed implication: Roe's voluntary NSPE membership functions as a categorical, non-geographic commitment to the Code's standards. The 'When in Rome' clause was not merely a policy option that the Board happened to reject on policy grounds — its deliberate rescission by the NSPE Board of Directors signals that the clause itself represented a structural error in the Code, one that created an exploitable loophole inconsistent with the Code's universalist foundations. The rescission therefore does not merely change the rule going forward; it clarifies that the ethical standard was always universal, and that the clause had temporarily obscured rather than legitimately modified that standard. Consequently, any engineer who might argue that the pre-rescission clause established a legitimate precedent for cultural accommodation is relying on what the Board has effectively characterized as a corrected mistake rather than a considered policy choice.
The Board's analysis, while correctly rejecting the 'no choice' defense and the peer-competitor justification, does not address what affirmative obligations Roe has beyond simply declining the contract. A fuller reading of the Code's spirit suggests that Roe may have an obligation to report the gift-conditioning practice — at minimum to NSPE and potentially to U.S. regulatory authorities, particularly given the existence of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act framework — rather than treating refusal as a complete discharge of his ethical duties. Passive non-participation in a corrupt procurement system, while necessary, may be insufficient when the engineer possesses specific, actionable knowledge of a systematic practice that harms public welfare, distorts competition, and implicates other engineering firms. The Board's silence on this affirmative reporting dimension leaves open a significant gap in the ethical analysis: declining to participate is the floor of ethical conduct, not necessarily its ceiling.
The domestic analogy implicit in the Board's reasoning — that a U.S. public official conditioning a contract on personal gifts would be unambiguously corrupt regardless of local industry custom — exposes the logical incoherence of the 'foreign country' defense more sharply than the Board explicitly articulates. If the ethical prohibition is grounded in the structural relationship between gift-giving and procurement integrity rather than in any particular jurisdiction's legal rules, then the geographic location of the transaction is ethically irrelevant. The foreign country defense does not identify a morally relevant distinction; it merely identifies a difference in legal enforcement. Since the NSPE Code operates at a higher standard than legal minimums by design, the fact that the foreign country's law permits the practice adds nothing to the ethical analysis. The Board's conclusion is therefore not merely a policy choice to apply the Code extraterritorially — it is the logically necessary consequence of the Code's own internal structure, which grounds the prohibition in the nature of the act rather than in the jurisdiction where it occurs.
The Board's consequentialist concern — that permitting a foreign gift exception would erode the domestic standard through analogical extension — is a legitimate systemic argument, but it should be understood as supplementary to rather than substitutive for the deontological basis of the prohibition. The slippery-slope reasoning correctly identifies a real institutional risk: once the Code acknowledges that geographic context can suspend the gift prohibition, the logical boundary preventing domestic engineers from invoking 'local industry custom' in U.S. markets becomes difficult to defend. However, relying primarily on this systemic erosion argument risks making the prohibition appear contingent on its downstream consequences rather than grounded in the intrinsic wrongness of conditioning contract awards on personal gifts. The stronger and more durable foundation for the Board's conclusion is the deontological one: the act of exchanging gifts for contract awards is inherently incompatible with professional integrity and honest dealing, regardless of whether permitting it would or would not produce downstream erosion. The consequentialist erosion argument should be treated as corroborating evidence for the prohibition, not as its primary justification.
In response to Q101: Routing gifts through a local intermediary or agent would not alter the ethical analysis and would, in fact, compound the violation. The NSPE Code's prohibitions attach to the substance of the corrupt arrangement, not to its structural form. Roe's direct participation in designing or funding an intermediary scheme would constitute knowing association with a corrupt enterprise, which is independently prohibited. The creation of a deniability layer would further implicate the honesty principle, since the deliberate concealment of Roe's role would compound the transparency violation already present in the off-contract, verbally communicated gift condition. The Board's reasoning — that the gift-for-contract arrangement is corrupt regardless of local legality or custom — applies with equal or greater force when the engineer takes affirmative steps to obscure his participation. The constraint against non-association with corrupt gift enterprises is not satisfied by geographic or organizational distance from the transaction.
In response to Q102: The coercive structure of the arrangement — where refusal to give gifts results in threatened poor cooperation on an already-awarded contract and permanent exclusion from future work — does materially change the ethical texture of the situation, though it does not change the ultimate conclusion. A purely voluntary gift-giving custom, offered without threat or consequence for refusal, would still violate the NSPE Code's prohibition on gifts that influence contract awards, but the coercive variant adds an additional dimension: the arrangement functions as an extortionate condition rather than a mere cultural courtesy. This coercive structure actually strengthens the Board's conclusion by demonstrating that the gifts are unambiguously tied to contract award decisions and ongoing business access, eliminating any plausible characterization of the payments as goodwill gestures. However, the coercive nature does not create a duress defense sufficient to excuse compliance, because Roe retains the meaningful choice to decline the contract entirely. The coercion is commercial rather than physical, and the NSPE Code does not recognize competitive disadvantage or business loss as ethical justifications for code violations. The coercive structure does, however, bear on Q103 — it strengthens the case that Roe has affirmative obligations to report the practice rather than simply walk away.
In response to Q103: The Board's ruling addresses only whether Roe may accept the contract and make the gifts; it does not address what affirmative obligations Roe bears after declining. However, the principles underlying the Board's conclusion — professional accountability, honesty, public welfare non-subordination to corrupt procurement, and the preservation of competitive integrity — collectively suggest that simply declining and walking away is ethically insufficient. If Roe has credible knowledge of a systematic practice by which foreign officials condition engineering contracts on personal gifts, and if other U.S. firms are participating, Roe possesses information relevant to U.S. regulatory authorities, to NSPE, and potentially to the foreign country's own oversight mechanisms. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act framework in the United States creates a legal reporting context that reinforces this ethical obligation. Disclosure to NSPE would enable the organization to issue guidance protecting other member engineers from similar coercive arrangements. Disclosure to U.S. authorities could trigger enforcement action that levels the competitive playing field Roe's refusal alone cannot level. The principle of professional accountability, combined with the constraint against public welfare subordination to corrupt procurement, implies that Roe's ethical obligation extends beyond personal non-participation to active disclosure where disclosure is feasible and would serve the public interest.
In response to Q104: Roe bears a real but limited ethical responsibility for the systemic competitive disadvantage his refusal imposes on other ethical firms, and none for the continuation of the corrupt system by less scrupulous competitors. The ethical analysis must distinguish between harms Roe causes and harms Roe fails to prevent. His refusal does not cause other firms to make gifts — those firms make independent choices for which they bear independent responsibility. However, Roe's awareness that his refusal alone will not eliminate the corrupt procurement environment does not diminish his obligation to refuse; it merely underscores that individual ethical compliance is a necessary but not sufficient condition for systemic reform. The Board's framework implicitly acknowledges this limitation by treating the prohibition as deontological rather than consequentialist: Roe's duty to refuse is not contingent on whether his refusal produces systemic change. The residual ethical responsibility Roe does bear — for the competitive disadvantage imposed on other ethical firms — is best discharged through the disclosure and reporting mechanisms identified in response to Q103, which convert individual refusal into a potential catalyst for broader reform rather than a merely symbolic gesture.
In response to Q201: The tension between Diplomatic Ethics Navigation for cross-cultural conflict management and Situational Ethics Rejection in foreign gift-giving contexts is real but resolvable within the Board's framework. The Board's ruling does not prohibit culturally sensitive refusal — it prohibits participation in the gift-for-contract exchange. Roe retains full latitude to decline the arrangement through diplomatic means: expressing respect for local customs while explaining that his firm's professional obligations preclude participation, framing the refusal in terms of his own institutional constraints rather than moral condemnation of the foreign officials, and exploring whether alternative forms of relationship-building that do not condition contract awards on personal gifts are available. The Board's prohibition is targeted at the corrupt exchange itself, not at the cultural navigation surrounding it. A truly honorable engineer in Roe's position would deploy diplomatic skill precisely in service of the ethical refusal — making the refusal as professionally graceful as possible — rather than treating diplomatic sensitivity as a reason to abandon the refusal altogether. The two principles conflict only if diplomatic navigation is understood to require substantive compliance with the corrupt arrangement, which the Board correctly rejects.
In response to Q202: The tension between the principle that the Ethics Code must meet a higher standard than the legal minimum and the principle of NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Applicability, when set against a foreign legal system that explicitly permits the gift-giving practice, does not resolve in favor of foreign legal sovereignty. The Board's position reflects a coherent universalist claim: professional ethics codes derive their authority from the engineering profession's obligations to public welfare and professional integrity, not from the legal systems of particular jurisdictions. A foreign law permitting gift-giving to officials does not constitute a moral endorsement of the practice — it merely reflects that jurisdiction's political and regulatory choices. The NSPE Code's higher-than-legal-minimum standard exists precisely to capture conduct that is legal but professionally impermissible. Recognizing foreign legal sovereignty as a trump card over professional ethics would render the Code's extraterritorial applicability entirely hollow, since virtually any jurisdiction could theoretically legalize the conduct the Code prohibits. The Board correctly treats foreign legal permissibility as one contextual fact among many, not as a dispositive ethical authorization. This does not disrespect foreign sovereignty; it simply affirms that Roe's professional obligations travel with him regardless of where he practices.
In response to Q203: The Board's invocation of the slippery-slope argument — that a foreign gift exception would enable domestic erosion of the prohibition — does introduce a consequentialist policy rationale alongside what is otherwise a deontological prohibition. This creates a genuine analytical tension: if the gift-giving is independently prohibited by the Code's letter and spirit, the slippery-slope argument is redundant; if the slippery-slope argument is necessary to justify the prohibition, it suggests the deontological case is weaker than the Board acknowledges. The most defensible resolution is that the Board's primary justification is deontological — the gifts are corrupt payments that violate the Code regardless of geography — and the slippery-slope argument functions as a secondary, reinforcing consideration that explains why the Board declined to carve out a foreign exception even if one could be theoretically constructed. The rescission of the 'When in Rome' clause supports this reading: the Board of Directors eliminated the clause not merely because of slippery-slope concerns but because the clause itself represented a substantive ethical error in permitting what the Code's core principles prohibit. The dual-obligation to comply with both the Code's spirit and its letter means the deontological prohibition stands independently, and the consequentialist erosion argument adds institutional weight without substituting for it.
In response to Q204: The tension between Service Before Profit and Free and Open Competition, when Roe's refusal effectively removes his firm from a market where gift-giving is universal, is genuine but does not undermine the Board's conclusion. The Free and Open Competition principle is violated by the gift-conditioned procurement system itself — not by Roe's refusal to participate in it. Roe's withdrawal from a corrupt market does not reduce competitive integrity; the corrupt market has already eliminated competitive integrity by conditioning awards on personal gifts rather than merit. The Service Before Profit principle, properly understood, does not require Roe to remain in every market at any ethical cost — it requires that when Roe does compete, he does so on the basis of professional merit rather than corrupt inducements. The apparent conflict dissolves when the analysis recognizes that a procurement system conditioned on personal gifts is not a competitive market in any meaningful sense; it is a patronage system that the Free and Open Competition principle condemns rather than protects. Roe's refusal to participate is therefore consistent with both principles: he declines to serve profit at the expense of professional ethics, and he declines to validate a system that has already destroyed the open competition the Code seeks to preserve.
In response to Q301: From a deontological perspective, Roe does have an absolute duty to refuse the gift-conditioned arrangement, and voluntary NSPE membership creates a categorical obligation that cannot be suspended by geographic context. The deontological case rests on two independent grounds. First, the gifts function as corrupt payments that instrumentalize public officials and undermine the integrity of the procurement process — a wrong that is wrong regardless of its legal status in any jurisdiction, because the wrongness derives from the nature of the act rather than its legal classification. Second, Roe's voluntary membership in NSPE constitutes a self-imposed categorical commitment to the Code's standards. A categorical commitment that dissolves when geographically inconvenient is not a categorical commitment at all — it is a conditional preference. The Kantian universalizability test reinforces this: if every engineer accepted the maxim 'I will make corrupt payments when local law permits and competitors do likewise,' the professional engineering enterprise — which depends on public trust in engineers' integrity — would be systematically undermined. The deontological prohibition is therefore not merely a rule Roe has agreed to follow; it reflects a duty grounded in the nature of professional engineering practice itself.
In response to Q302: From a consequentialist perspective, Roe's refusal to participate in the gift-conditioned contract does not produce a clearly superior outcome for public welfare when evaluated in isolation — his refusal shifts the contract to a less scrupulous competitor without eliminating the corrupt system. However, this consequentialist objection is weaker than it initially appears for three reasons. First, the consequentialist calculation must include the long-term systemic effects of normalized professional complicity: if all engineers in Roe's position rationalized participation on competitive-necessity grounds, the corrupt procurement system would be permanently entrenched and insulated from reform pressure. Second, the consequentialist analysis must account for the reputational and institutional harms to the engineering profession from systematic code violations, which erode public trust in ways that aggregate into significant welfare losses. Third, and most importantly, the consequentialist case for refusal is substantially strengthened when refusal is coupled with disclosure and reporting, as addressed in Q103 — at that point, Roe's individual refusal becomes part of a potentially system-changing intervention rather than a merely symbolic gesture. The Board's deontological framing is therefore not only independently justified but also consequentially defensible when the full scope of effects — including systemic, reputational, and reform-catalyzing effects — is properly accounted for.
In response to Q303: From a virtue ethics perspective, Roe's willingness to entertain the rationalizations offered — local custom, legal permissibility, competitive necessity, and peer firm conduct — does reveal a deficiency in the virtues of professional integrity and moral courage, even if Roe has not yet acted on those rationalizations. The virtue ethics analysis focuses not only on what Roe does but on the quality of his practical reasoning and the character dispositions it reflects. An engineer of fully formed professional virtue would not experience the rationalizations as genuinely tempting alternatives requiring extended deliberation — he would recognize them immediately as the standard repertoire of excuses that corrupt arrangements always generate. The fact that Roe is weighing these rationalizations seriously enough to seek ethical guidance suggests that his commitment to professional integrity is contingent on the absence of significant business pressure rather than robustly internalized. This is not a condemnation of Roe — seeking ethical guidance is itself a virtue-consistent act — but it does suggest that the virtue ethics analysis supports not only the conclusion that Roe must refuse, but also the prescriptive recommendation that Roe cultivate a more settled disposition of professional integrity that renders such rationalizations less persuasive in future situations.
