MORAL ALIENATION AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTOR OF CORRUPTION

The purpose of the study is to consider moral alienation as one of the psychological mechanisms used by corrupt officials to justify their actions. Research results. The article examines the general mechanism and components of the alienation of moral responsibility, as a phenomenon that is constructed in the experience of a corrupt person and protects his self-esteem at the expense of not applying internal moral sanctions to himself in the conditions of opposing his own behaviour to generally accepted moral norms. The existence of a cognitive mechanism that reinterprets morality in a person in such a way that moral self-regulation is blocked or even does not work has been revealed. Alienation of moral responsibility is presented as an important psychological construct, the application of which to the description and explanation of such a socio-legal phenomenon as corruption is productive and useful for predicting corrupt behaviour. Conclusions. Foreign studies were analysed, which show various contexts of corruption implemented in recent years; a grouping of the collected scientific material was carried out, taking into account the great heterogeneity of the presented works, and those of them were singled out, which reveal precisely the psychological perspectives of the given topic; the largest thorough empirical studies are analysed; a synthesis of the obtained material was carried out and further possible directions of scientific research were determined. Key words: justification, cognitive reconstruction, corruption, moral selfregulation, moral alienation, moral standards.