Abstract
A theory of political corruption must give a plausible descriptive account of what counts as politically corrupt conduct, and a plausible normative account of the reasons why (if any) such conduct is wrongful, and distinctively so. On Ceva and Ferretti's sophisticated descriptive and normative account of corruption if and only if the act is carried out by a public official acting in her capacity as officeholder, and she knowingly acts to ends which are not congruent with the terms of her mandate. By their own admission, Ceva and Ferretti focus for the most part on just, or nearly just, regimes – which include democratic regimes. In this paper, I probe the strength and implications of their account for political corruption in clearly unjust regimes, in which individuals’ basic civil, political and socio-economic rights are routinely and systematically violated. I argue that their account does not straightforwardly apply to these cases, and that their cursory treatment of all-things-considered justified corruption in those regimes exposes a gap in their account of corruption.
Introduction
A theory of political corruption must give a plausible descriptive account of what counts as politically corrupt conduct, and a plausible normative account of the reasons why (if any) such conduct is wrongful, and distinctively so. Not all abuses of political office count as corruption. There is a difference between, e.g., using one's office as a supposedly authoritative platform from which to claim that one's political opponent has ‘stolen the election’, and using one's office illicitly to channel public funds towards one's electoral campaign so as to defeat one's opponent. The latter is a clear case of corrupt behaviour; the former, however one may want to call it, is not. We need to know why.
On Ceva and Ferretti's sophisticated descriptive and normative account of corruption (2021: 19), political corruption occurs if and only if:
The act is carried out by a public official acting in her capacity as officeholder – or the She knowingly acts to ends which “may not be vindicated as coherent within the terms of the mandate of her powers of office” – or the
O
By their own admission, Ceva and Ferretti focus for the most part on just, or nearly just, regimes – which include democratic regimes – though they aver that their account also illuminates the problem of corruption in unjust regimes. 2 By their lights (2021: 106, 111), a clearly unjust regime is one in which individuals’ basic civil, political and socio-economic rights are routinely and systematically violated.
In this paper, I probe the strength and implications of their account for political corruption in such regimes. I argue that their account does not straightforwardly apply to these cases, and that their cursory treatment of all-things-considered justified corruption in those regimes exposes a gap in their account of corruption.
Unjustified corruption in unjust regimes
Assume that their account offers the correct diagnosis of the phenomenon and wrongfulness of corruption in (nearly) just regimes. For example, suppose that Official is an FBI agent. In the course of an otherwise legitimate undercover operation aiming to dismantle a far-right terrorist network, he discovers compromising information of a sexual nature on the President of an Ivy League university. He instructs his subalterns to haul the President in for (ostensibly) interrogation, and when on his own with him in the interrogation room, blackmails him into making an offer of a university place to his underachieving son.
This is a clear case of corruption. Official's mandate is to do his institutionally defined share in furthering the ends to which the FBI was set up – to wit, protect the United States from terrorist attacks. 3 He cannot justify his actions to his subalterns in terms coherent with his (and their) mandate. He is aptly described as corrupt, and aptly judged to commit a wrongdoing.
On the face of it, the point applies to political corruption in profoundly unjust regimes. Not everything which a grievously unjust regime does is unjust: even in such a regime – even, for example, in Soviet Russia – murderers and rapists are liable to being prosecuted and punished, the public infrastructure needs to be maintained, etc. Suppose that Official is a police detective in 1960s Moscow, tasked with investigating what appears to be serial killings of prostitutes. He uncovers evidence leading him to suspect that the son of a high-ranking member of the Communist Party might be involved. He takes a bribe to look the other way. This is a clear case of political corruption: His mandate, which is legitimate, is to arrest the serial killer. He is appropriately accountable to his fellow police officers and owes it to them to act in accordance with that mandate.
So far, so good. In cases such as these, Ceva and Ferretti have highlighted an important and neglected dimension of corruption, namely that it does consist (in part – I shall return to this point below) in dereliction of officeholders’ duties to one another.
Now suppose that the Official is a member of the KGB. His mandate is to gather compromising information on ordinary citizens and other officials for the sake of rooting out political opponents. He discovers that the ostensibly heterosexual President of Moscow University is having an adulterous affair with another man and uses what he has uncovered as a means to get his underachieving son a place at this University.
This is another clear case of corruption, which Ceva and Ferretti's account will handle, descriptively speaking, as follows: by dint of his position as a KGB member, Official has various rights which he ought to exercise solely for the sake of protecting the USSR from enemies within and without. He cannot justify using his position to blackmail the President in terms that are coherent with that mandate. In so far as he breaches the mandate condition, he acts in a corrupt manner. By contrast, a parent who is not an officeholder, who chances upon similarly compromising information about the President of the University, and who blackmails him into getting her underserving daughter a university place, is not aptly described as corrupt.
But now a difficulty arises. Both Official and the parent commit a wrongdoing. I take it that Ceva and Ferretti would agree. It also seems that what the Official does is in some respect worse other things equal than what the parent does. However, their account cannot explain why, normatively speaking, Official qua official acts wrongfully by taking advantage of the President's adulterous affair for personal gain, and does so in a way that differentiates his conduct from the parent's. For de jure, his mandate – more broadly, the mandate of KGB officers in general – is grievously unjust: it is a mandate to suppress any opposition to a totalitarian regime, by whatever means (blackmail, torture, extortion, assassination, etc.) necessary. True, his subalterns, whom he has dispatched to the President's house, unwittingly act on the false pretence of rooting out political opponents. But given that this particular enterprise is wrongful, it is hard to see why Official owes it to them not to deceive them in this way. Yet, it is precisely because he is derelict in this way that we are meant to see his conduct, qua officeholder, as distinctively wrongful.