In response to Q304: The covert, off-contract nature of the gift condition — communicated verbally but deliberately excluded from the written contract — does constitute an independent violation of Roe's duty of honesty and transparency, separate from and in addition to the gift prohibition itself. The deliberate exclusion of the gift condition from the written contract is not an incidental omission; it is a structural feature of the arrangement designed to create legal deniability while preserving the operative coercive force of the condition. For Roe to accept a contract whose written terms deliberately misrepresent the actual terms of the business relationship — omitting the gift condition that both parties understand to be operative — would require Roe to be party to a document that is materially misleading about the nature of the engagement. This implicates the honesty principle independently of the gift prohibition: an engineer who signs a contract knowing that its written terms omit a material condition of the relationship is participating in a form of institutional deception. The arrangement is therefore doubly impermissible: it violates the prohibition on corrupt payments, and it requires Roe to participate in a deliberately opaque contractual structure that violates his duty of transparency. This dual impermissibility reinforces the Board's conclusion and suggests that even if the gift prohibition were somehow inapplicable, the transparency violation would independently preclude Roe's participation.
In response to Q401: If the 'When in Rome' clause had not been rescinded, Roe's gift-giving might have been technically permissible under the prior code, but the Board's deliberate rescission of that clause does retroactively clarify that the clause itself represented an ethical error rather than a legitimate cultural accommodation. The rescission was not a neutral policy update — it was a substantive ethical correction prompted by the recognition that the clause created a loophole inconsistent with the Code's core principles. The Board of Directors' decision to eliminate the clause reflects a judgment that the clause had been wrong from its inception, not merely that circumstances had changed. This retroactive clarification has important implications: it means that engineers who relied on the clause during its operative period were acting under a defective code provision, and that the ethical standard the clause purported to create was never genuinely valid under the Code's underlying principles. The rescission therefore functions as an authoritative interpretation of what the Code always required, rather than as a prospective change in the standard. This reading is consistent with the Board's treatment of the gift prohibition as grounded in principles — honesty, competitive integrity, professional honor — that were present in the Code throughout the clause's existence.
In response to Q402: If Roe had accepted the contract but refused to make the gifts — accepting the threatened consequences of poor cooperation and no further work — this course of action would have substantially satisfied his ethical obligations while allowing his firm to perform the contracted engineering work. The Board's ruling addresses the combined act of accepting the contract and making the gifts; it does not rule that accepting a contract in a country with corrupt procurement practices is itself impermissible. Performing the contracted engineering work competently and honestly, while refusing to participate in the gift-conditioning system, would be consistent with the Code's requirements. The threatened consequences — poor cooperation and exclusion from future contracts — are business risks Roe would bear, not ethical violations he would commit. This course of action would also have the virtue of demonstrating that professional engineering services can be delivered with integrity even in corrupt procurement environments, potentially creating a reputational foundation for reform. The Board would likely have viewed this as not only acceptable but as the paradigmatic example of professional courage: accepting the business consequences of ethical compliance rather than compromising professional standards to avoid them.
In response to Q403: The domestic analogy — a U.S. government official conditioning a public engineering contract on personal gifts, invoking local industry custom and competitor conduct as justification — produces an identical ethical analysis, and this equivalence does expose the 'foreign country' defense as logically incoherent rather than a genuine cultural distinction. In the domestic context, no reasonable analyst would accept local industry custom or competitor conduct as ethical justifications for gift-giving to public officials; these are recognized as the standard rationalizations of corrupt procurement. The foreign country defense asks the Board to treat geographically identical conduct as ethically distinct solely because it occurs outside U.S. borders — a distinction that has no principled basis in the Code's underlying values of honesty, competitive integrity, and public welfare. The domestic analogy also reveals that the 'legal in that country' defense is similarly incoherent: if a U.S. state were to legalize gifts to public officials for contract awards, no one would argue that such legalization made the practice ethically permissible for NSPE members. The Board's extraterritorial application of the Code is therefore not an imperialistic imposition of U.S. norms on foreign cultures — it is the consistent application of professional principles that the domestic analogy demonstrates are not culturally contingent at all.
In response to Q404: If Roe had disclosed the gift-conditioning arrangement publicly — to his firm's board, to NSPE, or to U.S. regulatory authorities — before deciding whether to proceed, such transparency would have materially altered the ethical calculus in Roe's favor, though it would not have made participation in the gift-giving ethically permissible. Proactive disclosure would have demonstrated good faith, activated institutional mechanisms for guidance and enforcement, and potentially created a record that could catalyze industry-wide reform. Disclosure to NSPE would have enabled the organization to issue guidance protecting other member engineers from similar coercive arrangements and to engage diplomatically with the foreign procurement system. Disclosure to U.S. regulatory authorities — particularly given the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act framework — could have triggered enforcement action that addressed the systemic problem rather than leaving it to individual engineers to resist in isolation. Disclosure to Roe's own firm's board would have ensured that the decision not to participate was made transparently and with full institutional accountability rather than as a unilateral judgment. Proactive disclosure would not have converted gift-giving into an ethical act, but it would have transformed Roe's individual ethical dilemma into a potential vehicle for systemic reform — which is the most constructive response available to an engineer who encounters a corrupt procurement system he cannot unilaterally dismantle.
The Board resolved the tension between Diplomatic Ethics Navigation and Situational Ethics Rejection by treating cultural sensitivity as a matter of manner, not of substance. While an engineer may decline gifts diplomatically — acknowledging local custom without condemning it publicly — the prohibition on actually making the gifts admits no culturally sensitive exception. The resolution establishes a clear hierarchy: the universal deontological rule against corrupt payments is lexically prior to any cross-cultural accommodation principle. Cultural context may inform how Roe communicates his refusal, but it cannot alter whether he must refuse. This means Diplomatic Ethics Navigation operates only at the level of interpersonal conduct and communication, never at the level of substantive ethical compliance, and the two principles are not genuinely in tension once their respective domains are properly distinguished.
The case reveals that the principle that the Ethics Code must meet a higher standard than the legal minimum decisively overrides the principle of NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Applicability's implicit challenge — namely, the argument that a foreign sovereign's permissive law should constrain the Code's reach. The Board's resolution treats the foreign country's legal permissibility of gift-giving not as a competing normative authority but as simply irrelevant: legality establishes a floor, not a ceiling, for professional conduct. This prioritization carries a universalist implication that is worth making explicit: the NSPE Code does not merely supplement domestic U.S. law but asserts an independent normative standard that travels with the engineer regardless of jurisdiction. The sovereignty of a foreign legal system is acknowledged as a factual matter — the gifts are indeed legal there — but sovereignty over law does not translate into sovereignty over professional ethics, which the engineer carries as a personal obligation arising from voluntary NSPE membership rather than from territorial jurisdiction.
The most significant unresolved principle tension in the case is between the Foreign Gift Exception Would Enable Domestic Erosion rationale and the Ethics Code Spirit and Literal Compliance as a Dual Obligation. The Board invokes a consequentialist slippery-slope argument — permitting a foreign exception would chip away at the domestic standard — to reinforce what it presents as a deontological prohibition. This creates a structural ambiguity: if the Code's letter and spirit independently prohibit the gift-giving, the slippery-slope argument is redundant and its inclusion suggests the Board was not fully confident that the deontological case alone was airtight. Conversely, if the slippery-slope argument is doing independent normative work, the prohibition is partly consequentialist in character, which undermines the Board's framing of it as an absolute rule. The case thus teaches that when a Board supplements a deontological rule with a systemic policy rationale, it implicitly concedes that the rule's force may be context-sensitive — a concession that, left unaddressed, creates interpretive instability for future cases involving genuinely novel foreign contexts where the domestic erosion risk is minimal or speculative.
The tension between Service Before Profit and Free and Open Competition is resolved by the Board in a way that treats competitive market integrity as a systemic value rather than an individual engineer's entitlement. The Board acknowledges that Roe faces genuine competitive disadvantage by refusing gifts, but rejects the inference that this disadvantage justifies participation. The implicit reasoning is that Free and Open Competition is violated by the gift-conditioned procurement system itself, not by Roe's refusal to participate in it. Roe's compliance with the prohibition does not reduce competitive integrity — the corrupt system has already eliminated it. This resolution teaches that Service Before Profit and Free and Open Competition are not in genuine conflict here because both principles point in the same direction: they jointly condemn the procurement arrangement rather than pulling Roe toward opposite courses of action. The apparent tension dissolves once it is recognized that participating in a corrupt system does not restore competition; it merely makes Roe complicit in its perpetuation.
The covert, off-contract structure of the gift condition introduces a second and independent principle violation that the Board identifies but does not fully develop as a separate ground for its ruling. The Honesty Principle Invoked Against Covert Gift-for-Contract Exchange and the Contract Award Conditionality Non-Acquiescence principle together establish that Roe's ethical problem is not only that gifts are prohibited but that the entire arrangement is structured to evade transparency — the condition is communicated verbally and deliberately excluded from the written contract. This covert structure means that even if the gift prohibition were somehow inapplicable, Roe would still face an independent obligation violation: participating in an arrangement designed to obscure its own terms is inconsistent with the engineer's duty of honesty and openness. The case thus teaches that principle synthesis can reveal layered violations, where a single course of conduct offends multiple independent principles simultaneously, and that the Board's ruling would have been equally warranted on honesty grounds alone even if the corrupt payment prohibition had been ambiguous.
Contract Award Conditionality Non-Acquiescence Invoked Against Off-Contract Gift Condition
Foreign Government Official Conditioning Contract on Gifts
Richard Roe International Government Consulting Engineer
Corrupt Payment Prohibition in Professional Engagement Procurement
The fact that the gift condition is deliberately excluded from the written contract does not reduce Roe's ethical obligation to refuse it; an implicit, off-contract condition requiring gifts is ethically equivalent to a formal contractual bribery requirement
The structural design of the condition — kept off the contract to maintain deniability — does not diminish its ethical character; Roe must treat the informal condition as ethically equivalent to a formal corrupt payment demand
NSPE Ethics Committee Reviewing Engineer
Contract Award Conditionality Non-Acquiescence Principle
Roe is further advised that while the condition is not to be included in the contract, his failure to make the gifts will result in no further work being awarded to the firm and to expect poor cooperation in performing the first contract.
The off-contract nature of the condition is treated as ethically irrelevant; the prohibition applies to the substance of the demand, not its formal presentation
while the condition is not to be included in the contract, his failure to make the gifts will result in no further work being awarded to the firm and to expect poor cooperation in performing the first contract
Corrupt Payment Prohibition Invoked Against Roe Gift-Giving
US Engineering Firm Seeking Foreign Government Contract
Local Custom Non-Excuse for Professional Ethics Violation Principle
NSPE Membership Ethics Obligation Extraterritorial Applicability Principle
Richard Roe's engineering firm is prohibited from offering personal gifts to foreign government officials as a condition of obtaining or retaining the engineering contract, regardless of the legality of such gifts under foreign law
The prohibition on corrupt payments applies to gifts offered to foreign officials to secure contract awards, not merely to cash payments or kickbacks in domestic contexts; the principle's scope extends to any in-kind benefit designed to influence contract award decisions
Roe is advised by a high-ranking government official of that country that it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts to the governmental officials who are authorized to award the contracts, and that such practice is legal in that country.
The prohibition is absolute with respect to the type of conduct; no balancing against business expediency or local custom is permitted — the principle is not subject to contextual override
it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts to the governmental officials who are authorized to award the contracts
Should Roe offer personal gifts to the foreign government officials as a condition of securing the engineering contract, given that the practice is legal and customary locally but prohibited by the NSPE Code of Ethics?
Roe's firm is negotiating an engineering contract with a foreign government. The foreign officials authorized to award the contract expect personal gifts as a prerequisite for contract award. This practice is legal under local law, customary in the host country, and followed by competing engineering firms. The gift condition is deliberately excluded from the written contract, making it an implicit off-contract arrangement. Roe must decide whether to offer the gifts and accept the contract under these conditions.
Provide the expected personal gifts to the foreign government officials, treating the practice as a legitimate local custom and competitive necessity, and proceed to execute the engineering contract under the implicit gift condition.
Refuse to offer personal gifts to the foreign officials, decline to participate in the corrupt procurement arrangement, and withdraw from the contract competition even at the cost of losing the business opportunity.
Arrange for the gifts to be made indirectly through a local agent or intermediary rather than offering them directly, attempting to create a layer of deniability while still satisfying the implicit gift condition.
Roe (International Engineering Firm Principal)
Does the covert off-contract structure of the gift condition, or the coercive threat of professional exclusion for non-compliance, alter Roe's ethical obligation to refuse participation in the corrupt procurement arrangement?
Roe is aware that the gift condition is deliberately excluded from the written contract — the arrangement is structured so that the corrupt payment obligation exists entirely off-contract, creating a facade of contractual legitimacy while concealing the true basis for contract award. Roe must decide whether the covert, off-contract nature of the arrangement changes his ethical obligations, and whether the coercive dimension — where refusal to give gifts results in poor cooperation on already-awarded work and exclusion from future contracts — provides any ethical justification for acquiescence.
Treat the coercive structure — threatened poor cooperation and future exclusion — as a form of professional compulsion that mitigates ethical responsibility, and proceed with the gift-giving on the grounds that no genuine choice exists.
Recognize that the deliberate exclusion of the gift condition from the written contract heightens rather than reduces the ethical violation by reflecting intentional concealment of corrupt conduct, and refuse to participate regardless of the coercive consequences.
Pause the procurement process and seek formal guidance from the NSPE Board of Ethical Review or legal counsel before making any decision about the gift condition, using the consultation process to establish a documented record of good-faith ethical inquiry.
