## 1. Varieties of Corruption



Consider one of the most popular of the standard longstanding
definitions, namely, "Corruption is the abuse of power by a
public official for private
 gain".[2]
 No doubt the abuse of public offices for private gain is paradigmatic
of corruption. But when a bettor bribes a boxer to "throw"
a fight this is corruption for private gain, but it need not involve
any public office holder; the roles of boxer and bettor are usually
not public offices.



One response to this is to distinguish public corruption from private
corruption, and to argue that the above definition is a definition
only of public corruption. But if ordinary citizens lie when they give
testimony in court, this is corruption; it is corruption of the
criminal justice system. However, it does not involve abuse of a
public office by a public official. And when police fabricate evidence
out of a misplaced sense of justice, this is corruption of a public
office, but not for private gain.



In the light of the failure of such analytical-style definitions it is
tempting to try to sidestep the problem of providing a theoretical
account of the concept of corruption by simply identifying corruption
with specific legal and/or moral offences. However, attempts to
identify corruption with specific legal/moral offences are unlikely to
succeed. Perhaps the most plausible candidate is bribery; bribery is
regarded by some as the quintessential form of corruption (Noonan
1984; Pritchard 1998; Green 2006). But what of nepotism (Bellow 2003)?
Surely it is also a paradigmatic form of corruption, and one that is
conceptually distinct from bribery. The person who accepts a bribe is
understood as being required to provide a benefit to the briber,
otherwise it is not a bribe; but the person who is the beneficiary of
an act of nepotism is not necessarily understood as being required to
return the favor.



In fact, corruption is exemplified by a very wide and diverse array of
phenomena of which bribery is only one kind, and nepotism another.
Paradigm cases of corruption include the following. The commissioner
of taxation channels public monies into his personal bank account,
thereby corrupting the public financial system. A political party
secures a majority vote by arranging for ballot boxes to be stuffed
with false voting papers, thereby corrupting the electoral process. A
police officer fabricates evidence in order to secure convictions,
thereby corrupting the judicial process. A number of doctors close
ranks and refuse to testify against a colleague who they know has been
negligent in relation to an unsuccessful surgical operation leading to
loss of life; institutional accountability procedures are thereby
undermined. A sports trainer provides the athletes he trains with
banned substances in order to enhance their performance, thereby
subverting the institutional rules laid down to ensure fair
competition (Walsh and Giulianotti 2006). It is self-evident that none
of these corrupt actions are instances of bribery.



Further, it is far from obvious that the way forward at this point is
simply to add a few additional offences to the initial
"list" consisting of the single offence of bribery.
Candidates for being added to the list of offences would include
nepotism, police fabricating evidence, cheating in sport by using
drugs, fraudulent use of travel funds by politicians, and so on.
However, any such list needs to be justified by recourse to some
principle or principles. Ultimately, naming a set of offences that
might be regarded as instances of corruption does not obviate the need
for a theoretical, or quasi-theoretical, account of the concept of
corruption.



As it happens, there is at least one further salient strategy for
demarcating the boundaries of corrupt acts. Implicit in much of the
literature on corruption is the view that corruption is essentially a
legal offence, and essentially a legal offence in the economic sphere.
Accordingly, one could seek to identify corruption with economic
crimes, such as bribery, fraud, and insider trading.



But many acts of corruption are not unlawful. Bribery, a paradigm of
corruption, is a case in point. Prior to 1977 it was not unlawful for
U.S. companies to offer bribes to secure foreign contracts; indeed,
elsewhere such bribery was not unlawful until much
 later.[3]
 So corruption is not necessarily unlawful. This is because corruption
is not at bottom simply a matter of law; rather it is fundamentally a
matter of morality.



Secondly, corruption is not necessarily economic in character. An
academic who plagiarizes the work of others is not committing an
economic crime or misdemeanor; and she might be committing plagiarism
simply in order to increase her academic status. There might not be
any financial benefit sought or gained.