As we shall see presently, Ceva and Ferretti accept that officials of grievously unjust regimes whose mandate is to perpetuate such injustice do not owe such duties to one another. If so, then they seem committed to the view that although the KGB officer is corrupt, it is not that which makes his conduct wrongful. We thus need to know what is the normative pay-off of identifying his conduct as corrupt, and what is wrongful about it – setting aside the seemingly irrelevant fact that it is corrupt – and whether it is distinctively wrongful. I lack the space to elaborate here, but a salient moral difference between Official and the parent is that the former, unlike the latter, abuses his office in a way that causes unwarranted harm to the victim of his blackmail. The scope of the mandate condition, in other words, must be widened beyond officeholders’ duties to one another, to encompass duties owed to those over whom officeholders exercise power. In the next section, I develop this point by reflecting on Ceva and Ferretti's brief remarks on another kind of corruption in unjust regimes.
Justified corruption as a form of resistance
The KGB officer who blackmails a University President to advance his son's studies compounds the injustice of the regime which he serves. Now consider a case in which an officeholder mitigates, indeed fights, that injustice. Suppose, for example, that Official is an outwardly committed Nazi who works in the Third Reich's interior ministry and is in charge of hunting down and deporting Jews. Instead, he helps hundreds of Jews escape by forging documents. 4
Ceva and Ferretti claim that, in this and relevantly similar cases, (a) there is corruption, (b) it is a prima facie violation of Official's duty to other officeholders but (c) it is all things considered morally justified. As they put it, “the duty of office accountability ….loses its normative force when its violations reveal the deeper injustice of the very terms of the mandate and of the normative order that the corrupt officeholder fails by her action.” (2021: 111).
I entirely agree with this last claim. Indeed, it is critical to my analysis of the KGB official's conduct above. But note that on their account, both the KGB Official who blackmails the University President to advance his son's university education and the Nazi Official who helps Jews escape are (descriptively) corrupt in so far as they both act outside the scope of their mandate. The difference between the two cases is a normative one: whereas the KGB officer lacks a justification for engaging in corruption, the Nazi official does have one – in the imperative of protecting as many Jews as he can from extermination.
I suspect that many will resist the thought that the KGB officer and the Nazi official are both corrupt, descriptively speaking. Some will argue that the KGB officer is corrupt but that the Nazi Official is not; others will claim that neither is aptly described as corrupt, on the grounds that, however they act, their mandate is illegitimate. 5
Let us grant for the sake of argument that the Nazi official's conduct can be aptly described as corrupt. In that sense, corruption would be akin to deception, manipulation, disobedience to the law, indeed treason: it is presumptively wrongful, yet the presumption can in principle be overridden by appeal to weightier moral imperatives – here, the imperative of protecting fundamental rights. What makes his corruption morally justified (assuming that we can speak of corruption) is that it subverts a grievous injustice – period.
By that token, corruption is not merely justified in such cases: it is morally mandatory. By dint of his official position, the Nazi official is uniquely placed to protect Jews from the gas chambers. Now, in general, we all are under a pro tanto directed duty to third parties to protect them from unwarranted grievous harms. Furthermore, our duty to protect is the more stringent for the fact that we are implicated in the institutional structures which imposes those harms: under those circumstances, our duty to protect is a duty to rectify wrongdoings for which we are partly responsible. When our involvement in those structures takes the form of an official position, we are under a role-based rectificatory duty to protect those victims. 6 The Nazi official, thus, is under a role-based rectificatory duty to Jewish victims of the Holocaust to help them escape.
Ceva and Ferretti clearly agree that we are under a pro tanto duty to protect third parties from unwarranted harm. I also suspect that they would endorse the duty in its directed form, as one which we owe to victims of such harms (as distinct from undirected duties, which we do not owe to anyone in particular.) 7 This exposes an oddity in their account of the wrongfulness of corruption in general. Recall that on their account, what makes corruption qua corruption wrong (when it is) is the fact that Official violates his duty of accountability to fellow officials. However, as the example of the Nazi official suggests, our moral evaluation of officials’ conduct is rooted in the degree to which, in fulfilling their mandate, they respect the moral rights of individuals who are subject to their directives. It seems odd, then, to locate the wrong of corruption solely in a dereliction of duty to fellow officeholders, and not also in a dereliction of duty to those individuals. Irrespective of the nature of the regime under which they live, a University President has a right not to be blackmailed – in general, and in particular by officeholders in a position of authority – into awarding an underserved university place; indeed, aspiring students have a right that such places be accorded on the basis of merit rather than of who one's father is; taxpayers have a right that the proceed of taxation be used to fund public infrastructure and not be diverted into the pockets of officeholders, and so on.
To be clear, I do not deny that the wrong of corruption can sometimes involve a dereliction of one's duty of accountability to other officeholders: this, in fact, is what distinguishes some cases of corruption from other kinds of official abuses, such as (to return to an earlier example), using the putative authority of one's official position to peddle the false claim that the election has been stolen. My claim, rather, is that the corrupt officeholder who lacks an overriding justification for engaging in corruption is guilty of wrongdoing vis-à-vis those individuals as well – indeed, in some cases, such as the KGB officer blackmailing the University President, only vis-à-vis them.
Conclusion
Ceva and Ferretti offer a powerful descriptive and normative account of political corruption in (nearly) just regimes. One of its many merits is that it can accommodate some cases of clearly corrupt conducts in unjust regimes, to wit, cases in which the official's mandate, notwithstanding the fact that the regime is unjust, is itself morally justified. It is not clear however that their account can accommodate cases in which the mandate, though internally justified by the ends of the regime, is morally unjustified. I suggest, in closing, that a plausible account of political corruption must incorporate the view that corruption consists, first and foremost, in a violation of the duties which officials owe, qua officials, to those whom they are both entrusted and authorized to serve. 8
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