May Roe ethically justify offering gifts to foreign government officials on the grounds that the practice is legally permitted under local law and universally followed by competing engineering firms in the foreign market?
Roe is considering whether the fact that the gift-giving practice is legally permissible under the foreign country's law, and that competing engineering firms from other countries routinely comply with the practice, provides sufficient ethical justification for his firm to do the same. Roe must assess whether host-country legal permissibility or competitive normalization of the practice among peers constitutes a valid defense under the NSPE Code of Ethics.
Treat the combination of foreign legal permissibility and universal competitor compliance as sufficient ethical justification for offering the gifts, reasoning that the NSPE Code cannot reasonably require conduct that places the firm at a decisive competitive disadvantage in a legally permissible foreign market.
Recognize that neither the legality of the practice under foreign law nor its prevalence among competing firms transforms it into ethically permissible conduct under the NSPE Code, and apply the same ethical standard that would govern domestic procurement regardless of the competitive cost.
Apply the reasonable-men contextual threshold test from Case 60-9 to evaluate whether the gifts constitute prohibited inducements, assessing their size relative to circumstances and their direct connection to contract award, before reaching a conclusion about ethical permissibility.
Should the NSPE Board of Directors retain the 'When in Rome' foreign-practice exception to core ethics prohibitions, or rescind it to prevent the erosion of domestic ethical standards through precedential slippage?
The NSPE Board of Directors adopted a 'When in Rome' clause in July 1966 to permit submission of tenders for work in foreign countries when required by local laws, regulations, or practices. This clause institutionally codified a geographic exception to the competitive bidding prohibition. The NSPE Board must decide whether to retain or rescind this clause, weighing the practical accommodation of foreign business realities against the systemic risk that any foreign-practice exception will erode the domestic ethical standard through analogical extension.
Keep the foreign-practice exception in place, treating it as a narrowly scoped pragmatic accommodation of genuine international business realities that does not create meaningful precedential pressure on domestic standards because the foreign context is sufficiently distinct.
Eliminate the foreign-practice exception entirely, recognizing that any geographic carve-out to a core ethics prohibition creates a slippery slope toward domestic erosion by establishing the precedent that local or area practice can override the Code's universal prohibitions.
Retain the clause in modified form, explicitly limiting its scope to procedural or administrative foreign requirements while categorically excluding any exception for gift-giving to government officials or other corrupt payment arrangements, thereby preserving operational flexibility without sanctioning corruption.
NSPE Board of Directors (Institutional Ethics Governance)
After declining to offer gifts and withdrawing from the corrupt procurement process, what affirmative obligations does Roe bear — including potential reporting duties to domestic or foreign authorities and the NSPE — beyond the act of refusal itself?
Having determined that offering gifts to foreign officials is ethically prohibited, Roe must decide what affirmative obligations he bears beyond simply declining to participate in the corrupt procurement arrangement. The case raises the question of whether Roe has duties to report the gift-conditioning practice to relevant authorities — in the foreign country, in the United States, or to the NSPE — and whether his refusal alone satisfies his ethical obligations or whether he bears some responsibility for the competitive disadvantage imposed on other ethical engineering firms that also decline to make gifts.
Satisfy ethical obligations solely by refusing to offer the gifts and withdrawing from the procurement, treating the act of non-participation as the complete discharge of ethical duty without undertaking any affirmative reporting or disclosure obligations.
After declining to participate, affirmatively report the gift-conditioning practice to the NSPE Board of Ethical Review, relevant U.S. authorities, and where feasible to authorities in the foreign country, on the grounds that the spirit of the Code's anti-corruption obligations extends beyond personal non-participation to active resistance of corrupt procurement systems.
Without formal regulatory reporting, document the corrupt procurement practice and disclose its existence to other engineering firms and professional associations that may be affected, enabling the broader engineering community to make informed decisions about participation in the foreign market and collectively resist normalization of the corrupt practice.
Deciding Whether to Offer Gifts (Action 2) → Universal Gift Ban Confirmed (Event 6)
Diplomatic Ethics Navigation Invoked for Cross-Cultural Conflict Management
Foreign Country High-Ranking Government Official Gift-Conditioning Contract Award Government Official
Professional Honor Preservation in International Practice
While Roe must refuse to offer the gifts, he is obligated to navigate this refusal diplomatically and carefully — avoiding culturally insensitive confrontation with the foreign officials while still maintaining his professional ethics obligations
The obligation to refuse corrupt payments does not require or permit culturally insensitive or confrontational behavior; the engineer must find a way to sidestep the ethical conflict diplomatically, which may include declining the engagement entirely rather than making an issue of the local practice
Diplomatic Ethics Navigation Obligation in Cross-Cultural Practice
The diplomatic navigation obligation governs the manner of refusal, not the substance of the ethical obligation; Roe must refuse the gifts but should do so with cultural sensitivity
The firm is negotiating for a contract in a foreign country in which it has not worked previously
his failure to make the gifts will result in no further work being awarded to the firm and to expect poor cooperation in performing the first contract
Domestic Gift Permissibility Ambiguity Assessment (Case 60-9 Reference)
Active during the ethics board's precedent analysis; originally active during Case 60-9 deliberations in 1960
the question of when a gift is intended to or becomes an inducement to influence one's impartial decision, as distinguished from an expression of friendship or a social custom, has remained a perplexing one over the years
Gift Ambiguity Threshold Determination State
Three-tier gift assessment in Case 60-9 (luncheons, cash payments, automobile) used as precedent framework for current case
Ethics board determination that Situation 1 (luncheons) was permissible, Situations 2 and 3 (cash payments, automobile) were unethical
no blanket rule covering all situations has been discovered
the size of the gift is usually a material factor, but must be related to the circumstances of the gift
we then concluded that the practice in Situation 1 was ethically permissible, but those in situation 2 and 3 were unethical
Receipt or offer of gifts of varying sizes and contexts in professional relationships, requiring assessment of whether each constitutes permissible social custom or impermissible inducement
Domestic Public Official Receiving AE Contract Payments
{'jurisdiction': 'United States (domestic)', 'legal_status': 'Illegal under US law', 'role_in_ethics_analysis': "Analogical precedent for rejecting the 'no choice' defense"}
Referenced as an analogical precedent — domestic public officials who received financial payments from AE firms in exchange for favorable contract awards. Their case is cited to show that the 'no choice' rationalization has already been rejected in domestic contexts, reinforcing its rejection in the foreign context.
{'type': 'analogical_precedent_for', 'target': 'US Engineering Firm Seeking Foreign Government Contract'}
Domestic Gift-Conditioned Contract Recipient Engineer
those who have so recently been revealed as offering financial payments to public officials to influence the award of contracts for architect-engineer services
Engineer Professional Norm of Openness and Aboveboard Dealing
while the condition is not to be included in the contract, his failure to make the gifts will result in no further work being awarded to the firm
Richard Roe, P.E.; NSPE Board of Ethical Review
The covert, off-contract nature of the gift demand — explicitly excluded from the written contract — conflicts with the engineer's professional norm of open, straightforward, and transparent dealings; the secrecy requirement itself signals ethical impermissibility
Establishing Domestic Gift Principles (Action 5) → Domestic Gift Precedent Established (Event 1)
Ethics Code Higher Standard Than Legal Minimum Invoked Against Foreign Law Defense
The legality of gift-giving under foreign law is insufficient to discharge Roe's professional ethics obligation; the NSPE Code sets a higher standard than legal compliance, and foreign legal permissibility does not constitute ethical permissibility
The principle operates as a categorical override of the legal-compliance defense; an engineer cannot argue that conduct is ethically permissible merely because it is legal in the relevant jurisdiction
Ethics Code as Higher Standard Than Legal Minimum
Legal permissibility is treated as a floor, not a ceiling; the ethics code establishes obligations above that floor that are not discharged by legal compliance
Ethics Code Spirit and Literal Compliance as Dual Obligation
Ethics Code Standard Erosion Prevention Principle
The Board held that the ethics code must be read not only literally but in the spirit of its purpose — upholding the highest professional standards — such that technical compliance with the letter of a provision is insufficient if the conduct violates the spirit of the code's commitment to integrity and service
The ethics code sets a higher standard than mere rule-following — engineers must internalize the purpose and spirit of the code, not merely avoid technical violations, and must apply the code's values even in contexts where specific provisions may be ambiguous
We believe that the code must be read on this most basic point of honor and integrity, not only literally, but in the spirit of its purpose--to uphold the highest standards of the profession.
Spirit-and-purpose interpretation resolves ambiguity in favor of the higher ethical standard, preventing technical loopholes from undermining the code's protective purpose
Anything less is a rationalization which cannot stand the test of placing service to the public ahead of all other considerations.
Foreign Country Legal Framework Permitting Gifts to Government Officials
Foreign Business Payments Permissibility Law
High-ranking foreign government official; Richard Roe, P.E. (in deliberation)
The foreign official asserts that making personal gifts to contract-awarding officials is legal in that country; this legal permissibility claim is the central factual predicate creating the legal-but-unethical tension Roe must resolve
As represented by the foreign government official
Professional Ethics Standard Prohibiting Gifts to Foreign Government Officials in Procurement
Foreign Official Gift-Giving Ethics Standard
it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts to the governmental officials who are authorized to award the contracts, and that such practice is legal in that country
other firms have adhered to the local practice in regard to such gifts
Establishes that Roe's professional obligations prohibit compliance with the gift-giving demand regardless of local legal permissibility or competitive disadvantage; grounds the ethical analysis of whether local custom can override professional codes
Implied by NSPE Code provisions on honesty, integrity, and avoidance of deceptive conduct
Foreign Bribery Scandals Publicized (Event 4) → Ruling Gifts Universally Prohibited (Action 6)
Foreign Country Government Engineering Services Client
{'entity_type': 'Foreign national government', 'procurement_context': 'Contract award with gift-giving as established local practice', 'legal_status': 'Gift-giving practice is legal in this country'}
Foreign national government entity seeking to retain Roe's engineering firm for a contract, operating in a jurisdiction where personal gifts to awarding officials are legally permitted and treated as an established practice.
{'type': 'client_of', 'target': 'Richard Roe International Government Consulting Engineer'}
{'type': 'represented_by', 'target': 'Foreign Government High-Ranking Official'}
Foreign Government Engineering Services Client
{'rank': 'High-ranking government official', 'authority': 'Authorized to award engineering contracts', 'local_legal_status': 'Gift-receiving practice is legal in this country'}
High-ranking government official who informs Roe that personal gifts to contract-awarding officials are an established and legal local practice, and that failure to comply will result in no further work and poor cooperation on the first contract.
{'type': 'contract_award_authority_over', 'target': 'Richard Roe International Government Consulting Engineer'}
{'type': 'representative_of', 'target': 'Foreign Country Government Engineering Services Client'}
Gift-Conditioning Contract Award Government Official
Roe is advised by a high-ranking government official of that country that it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts to the governmental officials who are authorized to award the contracts
He is further told that other firms have adhered to the local practice in regard to such gifts
Foreign Gift-Giving Clearly Violative Under Contextual Assessment
The Board applied the contextual assessment framework to the current foreign gift-giving scenario and concluded that the gifts — contextually substantial even if unspecified in amount — would clearly violate the code because they are direct consideration for securing work with no pretense about the officials' intention
When gifts are explicitly conditioned as consideration for contract award with no pretense of social courtesy, they fall unambiguously within the prohibited category regardless of their precise monetary value
Gift Inducement Threshold Contextual Assessment Principle
There is no question under the factual situation that the gifts are a direct consideration for securing the work, and there is here no pretense about the intention of the foreign government officials.
The explicit quid pro quo nature of the gifts eliminates any ambiguity about their character as inducements, making the contextual assessment straightforward
Accordingly, they would clearly be a violation of the code if offered in the United States.
In the case before us we are not told the amount of proposed gifts, but we take it in context that they would be substantial.
Foreign Gift Confirmed Contract Inducement
From the point at which foreign officials explicitly conditioned the contract on gift compliance through the ethics board's analysis
there is no question under the factual situation that the gifts are a direct consideration for securing the work
Gift-as-Contract-Inducement Confirmed State
Engineer's engagement with foreign government officials conditioning contract award on gift receipt
Ethics board ruling that the gifts constitute a clear code violation regardless of foreign permissibility
there is here no pretense about the intention of the foreign government officials
they would clearly be a violation of the code if offered in the United States
Foreign government officials explicitly conditioning both current and future contract performance on receipt of gifts
Foreign Gift Exception Ethics Erosion Risk
From the initial proposal of a 'When in Rome' exception through the ethics board's analysis of erosion risk
Public relying on professional integrity
the result must be a 'chipping away' of ethical standards, leading to contention that such conduct should also be accepted in the United States
Ethics Standard Erosion Slippery Slope Risk State
Risk that permitting a foreign-work exception to the gift prohibition would erode the standard domestically through analogical extension
Ethics board's definitive rejection of any geographic exception to the gift prohibition, citing erosion risk
even if the 'go along' philosophy is accepted as an exception only for foreign work
the profession should maintain a 'pure' position on competitive bidding; otherwise our opposition to competitive bidding will be chipped away, piece by piece
Proposal and subsequent rescission of the 'When in Rome' clause, followed by engineer's request for foreign-work exception to gift prohibition
Foreign Gift Exception Would Enable Domestic Erosion
Peer Competitor Practice Non-Justification Principle
The Board reasoned that accepting gift-giving as permissible for foreign work would create precedential pressure to accept the same conduct domestically when local or area practice is invoked as justification — directly paralleling the domestic AE contract payment scandal where engineers rationalized corrupt payments as competitive necessity
The slippery-slope from foreign exception to domestic erosion is not merely theoretical — the Board points to the contemporaneous domestic AE contract payment scandal as evidence that the same rationalization ('we had no choice, others were doing it') is already being deployed domestically
Even if the 'go along' philosophy is accepted as an exception only for foreign work, the result must be a 'chipping away' of ethical standards, leading to contention that such conduct should also be accepted in the United States when and if it is argued that such is the local or area practice.
