There are two groups of people who understand the effectiveness of bribery: dictators and parents. At some point between the ages of 18 months and three, children acquire a grasp of banana republic economics that would awe a Colombian drugs baron.

As parenting techniques go, however, bribery is the last resort of the truly desperate and not something about which to boast at the toddler-group coffee morning. Long term it is a disaster, reinforcing bad behaviour and selfishness. It assumes a baseness on the part of the recipients and a cynicism on the part of the bribers.

The news that it is to become official policy in Dundee, where the nicotine-stained palms of smokers are to be greased by the health board in return for giving up the wicked weed, comes as something of a surprise, then. NHS Tayside, in a joint venture with the Scottish government, is planning to pay up to half a million pounds of taxpayers’ money to Dundonians who quit smoking.

Under the scheme, residents will be given £12.50 a week for a maximum of 12 weeks. The money will be put on a card which can be redeemed in supermarkets for groceries but not alcohol or cigarettes. Smokers need to prove they have stopped smoking for three months to qualify for the payout and they will be subjected to breath tests to ensure they don’t cheat.

The health board hopes 900 puffers will avail themselves of the £150 payola over the next two years. The scheme, which has the backing of health minister Shona Robison, is to be rolled out nationwide if it is successful.

You can see why it appeals to politicians. Smoking is the single biggest cause of ill health in the country. About 36,000 Dundonians are believed to smoke, many of them living in the most deprived areas of the city where the smoking rate is 41%, compared with 13% in the most affluent areas. The money doled out would be dwarfed by the eventual savings to the health service if all those targeted gave up for life. By trading cash for fags, politicians are dealing with two ills at once. And when it comes to vote-winners, instant cash handouts are right up there with tax cuts.

However, if you are setting alight to £8-a-day and inhaling the toxic fumes, £12.50 a week is hardly going to be much of an inducement. Those for whom money is an incentive will already have stopped and pocketed the cash they spent on cigarettes. There is something deeply unsettling about this use of public money and not just because it is so obviously open to abuse. We’ve spent the last decade instructing teenagers not to start smoking, only to tell them they can get a few quid every week if they do.

But it is more than just the illogicality of it that is so bothering. We have become so used to political expediency, to the setting of short-term targets and the promotion of instant fixes that we are in danger of losing sight of what is really at stake here.

Once the state starts paying subjects to behave in particular ways, a precedent has been set. The relationship between the state and citizen is subtly changed. At the heart of this debate is motivation. Does it matter what motivates somebody to behave well? I think it does.

Good health — like a good education, good manners or a safe community — should be valued for its own sake. If the only way we can get people to behave responsibly is by bribing them, then any notion of civic duty or altruism is lost. Once a society stops questioning the means because it desperately wants the end, the basic premise of democracy starts to erode.

Where will it stop? Do we pay teenage girls not to get pregnant; heroin addicts not to shoot up; criminals to stop breaking laws; wife-beaters to stop abusing their partners or paedophiles to stop abusing children?

It was one of Mrs Thatcher’s advisors who described the Scots as “a nation of subsidy junkies”. That is as false as it is offensive, but government dishing out cash to smokers alters economic relationships. Money is something that should be earned. If you want to see the debilitating effect of state handouts, drive through the deprived parts of any Scottish city and count the number of able-bodied young men hanging around on street corners or lounging in doorways.

Scotland grapples with a number of intransigent problems of which ill-health is only one. We know from bitter experience that there are no quick fixes. Long-term proven strategies consistently implemented will chip away at them over time.

Politicians, on a four-year election cycle, inevitably feel the need for instant solutions. Targets are set and cynically manipulated. Gimmicks are introduced and then quietly abandoned. Civil liberties and personal freedoms are subverted in a rush for results.

“The taking of a bribe or gratuity should be punished with as severe penalties as the defrauding of the state,” wrote William Penn, the Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania. But what if it is the state that is doing the bribing?

We have seen what happens in other countries when the state uses favours to further its own ends. It may seem a leap from paying a few wheezy souls in Dundee to give up smoking to the corruption of large swathes of Africa or South America, but there is a principle at stake here.

If Scotland is to become a country which bribes people into behaving in ways deemed acceptable by the government, we should at least have a debate about it. We all know money talks. What it has to say is not always edifying.

gillian.bowditch@sunday-times.co.uk