The erosion-prevention principle resolves the tension by treating the foreign exception as a precedent-setting decision with domestic consequences, not merely a context-specific accommodation
This approach is not dissimilar to the arguments advanced by those who have so recently been revealed as offering financial payments to public officials to influence the award of contracts for architect-engineer services.
{'jurisdiction': 'Foreign country with permissive gift-giving laws and customs', 'legal_status': 'Practice is legal and accepted in host country', 'role_in_ethics_analysis': 'Creates the ethical pressure point for the engineer'}
The foreign government official(s) who condition the award of engineering contracts on the receipt of gifts from the engineering firm. Their practice is legal and customary in the host country, but creates the ethical dilemma for the US engineer under NSPE obligations.
{'type': 'contract_authority_over', 'target': 'US Engineering Firm Seeking Foreign Government Contract'}
{'type': 'gift_recipient_from', 'target': 'US Engineering Firm Seeking Foreign Government Contract'}
Gift-Conditioning Foreign Government Contract Authority
even though the practice may be legal and accepted in the foreign country
improper gifts of large sums to foreign officials to secure contracts for their products
the gifts are a direct consideration for securing the work
Free and Open Competition Invoked as Violated by Gift-Conditioned Contract Award
Procurement Integrity in Public Engineering
The gift-conditioned contract award system in the foreign country corrupts the free and open competition that engineering ethics requires; firms that refuse to offer gifts are excluded from competition, violating the competitive integrity that the profession demands
Gift-conditioned procurement systems are incompatible with free and open competition because they substitute corrupt payment capacity for professional qualification as the determinative selection criterion
Free and Open Competition as Engineering Ethics Boundary Condition
The competitive integrity principle reinforces rather than conflicts with the corrupt payment prohibition; both point toward the same conclusion that Roe must refuse to participate in the gift-conditioned system
Gift-Giving to Secure Foreign Contract as Corrupt Payment Prohibition Violation
The Board held that offering gifts to foreign government officials as direct consideration for securing engineering contract work violates the NSPE Code prohibition on offering gifts or other consideration to secure work, regardless of the legality and cultural acceptance of such gifts in the host country
The corrupt payment prohibition applies with full force to foreign gift-giving when the gifts are explicitly conditioned as consideration for contract award — the foreign legal and cultural context does not create an exception to this core prohibition
The prohibition is treated as absolute in the context of explicit quid pro quo gift-giving — no balancing against local custom or competitive necessity is permitted
Note: The following Code sections no longer exists: Code of Ethics --Section 11b--'He will not pay, or offer to pay, either directly or indirectly, and commission, political contribution, or a gift, or other consideration in order to secure work, exclusive of securing salaried positions through employment agencies.'
Gift Inducement Threshold Assessment in Case 60-9 Precedent
The Board applied a contextual 'reasonable men' standard to three tiers of gift-giving in Case 60-9, finding occasional luncheons permissible, cash payments to specification-influencing engineers unethical, and a $4,000 automobile gift unethical — establishing a graduated, context-sensitive framework for distinguishing social courtesies from corrupt inducements
The principle requires asking whether a reasonable observer would infer an ulterior motive; cash payments to decision-influencers are per se suspect regardless of amount; very expensive gifts connote obligation regardless of stated intent
In Case 60-9 we acted upon a domestic case under Rule 4 of the then-prevailing Rules of Professional Conduct... Applying these general principles to the situations at hand, we think that an occasional free luncheon or dinner, or a Christmas or birthday present when there is a personal relationship is acceptable practice.
The contextual assessment framework resolves the tension by focusing on the reasonable inference of improper influence rather than subjective intent, making local custom irrelevant to the threshold determination
No blanket rule covering all situations has been discovered.
The question of when a gift is intended to or becomes an inducement to influence one's impartial decision, as distinguished from an expression of friendship or a social custom, has remained a perplexing one over the years.
The size of the gift is usually a material factor, but must be related to the circumstances of the gift.
cash payments to those in a position to influence decisions favorable or unfavorable to the giver are not in good taste and do immediately raise a suspicion that there is an ulterior motive.
we must apply a criterion which reasonable men might reasonably infer from the circumstances; that the giving or acceptance of the benefit be a matter of 'good taste,' and such that among reasonable men it might not be of a nature which raises suspicions of favoritism.
Home-Country Code Extraterritorial Applicability Contest
From the engineer's engagement with foreign officials through the ethics board's definitive ruling on extraterritorial applicability
the basic issue remaining is whether the flat prohibition in Section 11b applies to work in a foreign country where the laws and customs permit the gifts to government officials
Home-Country Ethics Code Extraterritorial Application Contested State
NSPE Code Section 11b's applicability to engineer performing work in foreign country where gifts to officials are legal and customary
Ethics board ruling that the code applies extraterritorially and the rescinded 'When in Rome' clause confirms no geographic exception exists
the Board of Directors in January 1968 rescinded the 'When in Rome' clause
the NSPE Board of Directors in July 1966 adopted a so-called 'When in Rome' clause
Foreign officials invoking local law and custom to justify gift-giving practice that would violate NSPE Code Section 11b
Honesty Principle Invoked Against Covert Gift-for-Contract Exchange
Participating in a covert gift-for-contract system — where the condition is deliberately kept off the written contract to maintain a facade of legitimate procurement — is fundamentally dishonest conduct incompatible with Roe's professional obligations
The deliberate concealment of the gift condition from the contract documents constitutes a form of institutional deception; participating in such a system implicates the engineer in dishonest conduct even if the individual gift transactions are not themselves deceptive
Honesty reinforces the corrupt payment prohibition; the covert nature of the arrangement amplifies rather than mitigates the ethical violation
Local Custom Non-Excuse Invoked Against Foreign Gift Practice Defense
The fact that gift-giving to contract-awarding officials is an 'established practice' and legal in the foreign country does not excuse Roe from his NSPE ethics obligations prohibiting such conduct
Professional ethics represent a higher and culturally non-relative standard; local legality and custom are insufficient to override the engineer's professional obligations because those obligations travel with the engineer regardless of host jurisdiction norms
Local custom and legality are treated as ethically irrelevant to the engineer's obligations; the principle operates as a categorical override of the local-custom defense
Local Custom and Foreign Law Non-Excuse for Gift-Giving Prohibition
The Board held that the fact that gifts to foreign government officials are legal and accepted practice in the host country does not excuse the US engineering firm from the NSPE Code prohibition on offering gifts to secure work, because professional ethics obligations are not culturally relative
The legality and cultural acceptance of gift-giving in the foreign jurisdiction is expressly acknowledged but deemed irrelevant to the engineer's professional ethics obligation — the code applies universally regardless of host jurisdiction norms
Even though the practice may be legal and accepted in the foreign country... we cannot accept it for professional services.
The principle resolves the tension by treating professional ethics as a higher-order obligation that supersedes local legal and cultural norms, with the 'When in Rome' clause rescission providing institutional confirmation of this position
Even though the practice may be legal and accepted in the foreign country, and even though some might argue on pragmatic grounds that United States commercial companies should 'go along' to protect the jobs of employees in this country, we cannot accept it for professional services.
The basic issue remaining is whether the flat prohibition in Section 11b applies to work in a foreign country where the laws and customs permit the gifts to government officials.
National Society of Professional Engineers
Primary normative authority governing whether Roe may ethically comply with the foreign official's demand for personal gifts as a condition of contract award; grounds obligations of honesty, integrity, and avoidance of deceptive or fraudulent conduct in business dealings
NSPE BER BER Multi-Precedent International Corrupt Payment Cross-Case Synthesis
BER Multi-Precedent International Corrupt Payment Cross-Case Synthesis Capability
The BER demonstrated multi-precedent international corrupt payment cross-case synthesis by drawing on Case 60-9 (domestic gift analysis), the 'When in Rome' clause history, and recent press reports of industrial corrupt payments to synthesize a consistent normative conclusion
The BER's comprehensive analysis drawing on multiple precedents and historical developments to reach its conclusion about foreign gift-giving
Integration of Case 60-9 gift threshold analysis, the NSPE Board's 1966-1968 'When in Rome' clause history, and the domestic AE corrupt payment analogy into a unified normative conclusion about foreign gift-giving
It is worth noting in considering this point that in a different but related context, the NSPE Board of Directors in July l966 adopted a so-called 'When in Rome' clause
This approach is not dissimilar to the arguments advanced by those who have so recently been revealed as offering financial payments to public officials
NSPE BER Domestic-Foreign Corrupt Procurement Analogy Recognition
Corrupt Procurement Domestic-Foreign Analogy Recognition Capability
The BER demonstrated the domestic-foreign corrupt procurement analogy recognition capability by explicitly drawing the equivalence between foreign gift-giving and domestic financial payments to public officials for AE contract awards
The BER's analysis connecting the foreign gift-giving scenario to recently revealed domestic corrupt procurement practices
Explicit comparison between the 'no choice' defense used by foreign gift-givers and the same defense used by domestic engineers who made financial payments to public officials, concluding both are ethically equivalent
NSPE BER Ethics Code Foreign Exception Chipping-Away Resistance
Ethics Code Foreign Exception Chipping-Away Resistance Capability
The BER demonstrated the ethics code foreign exception chipping-away resistance capability by articulating the slippery slope from foreign exceptions to domestic erosion and by referencing the NSPE Board of Directors' rescission of the 'When in Rome' clause
The BER's analysis of whether a foreign-practice exception to Section 11b should be recognized, and its rejection of such an exception
Explicit articulation of the 'chipping away' dynamic and reference to the NSPE Board's 1968 rescission of the 'When in Rome' clause to maintain a 'pure' position on competitive bidding
the Board of Directors in January l968 rescinded the 'When in Rome' clause from the code as recommended by the Professional Engineers in Private Practice Section, which recognized a division of opinion on the policy but concluded, '... the profession should maintain a "pure" position on competitive bidding; otherwise our opposition to competitive bidding will be chipped away, piece by piece.'
NSPE BER Ethics Code Spirit-and-Letter Dual Compliance Analysis
Ethics Code Spirit-and-Letter Dual Compliance Reasoning Capability
The BER demonstrated spirit-and-letter dual compliance reasoning by explicitly stating that Section 11b must be read not only literally but in the spirit of its purpose
The BER's analysis of whether Section 11b's flat prohibition applies to foreign practice where gifts are legal
Explicit articulation of the dual compliance standard and its application to reject rationalizations that satisfy the letter but violate the spirit of the code
NSPE BER Gift Inducement Contextual Threshold Analysis Case 60-9
Gift Inducement Contextual Threshold Calibration Capability
The BER demonstrated the gift inducement contextual threshold calibration capability by articulating the three-level gift analysis from Case 60-9 and applying it to the foreign gift scenario
The BER applied the Case 60-9 gift threshold framework to determine that the proposed foreign gifts would constitute a code violation
Articulation of the reasonable-men standard, the good-taste criterion, and the three-level gift spectrum (token gifts, cash payments, expensive property) from Case 60-9, and application to the present foreign gift scenario
we must apply a criterion which reasonable men might reasonably infer from the circumstances; that the giving or acceptance of the benefit be a matter of 'good taste'
NSPE BER No-Choice Defense Rejection Analysis
No-Choice Defense Rejection and Ethical Alternative Identification Capability
The BER demonstrated the no-choice defense rejection capability by explicitly identifying and rejecting the 'no choice' argument and articulating the genuine ethical alternative
The BER's analysis of the competitive necessity argument advanced by companies that had made improper gifts to foreign officials
Explicit rejection of the 'no choice' defense and articulation that 'there is a choice — the choice of declining to be drawn into a seamy procedure for self-gain'
There may be some appeal to this line of argument from a purely pragmatic standpoint, but it must of necessity fail in the final analysis.
The short answer is that there is a choice--the choice of declining to be drawn into a seamy procedure for self-gain.
NSPE BER Service-Before-Profit Claim Integrity Analysis
Service-Before-Profit Professional Claim Integrity Preservation Capability
The BER demonstrated the service-before-profit professional claim integrity preservation capability by articulating that corrupt gift-giving compromises the profession's foundational claim and cannot be rationalized away
The BER's analysis of why corrupt gift-giving violates the fundamental spirit of the engineering ethics code
Explicit articulation that 'the profession's claim of placing service before profit has been compromised' by corrupt gift-giving and that 'Anything less is a rationalization which cannot stand the test of placing service to the public ahead of all other considerations'
No amount of rationalization or explanation will change the public reaction that the profession's claim of placing service before profit has been compromised by a practice which is repugnant to the basic principles of ethical behavior under the laws and customs of this country.
NSPE BER When-in-Rome Rescission Ethics Erosion Resistance
The NSPE Board adopted a 'When in Rome' clause in July 1966 permitting tender submission in foreign countries where required by local law/practice, then rescinded it in January 1968 on the recommendation of the Professional Engineers in Private Practice Section, which concluded the profession must maintain a 'pure' position to prevent incremental erosion.
NSPE Board of Directors / NSPE Ethics Committee Reviewing Engineer
Ethics Code Foreign Exception Chipping-Away Resistance Obligation
The NSPE Board of Directors was obligated to resist the 'When in Rome' foreign-practice exception to the competitive bidding prohibition, and did so by rescinding the clause in January 1968, establishing the precedent that foreign-practice exceptions to core ethics prohibitions must be rejected to prevent the 'chipping away' of ethical standards that would follow from their adoption.
the NSPE Board of Directors in July l966 adopted a so-called 'When in Rome' clause to permit the submission of tenders for work in foreign countries when such is required by laws, regulations, or practices of the foreign country.
January 1968 rescission decision; applied prospectively to all foreign-practice exception arguments including the gift-giving scenario
Even if the 'go along' philosophy is accepted as an exception only for foreign work, the result must be a 'chipping away' of ethical standards
NSPE Board of Directors When-in-Rome Rescission Ethics Erosion Resistance
The NSPE Board of Directors demonstrated the ethics code foreign exception chipping-away resistance capability by rescinding the 'When in Rome' clause in January 1968 to prevent incremental erosion of the competitive bidding prohibition
The NSPE Board of Directors' 1968 decision to rescind the 'When in Rome' clause that had been adopted in 1966 to permit competitive bidding in foreign countries where required by law
Institutional decision to rescind the 'When in Rome' clause after recognizing that foreign exceptions would progressively chip away at core ethics standards
On its face, the code is clear and direct to the point.
NSPE Board of Ethical Review in analyzing the engineer's proposed conduct
Primary normative authority prohibiting engineers from paying, offering, or receiving gifts, commissions, political contributions, or other consideration to secure work; applied to determine whether offering gifts to foreign government officials violates professional ethics regardless of local law or custom
Prevailing at time of case (pre-revision)
{'authority': 'NSPE Board of Ethical Review', 'function': 'Authoritative ethical interpretation and opinion issuance', 'precedent_applied': 'Case 60-9 domestic gift analysis'}
The NSPE Board of Ethical Review, acting in its capacity as the authoritative interpreter of the NSPE Code of Ethics, analyzing whether the prohibition on gift-giving in Section 11b applies to foreign jurisdictions where such gifts are legal and customary. The committee applies the 'reasonable men' standard and rejects the 'When in Rome' and 'no choice' rationalizations.
{'type': 'ethical_authority_over', 'target': 'US Engineering Firm Seeking Foreign Government Contract'}
{'type': 'interprets', 'target': 'NSPE Code Section 11b'}
In Case 60-9 we acted upon a domestic case
We believe that the code must be read on this most basic point of honor and integrity
we believe the canons and rules state, in substance, that an engineer may neither offer nor receive a gift
NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Applicability Invoked in Foreign Contract Scenario
Roe's NSPE membership obligations — including the prohibition on gifts to obtain work — apply fully to his firm's pursuit of the foreign government contract, notwithstanding that the host country's law permits and its officials expect such gifts
NSPE membership is a voluntary professional commitment that is geographically unbounded; by joining NSPE, Roe accepted ethics obligations that follow him into international practice and cannot be suspended by host-country law
Richard Roe, P.E., is president and chief executive officer of an engineering firm which has done overseas assignments in various parts of the world. The firm is negotiating for a contract in a foreign country in which it has not worked previously.
Extraterritorial applicability is treated as categorical; no geographic exception is recognized for NSPE ethics obligations
NSPE Board of Directors / Professional Engineers in Private Practice Section
NSPE Board of Directors 'When in Rome' Clause (Adopted July 1966; Rescinded January 1968)
NSPE Board of Ethical Review as a cautionary analogy against adopting a foreign-custom exception to the gift prohibition
Policy exception that briefly permitted submission of tenders for foreign work when required by local laws, regulations, or practices; subsequently rescinded on recommendation of the Professional Engineers in Private Practice Section to maintain a 'pure' position on competitive bidding; cited as analogous precedent for rejecting a 'local custom' exception to the gift prohibition in foreign countries
Negotiating Foreign Contract (Action 1) → Gift Mandatory Status Communicated (Event 5)
No Choice Defense Rejected as Peer Competitor Normalization
Gift-Offering Foreign Contract Seeking Engineer
The Board explicitly rejected the 'no choice' defense — that the engineering firm had no alternative because competitors in other countries would comply with the gift-giving practice — as a form of peer competitor normalization that cannot justify professional ethics violations
The fact that foreign competitors would offer gifts does not constitute a valid ethical justification for a US engineer to do the same — the 'no choice' argument is a rationalization that, if accepted, would make professional ethics contingent on the lowest common denominator of competitor behavior
The defense to this activity has generally been that the companies making such gifts had 'no choice,' meaning that without such action they would not have been able to secure the contracts because competitors in other countries would have complied with the practice.
The principle resolves the tension by affirming that there is always a choice — the choice to decline participation in ethically prohibited conduct — even at the cost of losing the contract
Peer Competitor Practice Non-Justification Invoked Against Other Firms Defense
The assertion that other engineering firms have adhered to the local gift-giving practice does not justify Roe's firm doing the same; competitor normalization of prohibited conduct is ethically irrelevant to Roe's individual professional obligations
The 'everyone else is doing it' defense is categorically rejected; Roe's ethics obligations are individual and non-delegable, and cannot be discharged by demonstrating that competitors have violated the same obligations
He is further told that other firms have adhered to the local practice in regard to such gifts.
Competitor misconduct creates competitive disadvantage for the ethically compliant engineer, but this disadvantage does not constitute an ethical justification for joining the misconduct
Professional Accountability Invoked for Roe's Individual Responsibility
Engineering Business-Profession Duality Integrity Principle
As president and CEO of the engineering firm, Roe bears personal professional accountability for the firm's decision about whether to offer gifts; he cannot delegate or diffuse this responsibility to business necessity, local officials, or competitor behavior
Professional accountability is non-delegable; Roe's leadership position amplifies rather than diminishes his personal ethical responsibility for the firm's conduct in the foreign procurement process
Richard Roe, P.E., is president and chief executive officer of an engineering firm which has done overseas assignments in various parts of the world.
Business pressures and competitive disadvantage are acknowledged but do not discharge professional accountability; Roe must personally own the decision to refuse the gift condition
Richard Roe, P.E., is president and chief executive officer of an engineering firm which has done overseas assignments in various parts of the world
Professional Honor Preservation Invoked in International Gift-Giving Context
Roe's obligation to preserve his professional honor and that of the engineering profession applies fully in the foreign country context; offering gifts to secure contracts would bring dishonor upon himself and other engineers regardless of the international setting
The international arena amplifies rather than diminishes the importance of professional honor; conduct that dishonors the profession in a foreign country damages the global credibility of engineering as a profession
Professional honor is non-negotiable across jurisdictions; diplomatic navigation is the mechanism for preserving honor while avoiding unnecessary cultural conflict
Professional Honor and Integrity in International Gift-Giving Context
The Board invoked the profession's fundamental commitment to honor and integrity as the interpretive lens for reading the ethics code on gift-giving, holding that the code must be read not only literally but in the spirit of upholding the highest professional standards — and that international practice creates no exception to this obligation
Professional honor is not geographically bounded — the same standards of honor and integrity that govern domestic practice apply in international contexts, and the international arena does not create a zone of reduced ethical obligation
Honor and integrity are treated as non-negotiable professional commitments that override pragmatic accommodation to foreign business customs
Would it be ethical for Roe to accept the contract and make the gifts as described?
Would it make any ethical difference if Roe arranged for gifts to be made through a local intermediary or agent rather than making them directly, thereby creating a layer of deniability?
Does the coercive structure of the arrangement — where refusal to give gifts results in poor cooperation on an already-awarded contract and exclusion from future work — change the ethical calculus compared to a purely voluntary gift-giving custom?
What affirmative obligations, if any, does Roe have to report the gift-conditioning practice to relevant authorities — either in the foreign country, in the United States, or to the NSPE — rather than simply declining the contract?
To what extent does Roe bear ethical responsibility for the competitive disadvantage imposed on other ethical engineering firms that also decline to make gifts, given that his refusal alone does not eliminate the corrupt procurement system?
Does the principle of Diplomatic Ethics Navigation for cross-cultural conflict management conflict with the principle of Situational Ethics Rejection in foreign gift-giving contexts — and if so, is there any culturally sensitive way to decline gifts that the Board's ruling permits without compromising the universal prohibition?
Does the principle that the Ethics Code must meet a higher standard than the legal minimum conflict with the principle of NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Applicability when the foreign country's law explicitly permits the gift-giving practice — and how should the Board weigh the sovereignty of a foreign legal system against the universalist claims of a professional code?
Does the principle that a Foreign Gift Exception Would Enable Domestic Erosion conflict with the principle of Ethics Code Spirit and Literal Compliance as a Dual Obligation — specifically, does invoking a slippery-slope systemic argument to justify the prohibition substitute a consequentialist policy rationale for the deontological rule that the Code's letter and spirit are supposed to independently require?
Does the principle of Service Before Profit — which the Board invokes to condemn Roe's gift-giving — conflict with the principle of Free and Open Competition when declining to participate in a universally practiced gift system effectively removes Roe's firm from the market entirely, thereby reducing rather than increasing competitive integrity in that foreign procurement environment?
From a deontological perspective, does Roe have an absolute duty to refuse gifts that condition contract awards, regardless of whether such gifts are legal and customary in the foreign country, and does voluntary NSPE membership create a categorical obligation that cannot be suspended by geographic context?
From a consequentialist perspective, if refusing the gift-conditioned contract causes Roe's firm to lose business to less scrupulous competitors who continue the corrupt practice, does the net outcome for public welfare and professional integrity justify Roe's refusal, or does it merely shift the harm without eliminating it?
From a virtue ethics perspective, does Roe's willingness to rationalize gift-giving through appeals to local custom, competitive necessity, and the conduct of peer firms reveal a deficiency in the virtues of professional integrity and moral courage that a truly honorable engineer should embody regardless of external pressures?
From a deontological perspective, does the covert, off-contract nature of the gift condition — communicated verbally but deliberately excluded from the written contract — constitute a violation of Roe's duty of honesty and transparency independent of the gift prohibition itself, making the arrangement doubly impermissible under the NSPE Code?
If the NSPE Board had not rescinded the 'When in Rome' clause, would Roe's gift-giving have been ethically permissible under the prior code, and does the Board's deliberate rescission of that clause retroactively clarify that the clause itself represented an ethical error rather than a legitimate cultural accommodation?
What if Roe had accepted the contract but refused to make the gifts, accepting the threatened consequences of poor cooperation and no further work — would this course of action have satisfied his ethical obligations while still allowing his firm to perform the contracted engineering work, and would the Board have viewed this as an acceptable compromise?
If a domestic U.S. government official had conditioned a public engineering contract on personal gifts in the same manner — invoking local industry custom and the conduct of competing firms as justification — would the ethical analysis have been identical, and does the domestic analogy expose the 'foreign country' defense as logically incoherent rather than a genuine cultural distinction?
What if Roe had disclosed the gift-conditioning arrangement publicly — to his firm's board, to NSPE, or to U.S. regulatory authorities — before deciding whether to proceed: would such transparency have altered the ethical calculus, and could proactive disclosure have served as a mechanism for industry-wide reform rather than individual complicity?
Rescinding 'When in Rome' Clause (Action 4) → Rome Clause Policy Nullified (Event 3)
{'license': 'Professional Engineer (P.E.)', 'position': 'President and Chief Executive Officer', 'firm_type': 'Engineering firm with international/overseas assignments', 'jurisdiction_context': 'Foreign country where gift-giving to officials is locally legal'}
President and CEO of an engineering firm negotiating a contract in a foreign country where personal gifts to government officials are an established and legal local practice; must decide whether to comply with the gift-giving custom or refuse on ethical grounds under NSPE obligations.
{'type': 'service_provider_to', 'target': 'Foreign Government Client'}
{'type': 'subject_to_coercion_by', 'target': 'Foreign Government High-Ranking Official'}
International Government Consulting Engineer
Roe is advised by a high-ranking government official of that country that it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts
Roe BER Multi-Precedent International Corrupt Payment Synthesis
Roe (and the NSPE Ethics Committee reviewing his case) must possess the capability to synthesize multiple BER precedents addressing corrupt payments in international engineering practice to reach a consistent normative conclusion applicable to the gift-giving scenario.
The NSPE BER analyzes Roe's case against a corpus of prior cases addressing corrupt payments in international engineering contexts, requiring synthesis across factually varied precedents
Application of precedent corpus addressing direct kickbacks, indirect encouragement-to-associate arrangements, and gift-giving customs to reach the uniform conclusion that all such arrangements are prohibited
Roe Competitor Gift Practice Non-Justification
The government official informs Roe that 'other firms have adhered to the local practice in regard to such gifts,' which Roe might otherwise treat as evidence that the practice is professionally acceptable.
Competitor Gift-Practice Non-Justification Compliance Obligation
Roe is obligated to refuse to use the fact that other engineering firms have adhered to the local gift-giving practice as ethical justification for his firm doing the same, bearing independent personal professional accountability for his own ethical compliance.
At the time of contract negotiation and decision-making
Roe Corrupt Procurement Competitive Disadvantage Non-Excuse
The foreign official has explicitly threatened that failure to make gifts will result in no further work being awarded and poor cooperation on the first contract, creating direct competitive pressure on Roe's firm.
Corrupt Procurement Competitive Disadvantage Non-Excuse Constraint
Roe cannot invoke the competitive disadvantage of ethics compliance — specifically the threat of no further work and poor cooperation — as justification for making prohibited gifts to foreign officials, because competitive harm does not excuse NSPE Code violations.
NSPE Code of Ethics Sections II.5.b, III.6, III.7; BER Cases 76-6, 96-5
During and after the contract negotiation
Roe Cross-Cultural Consistent Ethical Compass
Roe's firm has done overseas assignments in various parts of the world, and the pressure to adopt locally-adapted ethics in the foreign country represents precisely the situational ethics that the consistent ethical compass obligation prohibits.
Cross-Cultural Engineering Practice Consistent Ethical Compass Obligation
Roe is obligated to maintain a consistent ethical compass across his firm's international practice, applying the same fundamental ethical principles in the foreign country as he would apply in domestic US practice, regardless of the cultural context or prevailing norms of the host country.
Throughout all international engineering practice
it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts to the governmental officials who are authorized to award the contracts, and that such practice is legal in that country.
Roe Cross-Cultural Diplomatic Navigation of Gift Refusal
Cross-Cultural Corrupt Custom Diplomatic Navigation Capability
Roe must possess the capability to navigate the diplomatic and social dimensions of refusing the gift-giving expectation in the foreign country, doing so carefully, delicately, and diplomatically to minimize unnecessary offense while maintaining firm ethical non-participation.
Roe must refuse the gift-giving expectation in a foreign country where it is an established cultural and legal practice, requiring sophisticated diplomatic navigation to do so without causing unnecessary offense to the high-ranking government official
Identification and execution of culturally sensitive refusal strategies that preserve professional relationships to the extent possible without compromising ethical standards
Roe Cross-Cultural Diplomatic Sidestepping
Roe must refuse the gift-giving practice while operating in a foreign cultural context where such gifts are described as an established local custom, requiring diplomatic navigation rather than blunt refusal.
Cross-Cultural Corrupt Custom Diplomatic Sidestepping Obligation
Roe is obligated to make every attempt to carefully, delicately, and diplomatically sidestep the gift-giving expectation — navigating around the ethically conflicting custom without culturally insensitive confrontation — so as to remove any appearance of an ethical conflict while maintaining his professional ethics.
During contract negotiation and any subsequent interactions with government officials
his failure to make the gifts will result in no further work being awarded to the firm and to expect poor cooperation in performing the first contract.
Roe Cross-Cultural Diplomatic Sidestepping Requirement
The foreign official has framed the gift-giving expectation as an established cultural and legal practice, creating a culturally sensitive situation requiring diplomatic navigation rather than blunt refusal.
Cross-Cultural Ethical Conflict Diplomatic Sidestepping Constraint
Roe is required to make every careful, delicate, and diplomatic attempt to sidestep the gift-giving expectation rather than either directly participating in the prohibited conduct or making a blunt confrontational refusal that could damage professional relationships unnecessarily.
NSPE Code of Ethics Section II.1.d; BER Case 96-5
it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts to the governmental officials
During the contract negotiation phase with the foreign government
Roe Direct vs Indirect Corrupt Arrangement Distinction
Direct vs Indirect Corrupt Arrangement Factual Distinction Capability
The NSPE Ethics Committee must possess the capability to analyze the factual distinctions between the direct gift-giving arrangement in Roe's case and indirect corrupt arrangements in prior precedents, while correctly concluding that both configurations violate professional ethics standards.
The NSPE BER must distinguish Roe's direct gift-giving scenario from prior cases involving indirect corrupt arrangements (e.g., encouragement to associate with local intermediaries) while maintaining the consistent normative conclusion that all such arrangements are prohibited
Analysis of whether the direct personal gift arrangement differs ethically from indirect kickback or intermediary arrangements addressed in prior BER cases, reaching the conclusion that both are prohibited
Roe Domestic-Foreign Corrupt Procurement Analogy Self-Application
Roe and his firm were required to recognize that the foreign gift-giving scenario is structurally equivalent to domestic corrupt procurement practices and to apply the same ethical condemnation to both
Roe's firm needed to assess whether the foreign legal permissibility of gift-giving changed its ethical status relative to domestic corrupt payments
Recognition that the 'foreign context' framing does not change the fundamental ethical equivalence of the corrupt conduct
Roe Ethics Code Spirit-and-Letter Dual Compliance
Roe and his firm were required to read Section 11b not only in its literal terms but in the spirit of its purpose — upholding the highest standards of the profession — and to apply that purposive interpretation to the foreign gift scenario
Roe's firm needed to determine whether Section 11b's prohibition on gifts to secure work applied to foreign practice where gifts are legal and customary
Recognition that even if a literal reading of Section 11b might be argued to have geographic limits, the spirit of the provision requires application to foreign practice
Roe Firm Coercive Foreign Contract Conditioning
From the moment the foreign official explicitly conditions future work and cooperation on gift compliance through the firm's decision to proceed or withdraw
his failure to make the gifts will result in no further work being awarded to the firm
Coercive Foreign Contract Conditioning State
Richard Roe / Roe's engineering firm in negotiation with foreign government
Firm's decision to comply with gift demand, refuse and withdraw, or refuse and accept the threatened consequences
expect poor cooperation in performing the first contract
while the condition is not to be included in the contract
Foreign official explicitly states that failure to make gifts will result in no further work and poor cooperation on the first contract
Roe Firm Competitor Gift-Practice Non-Justification Compliance
NSPE BER explicit rejection of the 'no choice' / 'competitors were doing it' defense in the foreign gift-giving context.
Richard Roe / US Engineering Firm Seeking Foreign Government Contract
Roe's firm was obligated to refuse to use the fact that competing engineering firms in other countries had adhered to the local gift-giving practice as ethical justification for engaging in the same conduct, recognizing that the prevalence of the corrupt practice among competitors did not transform it into an ethically permissible one.
At the time of evaluating whether to offer gifts and in any subsequent ethical defense
Roe Firm Corrupt Procurement Competitive Disadvantage Non-Excuse
The BER acknowledged the pragmatic appeal of the competitive necessity argument but rejected it categorically, establishing that competitive harm does not excuse ethics violations.
Roe's firm was constrained from using its competitive disadvantage — the risk of losing the foreign contract to competitors who would comply with the gift-giving practice — as an ethical justification for offering gifts to the foreign government officials.
NSPE Code Section 11b; BER Cases 76-6, 96-5
At the time of the foreign contract negotiation
Even though the practice may be legal and accepted in the foreign country, and even though some might argue o pragmatic grounds that United State commercial companies should 'go along' to protect the jobs of employees in this country, we cannot accept it for professional services.
Roe Firm Cross-Cultural Consistent Ethical Compass Maintenance
NSPE BER analysis of the extraterritorial application of Section 11b; the Board held that the prohibition applies with equal force in foreign countries as in the United States.
Roe's firm was obligated to maintain a consistent ethical compass in its foreign practice, applying the same fundamental ethical principles regarding gift-giving and corrupt payments regardless of the geographic location, cultural context, or prevailing norms of the host country.
Even though the practice may be legal and accepted in the foreign country, and even though some might argue on pragmatic grounds that United State commercial companies should 'go along' to protect the jobs of employees in this country, we cannot accept it for professional services.
Throughout the foreign contract negotiation and procurement process
we believe that the code must be read on this most basic point of honor and integrity, not only literally, but in the spirit of its purpose--to uphold the highest standards of the profession.
Roe Firm Cross-Cultural Diplomatic Sidestepping
The BER's recognition of cultural sensitivity in international practice implies that the engineer must navigate the ethical conflict diplomatically, consistent with the cross-cultural sidestepping constraint established in related BER precedents.
Roe's firm was constrained to make every careful, delicate, and diplomatic attempt to sidestep the gift-giving expectation rather than either directly complying with the corrupt demand or making a blunt confrontational refusal that could damage the professional relationship.
At the time of the foreign official's gift demand
Roe Firm Ethical Dilemma - Business vs. Professional Integrity
From receipt of the gift-giving condition through the firm's final decision on contract pursuit
Firm employees dependent on business continuity
Richard Roe facing choice between business continuity and professional ethics compliance
Roe's decision to comply with or refuse the gift-giving condition
Convergence of coercive conditioning, local legality claim, competitive disadvantage, and professional ethics obligations creates an irresolvable tension between business interests and ethics code compliance
Roe Firm Ethics Code Spirit-and-Letter Dual Compliance
NSPE BER conclusion on the gift-giving prohibition; the Board held that the code must be read in spirit as well as letter, and that any rationalization falling short of that dual standard fails the test of placing service to the public ahead of all other considerations.
Ethics Code Spirit-and-Letter Dual Compliance Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to read Section 11b not only in its literal terms but in the spirit of its purpose — upholding the highest standards of the profession — such that rationalizations based on foreign legality, competitive necessity, or pragmatic job-preservation arguments, even if they might appear to satisfy a narrow literal reading, could not satisfy the spirit of the code's prohibition on gifts to secure work.
At the time of evaluating whether to offer gifts and in any subsequent ethical defense of the conduct
Roe Firm Ethics Compliance Competitive Disadvantage
From the point Roe is informed that other firms have complied with the gift-giving practice through the firm's decision on contract pursuit
Ethics Compliance Competitive Disadvantage State
Richard Roe / Roe's engineering firm relative to competing firms in the foreign market
Firm's decision to comply (eliminating disadvantage but creating ethics violation) or to refuse (accepting the disadvantage)
Foreign official advises that other firms have adhered to the local gift-giving practice, placing Roe's firm at a competitive disadvantage if it refuses
Roe Firm Foreign Contract Negotiation - International Ethics Applicability
From the point Roe is advised of the gift-giving practice through the firm's decision on whether to proceed with the contract
International Member Ethics Standard Applicability State
Richard Roe / Roe's engineering firm operating in foreign contract negotiation context
Firm's decision to comply or refuse the gift-giving condition, or withdrawal from negotiation
High-ranking foreign government official advises Roe that gift-giving to contract-awarding officials is established practice and legal under local law
Roe Firm Foreign Official Corrupt Payment Prohibition Violation
Core holding of the NSPE BER opinion: Section 11b prohibits offering gifts to secure work, and this prohibition applies to foreign government officials in foreign countries regardless of local law or custom.
Foreign Official Corrupt Payment Prohibition Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to refrain from offering personal gifts to foreign government officials as a condition of obtaining the engineering contract, regardless of the legality of such gifts under foreign law and regardless of their status as established local practice.
Throughout the contract negotiation and procurement process in the foreign country
Note: The following Code sections no longer exists: Code of Ethics --Section 11b--'He will not pay, or offer to pay, either directly or indirectly, and commission, political contribution, or a gift, or other consideration in order to secure work'
they would clearly be a violation of the code if offered in the United State.
Roe Firm Foreign Official Payment Prohibition
The foreign official explicitly conditioned both future contract awards and cooperative performance on receipt of personal gifts. The BER confirmed this constitutes a direct consideration for securing work — the clearest possible case of a prohibited gift-for-contract arrangement.
Foreign Official Payment Prohibition Constraint
Roe's firm was absolutely prohibited from offering personal gifts to the foreign government officials conditioning the contract award, regardless of the legality of such gifts under the foreign country's law or the prevalence of the practice among competing firms.
Throughout the foreign contract negotiation and performance period
Roe Firm Gift Inducement Contextual Threshold Assessment
NSPE BER analysis of Case 60-9 precedent applied to Roe's foreign gift-giving scenario; the Board applied the three-tier gift analysis (luncheons permissible, cash payments and expensive gifts prohibited) and concluded the foreign gifts would clearly violate the code if offered in the United States.
Gift Inducement Reasonable-Men Contextual Threshold Assessment Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to apply the reasonable-men contextual threshold test to assess whether the proposed gifts to foreign government officials constituted prohibited inducements, and upon applying that test — given the substantial size of the gifts and their direct connection to contract award — to conclude that they clearly crossed the threshold into prohibited conduct.
At the time of evaluating whether to offer gifts to foreign government officials as a condition of contract award
In the case before us we are not told the amount of proposed gifts, but we take it in context that they would be substantial. Accordingly, they would clearly be a violation of the code if offered in the United State.
Roe Firm Gift Inducement Reasonable-Men Threshold Assessment
The BER applied the three-tier gift framework from Case 60-9 to conclude that the proposed gifts — substantial in amount, explicitly conditioned on contract award — would clearly violate the code if offered in the United States, and the same standard applies internationally.
Gift Inducement Reasonable-Men Contextual Threshold Constraint
Roe's firm was constrained to assess the proposed gifts to foreign government officials against the reasonable-men contextual threshold — asking whether reasonable persons would infer an ulterior motive — and the case confirms the gifts would clearly fail this test as they are substantial, directly transactional, and offered to officials in a position to influence contract awards.
BER Case 60-9 (domestic precedent); NSPE Code Section 11b
we are not told the amount of proposed gifts, but we take it in context that they would be substantial.
At the time of the foreign contract negotiation and gift demand
Accordingly, they would clearly be a violation of the code if offered in the United State.
Roe Firm International Engineering Procurement Competitive Integrity
NSPE BER analysis of the free and open competition principle as violated by the gift-conditioned contract award system in the foreign country.
International Engineering Procurement Competitive Integrity Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to pursue the foreign government engineering contract exclusively through merit-based and qualification-based means, refraining from the gift-for-contract arrangement that distorted fair competition and undermined the integrity of the international engineering procurement process.
There is no question under the factual situation that the gifts are a direct consideration for securing the work
Roe Firm International Practice Engineer Dishonor Avoidance
NSPE BER invocation of the profession's fundamental commitment to honor and integrity as the interpretive lens for the gift-giving prohibition in international practice.
International Engineering Practice Engineer Dishonor Avoidance Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to refrain from offering gifts to foreign government officials to secure the contract, recognizing that participation in such a corrupt payment scheme would bring dishonor on other engineers and on the engineering profession globally.
Roe Firm International Practice Profession Dishonor Avoidance
The BER's analysis establishes that participation in corrupt payment schemes in foreign markets constitutes conduct that dishonors the profession, consistent with the international practice dishonor avoidance constraint.
International Engineering Practice Profession Dishonor Avoidance Constraint
Roe's firm was constrained from offering gifts to foreign government officials to secure the contract, as such conduct would bring dishonor upon the engineering profession regardless of local cultural acceptance or legal permissibility.
Throughout the firm's international engineering practice
Roe Firm NSPE International Uniform Ethics Standard
The BER's analysis confirms that the flat prohibition in Section 11b applies to work in a foreign country regardless of whether local laws and customs permit gifts to government officials, establishing the uniform international application of the ethics standard.
Richard Roe / Roe's engineering firm as NSPE member
NSPE International Member Uniform Ethics Standard Constraint
Roe's firm, as an NSPE member practicing internationally, was constrained to apply the same uniform NSPE Code of Ethics standards as domestic members, without geographic carve-outs or context-adjusted relaxation based on the foreign country's legal environment or local business customs.
NSPE Code of Ethics; NSPE International Membership obligations; BER Cases 76-6, 96-5
The BER explicitly analogized Roe's situation to domestic cases where engineers and industrial firms offered financial payments to public officials to influence contract awards, rejecting the 'no choice / others were doing it' defense in both contexts.
Domestic Corrupt Procurement Analogy Non-Excuse Constraint
Roe's firm was constrained from invoking the 'no choice' or 'competitors were doing it' defense to justify compliance with the gift-giving demand, as the BER established that this rationalization fails in the final analysis and that the choice to decline corrupt procurement is always available.
NSPE Code Section 11b; BER Case 76-6; BER analysis of domestic architect-engineer payment scandals
it must of necessity fail in the final analysis.
Roe Firm No-Choice Defense Rejection Domestic Analogy
NSPE BER rejection of the 'no choice' competitive necessity defense; the Board drew an explicit analogy to domestic AE firm payment scandals where the same 'others were doing it' rationale was advanced and rejected.
Domestic Corrupt Procurement Analogy Non-Excuse Recognition Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to recognize that the 'no choice' defense — that competitors in other countries would comply with the gift-giving practice — does not constitute an ethical justification for participation, just as the same defense failed for domestic AE firms that paid public officials to influence contract awards, and that the choice to decline corrupt procurement participation was always available.
At the time of deciding whether to offer gifts and in any subsequent ethical defense
This approach is not dissimilar to the arguments advanced by those who have so recently been revealed as offering financial payments to public officials to influence the award of contracts for architect-engineer services. The rationale was 'We had no choice. Others were doing it, and if we did not we would not be considered.'
Roe Firm Non-Association Corrupt Gift Enterprise
The BER's analysis implicitly treats the foreign procurement system — which conditions contract awards on personal gifts to officials — as a corrupt enterprise with which the engineer cannot ethically associate, consistent with the non-association principle.
Non-Association with Fraudulent Enterprise Constraint
Roe's firm was constrained from associating itself in a business venture with a foreign procurement system that operates through covert corrupt payments to government officials, as such association would constitute permitting the firm's name to be used in connection with a fraudulent or dishonest enterprise.
At the time of the foreign contract negotiation and throughout any resulting project engagement
the choice of declining to be drawn into a seamy procedure for self-gain.
Roe Firm Off-Contract Implicit Gift Condition Non-Acquiescence
NSPE BER analysis of the gift condition as a direct consideration for securing work, with the Board noting there was 'no pretense about the intention of the foreign government officials' — the gift condition was explicit even if not written into the contract.
Off-Contract Implicit Gift Condition Non-Acquiescence Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to refuse to acquiesce to the implicit off-contract condition requiring personal gifts to foreign government officials as a prerequisite for contract award, recognizing that the deliberate exclusion of the gift condition from the written contract did not diminish the ethical prohibition — the covert nature of the arrangement heightened rather than reduced the ethical violation.
At the time of receiving the implicit gift condition from the foreign government official and deciding whether to comply
Roe Firm Public Welfare Non-Subordination to Corrupt Procurement
The BER explicitly rejected the argument that protecting domestic jobs or securing beneficial infrastructure projects could justify compliance with the gift-giving demand, establishing that public welfare arguments cannot override the categorical prohibition on corrupt payments.
Public Welfare Non-Subordination to Corrupt Procurement Gain Constraint
Roe's firm was constrained from invoking the public welfare benefit of the foreign engineering project — or the employment benefit to domestic workers — as a utilitarian justification for complying with the corrupt gift-giving demand, as the BER established that such pragmatic arguments cannot override the categorical prohibition.
even though some might argue o pragmatic grounds that United State commercial companies should 'go along' to protect the jobs of employees in this country, we cannot accept it for professional services.
Roe Firm Service-Before-Profit Claim Preservation
The BER grounded its prohibition not only in the literal code provision but in the profession's identity claim — that engineers place service before profit — and established that corrupt payment practices publicly compromise this claim regardless of their legality or local acceptance.
Service-Before-Profit Professional Claim Preservation Constraint
Roe's firm was constrained from offering gifts to foreign government officials because doing so would irreversibly compromise the engineering profession's foundational claim to place service before profit, a harm that no amount of rationalization or explanation could undo in the eyes of the public.
NSPE Code Section 11b; BER analysis of professional identity and public trust
At the time of the foreign contract negotiation and throughout the firm's professional practice
Roe Firm Service-Before-Profit Claim Preservation Failure
NSPE BER analysis of whether Roe's firm may offer gifts to foreign officials; the Board held that the profession's service-before-profit claim would be irreparably compromised in public perception by participation in the gift-for-contract system.
Service-Before-Profit Professional Claim Preservation Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to refrain from offering gifts to foreign government officials as a condition of contract award, because such conduct — if revealed — would publicly undermine the engineering profession's foundational claim to place service before profit, a harm that no pragmatic justification about competitive necessity or job preservation could remedy.
At the time of deciding whether to offer gifts to foreign government officials
Roe Firm Situational Ethics Non-Practice Foreign Context
NSPE BER rejection of the geographic/cultural context defense; the Board held that the flat prohibition in Section 11b applies to foreign work regardless of local laws and customs.
Situational Ethics Non-Practice in International Engineering Obligation
Roe's firm was obligated to apply the same ethical standard in the foreign country as it would domestically, refusing to adopt a geographically variable ethics standard that permits gift-giving abroad while prohibiting it at home.
Roe Firm When-in-Rome Ethics Erosion Prevention
The NSPE had briefly adopted a 'When in Rome' clause in 1966 permitting submission of tenders for foreign work when required by local laws or practices, but rescinded it in 1968 after recognizing that any such exception would chip away at ethical standards piece by piece.
Richard Roe / Roe's engineering firm / NSPE as institution
Ethics Standard Foreign-Exception Slippery Slope Prevention Constraint
Roe's firm was constrained from invoking a 'When in Rome' foreign-practice exception to the gift prohibition, and the NSPE was constrained from recognizing such an exception, because the NSPE Board of Directors had already rescinded the 'When in Rome' clause in 1968 precisely to prevent the chipping-away of ethical standards through foreign-practice exceptions.
NSPE Board of Directors January 1968 rescission of 'When in Rome' clause; NSPE Code Section 11b
Ongoing — the rescission established a permanent institutional constraint
the Board of Directors in January l968 rescinded the 'When in Rome' clause from the code as recommended by the Professional Engineers in Private Practice Section, which recognized a division of opinion on the policy but concluded, '... the profession should maintain a 'pure' position on competitive bidding; otherwise our opposition to competitive bidding will be chipped away, piece by piece.'
Roe Foreign Corrupt Payment Prohibition Recognition
Foreign Corrupt Payment Prohibition Recognition Capability
Roe must possess the capability to recognize that offering personal gifts to foreign government officials to obtain engineering contracts constitutes a corrupt payment prohibited by NSPE ethics codes, regardless of local legality.
Roe is advised that personal gifts to government officials are established practice and legally permitted in the foreign country, requiring him to recognize this as a prohibited corrupt payment under NSPE standards
Recognition that the gift-giving practice described by the foreign official — personal gifts to contract-awarding officials — falls within the category of corrupt payments prohibited by NSPE ethics provisions
Roe Foreign Official Gift Payment Prohibition
A high-ranking foreign government official has advised Roe that making personal gifts to contract-awarding officials is established practice, legal in that country, and that failure to comply will result in no further work and poor cooperation on the first contract.
Roe is absolutely prohibited from offering, authorizing, or making personal gifts or payments to the foreign government officials who are authorized to award the engineering contract, regardless of the legality of such gifts under the foreign country's law or the established local custom of gift-giving.
Throughout the contract negotiation and any subsequent performance period
Roe's firm is negotiating a contract in a foreign country where a high-ranking government official has advised that personal gifts to contract-awarding officials are an established and legal local practice, and that failure to give gifts will result in loss of future work and poor cooperation.
Roe is obligated to refrain from offering personal gifts to the foreign government officials who are authorized to award the engineering contract, regardless of the legality of such gifts under local law and regardless of the established local practice.
Throughout the contract negotiation and performance period
Roe Gift Inducement Contextual Threshold Calibration
Roe and his firm were required to apply the reasonable-men contextual threshold test to assess whether the proposed gifts to foreign government officials crossed from acceptable social custom into prohibited corrupt inducement
Roe's firm was considering whether to offer personal gifts to foreign government officials as a condition of obtaining an engineering contract in a foreign country
Application of the Case 60-9 three-level gift analysis framework to the foreign gift-giving scenario, recognizing that substantial gifts to contract-awarding officials clearly constitute corrupt inducements
we are not told the amount of proposed gifts, but we take it in context that they would be substantial. Accordingly, they would clearly be a violation of the code if offered in the United States.
cash payments to those in a position to influence decisions favorable or unfavorable to the giver are not in good taste and do immediately raise a suspicion that there is an ulterior motive
Roe Global Engineering Ethics Uniform Standard Advocacy
Global Engineering Ethics Uniform Standard Institutional Advocacy Capability
The NSPE Ethics Committee must possess the capability to recognize and articulate the institutional imperative of applying uniform ethics standards to all NSPE members regardless of practice jurisdiction, and to advocate for this position in the context of international engineering practice.
The NSPE BER must articulate why uniform standards apply to Roe's international practice, providing the institutional rationale for extraterritorial ethics jurisdiction
Recognition that differential ethics standards for domestic vs. international practice would undermine the NSPE Code's meaning and application in the period of heightened global engineering practice
Roe Home-Country Law Non-Excuse Recognition
Home-Country Law Non-Excuse for NSPE Ethics Compliance Capability
Roe must possess the capability to recognize that the legality of gift-giving under the foreign country's law does not constitute an ethical justification for conduct that violates NSPE ethics provisions.
The foreign official explicitly advises that the gift-giving practice 'is legal in that country,' presenting a legal-permissibility argument that Roe must recognize as insufficient to excuse NSPE ethics violations
Recognition that local legal permissibility of gift-giving does not excuse NSPE ethics non-compliance
Roe Honorable Procurement Conduct Self-Regulation
Honorable Procurement Conduct Self-Regulation Capability
Roe must possess the capability to conduct himself honorably, responsibly, and fairly in the foreign procurement process, refraining from gift-giving and ensuring that his competitive conduct is consistent with the spirit and letter of professional ethics codes.
Roe is competing for a foreign government contract in a context where gift-giving provides competitive advantage and is practiced by other firms, requiring him to self-regulate his procurement conduct to maintain honorable standards
Self-regulation of procurement conduct to exclude gift-giving even when it would provide competitive advantage and is practiced by competing firms
The firm is negotiating for a contract in a foreign country
Roe Host-Country Legal Permissibility Non-Excuse
The high-ranking government official explicitly advises Roe that the gift-giving practice 'is legal in that country,' which Roe might otherwise treat as a sufficient ethical defense.
Home-Country Legal Permissibility Non-Excuse for NSPE Ethics Violation Obligation
Roe is obligated to recognize that the legality of gift-giving under the foreign country's law does not constitute an ethical justification for conduct that violates the NSPE Code of Ethics, and to conform his conduct to the higher NSPE ethical standard.
At the time of contract negotiation and throughout the engagement
Roe International Cross-Cultural Norm Conflict Navigation
International Engineering Ethics Cross-Cultural Norm Conflict Navigation Capability
Roe must possess the capability to identify, analyze, and correctly resolve the conflict between the host country's legal and cultural norm permitting gift-giving and the NSPE Code of Ethics prohibition on corrupt payments.
Roe faces a direct conflict between the host country's established legal and cultural practice of gift-giving and his NSPE ethics obligations, requiring sophisticated cross-cultural norm conflict navigation
Analysis of the conflict between local legal permissibility, cultural normalization, and NSPE ethics standards, with correct resolution in favor of NSPE compliance
Roe International Engineering Procurement Competitive Integrity
International Engineering Procurement Competitive Integrity Capability
Roe and his firm were required to pursue the foreign government engineering contract exclusively through merit-based and honest competitive means, refraining from gift-giving or other corrupt procurement practices
Roe's firm was competing for a foreign government engineering contract in a procurement environment where gift-giving to officials is an established practice
Recognition that the engineering contract must be pursued through qualifications-based means rather than through gift-conditioned procurement
He will not pay, or offer to pay, either directly or indirectly, any commission, political contribution, or a gift, or other consideration in order to secure work
Roe International Practice Profession Dishonor Avoidance
Participation in a corrupt payment scheme, even one framed as culturally accepted gift-giving, would dishonor the engineering profession in the international arena.
Roe is prohibited from participating in the foreign gift-giving practice because doing so would bring dishonor upon the engineering profession, regardless of the local cultural acceptance of such practices.
NSPE Code of Ethics Section II.1.d; BER Cases 76-6, 96-5
Roe International Practice Slippery Slope Ethical Consequence Reasoning
International Practice Slippery Slope Ethical Consequence Reasoning Capability
Roe and his firm were required to reason about the systemic consequences of permitting foreign-practice exceptions to ethics standards, recognizing that such exceptions would progressively weaken domestic standards
Roe's firm needed to assess whether a pragmatic 'go along' approach to foreign gift-giving was ethically acceptable
Recognition that accepting the 'go along' philosophy for foreign work would lead to 'chipping away' of ethical standards and eventual contention that such conduct should be accepted domestically
Roe International Practice Slippery Slope Reasoning
The NSPE Ethics Committee must possess the capability to reason about the systemic consequences of permitting situational ethics in international engineering practice, recognizing that allowing host-country minimal standards would progressively weaken protections for host-country citizens and undermine global engineering ethics integrity.
The NSPE BER must reason about the broader institutional consequences of permitting Roe to apply only host-country standards, informing the policy rationale for extraterritorial ethics application
Articulation of why uniform ethics standards serve public welfare of host-country populations and why differential standards create a race-to-the-bottom dynamic
Roe International Procurement Competitive Integrity
The gift-conditioned contract award system in the foreign country corrupts the free and open competition that engineering ethics requires; Roe must refuse to participate in this system.
Roe is obligated to pursue the foreign government engineering contract exclusively through merit-based and honest competitive means, refraining from corrupt payments or improper inducements that distort fair competition.
During contract negotiation and procurement
Roe Local Custom Legality Invoked as Ethics Justification
From the moment the foreign official presents local legality and peer conformity arguments through Roe's ethical determination
Local Custom Legality Invoked as Ethics Justification State
Richard Roe's ethical deliberation in response to foreign official's justificatory arguments
Roe's definitive rejection or acceptance of the local-custom justification
Foreign official asserts that gift-giving is legal, established practice, and followed by other firms — presenting a multi-pronged justification for compliance
Roe Local Intermediary Corrupt Payment Non-Participation
The off-contract nature of the gift condition creates a risk that Roe might attempt to structure the payment through intermediaries to maintain formal deniability, which is equally prohibited.
Local Intermediary Corrupt Payment Facilitation Non-Participation Constraint
Roe is prohibited from structuring any arrangement — including through local partners, agents, or intermediaries — that would result in corrupt payments or gifts reaching the foreign government officials, even if such arrangements place formal legal distance between Roe's firm and the payment.
NSPE Code of Ethics Sections II.5.b, III.6, III.7; BER Case 96-5
make personal gifts to the governmental officials who are authorized to award the contracts
Roe NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Compliance
Roe's firm is pursuing a contract in a foreign country where it has not previously worked, and the NSPE Code provisions on corrupt payments and competitive integrity apply fully to this international engagement.
NSPE International Member Extraterritorial Ethics Compliance Obligation
Roe is obligated to comply with all applicable NSPE Code of Ethics provisions in his firm's international engineering practice in the foreign country, recognizing that his NSPE membership obligations apply extraterritorially.
The firm is negotiating for a contract in a foreign country in which it has not worked previously.
Roe NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Jurisdiction Self-Application
NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Jurisdiction Self-Application Capability
Roe was required to recognize that NSPE Code of Ethics provisions — specifically Section 11b — apply to his firm's international engineering practice in the foreign country, regardless of the absence of U.S. legal jurisdiction
Roe's firm was pursuing a contract in a foreign country where gift-giving is legal and customary, raising the question of whether NSPE ethics apply extraterritorially
Recognition that the flat prohibition in Section 11b applies to work in a foreign country
Roe NSPE Extraterritorial Ethics Self-Application
Roe must possess the capability to recognize that NSPE Code of Ethics provisions apply to his firm's international engineering practice in the foreign country, regardless of the absence of U.S. legal jurisdiction there.
Roe's firm is negotiating a contract in a foreign country where U.S. law does not apply, requiring him to recognize that NSPE ethics obligations nonetheless govern his conduct
Self-application of NSPE ethics standards to the foreign procurement context, recognizing that NSPE membership obligations follow the engineer across jurisdictions
Roe NSPE Uniform Ethics Standard International Application
The foreign official invokes local legal permissibility and established custom to argue that the gift-giving practice is acceptable, implicitly suggesting that different ethical standards apply in the foreign jurisdiction.
Roe, as an NSPE member, is bound by the same uniform NSPE Code of Ethics standards in his firm's foreign operations as he would be domestically, and cannot apply a relaxed or context-adjusted ethics standard based on the foreign country's legal environment or local business customs.
NSPE Code of Ethics; BER Cases 76-6, 96-5
Throughout all international engineering practice by Roe's firm
Roe and his firm were required to recognize and reject the 'no choice' competitive necessity argument and to identify that the genuine ethical alternative — declining to participate in corrupt procurement — was always available
Roe's firm faced competitive pressure from other firms that had complied with the foreign gift-giving practice, creating an apparent 'no choice' situation
Recognition that the 'no choice' defense advanced by other companies does not constitute ethical justification, and that the choice to decline corrupt participation is always available
Roe Non-Association Corrupt Gift Enterprise
The foreign government's contract award system — which deliberately excludes the gift condition from the written contract while requiring it in practice — constitutes a fraudulent enterprise that Roe must not associate his firm with.
Non-Association with Fraudulent Enterprise Obligation
Roe is obligated to refrain from associating his firm in a business venture with a procurement system that operates through covert corrupt payments to government officials, as such a system constitutes a fraudulent or dishonest enterprise.
Roe is further advised that while the condition is not to be included in the contract, his failure to make the gifts will result in no further work being awarded to the firm
At the time of contract negotiation and decision whether to proceed
Roe Non-Association Corrupt Procurement Enterprise
Non-Association with Corrupt Procurement Enterprise Capability
Roe must possess the capability to recognize that the foreign government's procurement system — which operates through covert corrupt gift payments — constitutes a fraudulent enterprise with which his firm should not associate, even though the underlying engineering work would be legitimate.
The foreign procurement system is described as operating through established gift-giving to contract-awarding officials — a systemic corrupt structure that Roe must recognize as a fraudulent enterprise incompatible with professional association
Recognition that participation in a procurement system structurally dependent on corrupt payments constitutes association with a fraudulent enterprise, triggering an obligation to decline participation
Roe Off-Contract Covert Gift Condition Transparency Violation
The foreign official has explicitly stated that the gift condition 'is not to be included in the contract,' making the covert nature of the arrangement an independent ethical violation beyond the gift prohibition itself.
Off-Contract Covert Gift Condition Transparency Violation Constraint
Roe is independently prohibited from acquiescing to the gift condition by virtue of its deliberate exclusion from the written contract, which signals the covert and improper nature of the arrangement and independently violates Roe's professional obligations of openness and transparency.
NSPE Code of Ethics Sections II.1.d, II.5.b; Engineer Openness and Transparency Norm
Roe Off-Contract Implicit Gift Condition Non-Acquiescence
The government official explicitly advises Roe that the gift condition 'is not to be included in the contract,' creating a covert off-contract arrangement designed to maintain a facade of contractual legitimacy while concealing the corrupt payment scheme.
Roe is obligated to refuse to acquiesce to the off-contract, implicit gift condition, recognizing that the deliberate exclusion of the gift requirement from the written contract does not reduce — and in fact heightens — the ethical prohibition against participating in this covert corrupt arrangement.
Roe Off-Contract Implicit Gift Condition Recognition
Off-Contract Implicit Gift Condition Recognition and Refusal Capability
Roe must possess the capability to recognize that the gift requirement — deliberately excluded from the written contract but communicated as an implicit condition — constitutes an improper off-contract condition that must be refused.
The foreign official explicitly states that 'the condition is not to be included in the contract' while simultaneously conditioning future work on gift compliance — a structural feature Roe must recognize as an improper off-contract implicit condition
Recognition that the deliberate exclusion of the gift requirement from the contract text, combined with its communication as a de facto condition, makes it an improper implicit condition requiring refusal
Roe Procurement Competition Honorable Conduct International
Roe's firm is competing for a foreign engineering contract in a market where gift-giving to officials is an established practice used by competing firms to obtain contracts.
Procurement Competition Honorable Conduct Constraint
Roe is required to pursue the foreign engineering contract exclusively through honorable, merit-based competitive means, and is prohibited from using gift payments to government officials as a competitive tool to obtain the contract.
NSPE Code of Ethics Sections II.5, III.6, III.7
Throughout the contract negotiation and competitive procurement process
Roe Professional Honor Preservation International
As president and CEO of an engineering firm with international experience, Roe's decision about whether to offer gifts to foreign officials carries profession-wide reputational implications for engineering practice internationally.
Professional Honor and Reputation Preservation in Competence Decisions Obligation
Roe is obligated to conduct himself in a manner that preserves the honor and reputation of the engineering profession in his international practice, refusing to participate in gift-giving arrangements that would dishonor the profession globally.
Throughout all professional conduct in international practice
Roe Professional Honor Preservation International Practice
Professional Honor and Reputation Preservation in International Practice Capability
Roe must possess the capability to recognize that his conduct in the foreign procurement context reflects on the honor and reputation of the engineering profession, and to conduct himself in a manner that preserves rather than compromises that professional honor.
As president and CEO of an engineering firm with international experience, Roe's conduct in the foreign procurement context carries reputational implications for the engineering profession that he must recognize and act upon
Recognition that participation in corrupt gift-giving would compromise the honor and reputation of the engineering profession in the international arena, and prioritization of professional integrity over business gain
Roe Public Welfare Non-Subordination Corrupt Procurement
Roe's firm is negotiating for an engineering contract in a foreign country, and the social value of the engineering work could be invoked as a utilitarian justification for complying with the gift demand.
Roe cannot justify compliance with the gift-giving demand by invoking the public welfare benefit of the engineering project that his firm would perform, because the integrity of the procurement process is itself a component of public welfare that cannot be traded against project outcomes.
Roe Service-Before-Profit Professional Claim Integrity Preservation
Roe and his firm were required to recognize that offering gifts to foreign officials would compromise the engineering profession's foundational claim of placing service before profit and to refrain from conduct that would undermine this claim
Roe's firm faced the temptation to offer gifts to secure a foreign government contract, which would have compromised the profession's service-before-profit claim
Recognition that corrupt gift-giving, regardless of its foreign legal permissibility, is repugnant to basic ethical principles and compromises the profession's service-before-profit identity
Roe Situational Ethics Non-Practice International
Roe is operating in a foreign country where gift-giving to contract-awarding officials is described as an established and legal local practice, creating pressure to adopt a locally-adapted ethical standard.
Roe is obligated to apply the same ethical standards in the foreign country as he would apply domestically, refusing to adopt a different ethical standard based on the geographic or cultural context of the host country.
Roe Voluntary NSPE Membership Full Code Non-Selective Compliance
The foreign official's argument that local law permits gift-giving implicitly invites Roe to treat the NSPE gift prohibition as inapplicable in the foreign context, which would constitute selective non-compliance with the Code.
Voluntary Membership Full Code Acceptance Non-Selective Compliance Constraint
Roe's voluntary NSPE membership constitutes unconditional acceptance of the full NSPE Code of Ethics, prohibiting him from selectively applying only those provisions that are convenient in the foreign context while disregarding the gift prohibition because of local legal permissibility or competitive pressure.
Roe When-in-Rome Situational Ethics Argument
From the moment Roe receives the local-custom justification through his final ethical determination
it is established practice for those awarded contracts to make personal gifts
Situational Ethics Prohibition Precedent Active State
Richard Roe's ethical reasoning regarding local gift-giving practice
Roe's definitive ethical determination applying or rejecting the situational ethics argument
other firms have adhered to the local practice
Foreign official invokes local legality and established custom as justification for gift-giving, implicitly raising a 'When in Rome' argument
Roe When-in-Rome Situational Ethics Rejection
When-in-Rome Situational Ethics Rejection Capability
Roe must possess the capability to recognize and reject the 'When in Rome' reasoning that because gift-giving is legal and customary in the foreign country, it is ethically permissible for him to participate.
The foreign official advises that the practice is legal and established locally, and that other firms have adhered to it — presenting a classic 'When in Rome' justification that Roe must be capable of identifying and rejecting
Rejection of the argument that local legal permissibility and cultural normalization of gift-giving practices justifies NSPE ethics non-compliance
Roe's firm negotiations for foreign contract during current case analysis period (mid-1970s)
Service Before Profit Claim Undermined by Foreign Gift-Giving
The Board held that offering gifts to foreign officials to secure contracts publicly undermines the engineering profession's foundational claim to place service before profit — the conduct is repugnant not only because it violates a specific code provision but because it visibly compromises the profession's defining self-representation and public trust foundation
The public perception test — whether the conduct, if known, would undermine the profession's service-before-profit claim — operates as an independent ethical criterion beyond specific code compliance, reflecting the identity-constitutive dimension of professional ethics
Service Before Profit as Professional Identity Principle
The service-before-profit principle resolves the tension by establishing that no pragmatic rationalization can overcome the reputational and identity damage caused by conduct that publicly signals profit-seeking over service
Situational Ethics Rejection Invoked Against Geographic Context Defense
Roe cannot adopt a different ethical standard for his foreign practice than he would apply domestically; the geographic and cultural context of the foreign country does not create an exception to his professional ethics obligations
The principle prevents engineers from treating international practice as an ethical 'free zone' where different standards apply; the consistency of professional ethics across contexts is essential to their integrity and credibility
Situational ethics are rejected categorically; the diplomatic navigation obligation provides guidance on how to handle the conflict without changing the substantive ethical standard
Situational Ethics Rejection in Foreign Gift-Giving Context
The Board rejected the argument that professional ethics obligations should vary based on the geographic location and legal environment of the engagement — specifically rejecting the proposition that foreign work creates a different ethical regime where gift-giving to officials is permissible because it is locally legal and customary
Professional ethics obligations are geographically invariant — the same standards apply in foreign jurisdictions as in domestic practice, and the foreign legal and cultural context cannot create a situational exception to core prohibitions
The situational ethics rejection principle resolves the tension by treating geographic and cultural context as ethically irrelevant to the application of core professional obligations
{'jurisdiction': 'US-based firm operating internationally', 'ethical_code': 'NSPE Code of Ethics Section 11b', 'dilemma': 'Whether to offer gifts legally permitted in host country to secure contracts'}
The engineering firm at the center of the ethics opinion, which is considering whether to offer gifts to foreign government officials as required by local custom in order to secure engineering contracts abroad. The firm faces the ethical question of whether NSPE Section 11b's prohibition on gift-giving applies extraterritorially.
{'type': 'client', 'target': 'Foreign Government Contract Authority'}
{'type': 'ethical_obligation', 'target': 'NSPE Code Section 11b'}
there is a choice--the choice of declining to be drawn into a seamy procedure for self-gain
we cannot accept it for professional services
When in Rome Clause Rescission as Ethics Code Erosion Prevention
The NSPE Board of Directors rescinded the 'When in Rome' clause in January 1968 specifically because the Professional Engineers in Private Practice Section recognized that permitting competitive bidding exceptions for foreign work would erode the profession's domestic competitive bidding position piece by piece — a direct institutional application of the erosion-prevention principle
The rescission of the 'When in Rome' clause demonstrates that the profession has already resolved the foreign-exception question in favor of code integrity over pragmatic accommodation, and this resolution is precedentially binding on the current gift-giving analysis
The erosion-prevention rationale prevailed over the pragmatic 'When in Rome' accommodation, establishing that code integrity takes precedence over competitive disadvantage in foreign markets
after further discussion and debate, the Board of Directors in January l968 rescinded the 'When in Rome' clause from the code as recommended by the Professional Engineers in Private Practice Section, which recognized a division of opinion on the policy but concluded, '... the profession should maintain a 'pure' position on competitive bidding; otherwise our opposition to competitive bidding will be chipped away, piece by piece.'
adoption of 'When in Rome' clause (July 1966) before rescission of 'When in Rome' clause (January 1968)
foreign bribery press reports before current case analysis
further discussion and debate during period between July 1966 and January 1968
gift to chief engineer finishes project completion
inflation since 1960 during period from 1960 to current case analysis
rescission of 'When in Rome' clause (January 1968) before current case analysis (mid-1970s)
revelation of domestic financial payments to public officials before current case analysis