We can conclude that many of the historically influential definitions
of corruption, as well as attempts to circumscribe corruption by
listing paradigmatic offences, fail. They fail in large part because
the class of corrupt actions comprises an extremely diverse array of
types of moral and legal offences undertaken in a wide variety of
institutional contexts including, but by no means restricted to,
political and economic institutions.



However, in recent times progress has been made. Philosophers, at
least, have identified corruption as fundamentally a moral, as opposed
to legal, phenomenon. Acts can be corrupt even though they are, and
even ought to be, legal. Moreover, it is evident that not all acts of
immorality are acts of corruption; corruption is only one species of
immorality.



An important distinction in this regard is the distinction between
human rights violations and corruption (see the entry on
 human rights).
 Genocide is a profound moral wrong; but it is not corruption. This is
not to say that there is not an important relationship between human
rights violations and corruption; on the contrary, there is often a
close and mutually reinforcing nexus between them (Pearson 2001; Pogge
2002 [2008]; Wenar 2016; Sharman 2017). Consider the endemic
corruption and large-scale human rights abuse that have taken place in
authoritarian regimes, such as that of Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in
Indonesia and Marcos in the Philippines (Sharman 2017). And there is
increasing empirical evidence of an admittedly sometimes complex, but
sometimes not so complex, causal connection between corruption and the
infringement of both negative rights (such as the right not to be
tortured, suffer arbitrary loss of one's freedom, or have
one's property stolen) and positive rights, e.g., subsistence
rights (such as the right to a sufficient supply of clean water to
enable life and health); there is evidence, that is, of a causal
relation between corruption and poverty. Consider corrupt
authoritarian leaders in developing countries who sell the
country's natural resources cheaply and retain the profits for
themselves and their families and supporters (Pogge 2002 [2008]:
Chapter 6; Wenar 2016). As Wenar has forcefully argued (Wenar 2016),
in the first place this is theft of the property (natural resources)
of the people of the countries in question (e.g., Equatorial Guinea)
by their own rulers (e.g., Obiang) and, therefore, western countries
and others who import these resources are buying stolen goods; and, in
the second place, this theft maintains these human rights-violating
rulers in power and ensures that their populations continue to suffer
in conditions of abject poverty, disease etc.



Thus far, examples of different types of corrupt action have been
presented, and corrupt actions have been distinguished from some other
types of immoral action. However, the class of corrupt actions has not
been adequately demarcated within the more general class of immoral
actions. To do so, a definition of corrupt actions is needed.



An initial distinction here is between single one-off actions of
corruption and a pattern of corrupt actions. The despoiling of the
moral character of a role occupant, or the undermining of
institutional processes and purposes, would typically require a
pattern of actions--and not merely a single one-off action. So a
single free hamburger provided to a police officer on one occasion
usually does not corrupt, and is not therefore an act of corruption.
Nevertheless, a series of such gifts to a number of police officers
might corrupt. They might corrupt, for example, if the hamburger joint
in question ended up with (in effect) exclusive, round the clock
police protection, and if the owner intended that this be the
case.



Note here the pivotal role of habits (Langford & Tupper 1994). We
have just seen that the corruption of persons and institutions
typically requires a pattern of corrupt actions. More specifically,
corrupt actions are typically habitual. Yet, as noted by Aristotle in
his *Nicomachean Ethics*, one's habits are in large part
constitutive of one's moral character; habits make the man (and
the woman). The coward is someone who habitually takes flight in the
face of danger; by contrast, the courageous person has a habit of
standing his or her ground. Accordingly, morally bad
*habits*--including corrupt actions--are extremely
corrosive of moral character, and therefore of institutional roles and
ultimately institutions. Naturally, so-called systemic corruption
would typically involve not simply the habitual performance of a
corrupt action by a single individual but the habitual performance of
a corrupt action by many individuals in an institution or,
conceivably, an entire society or polity. Moreover, this pattern of
individuals engaged in the performance of habitual corrupt actions
might have a self-sustaining structure that gives rise to a collective
action problem, if the pattern is to be broken. Consider widespread
bribery in relation to competitive tenders for government contracts.
Bribes are paid by competing companies in order to try influence the
outcome of the tender process. Any firm that chooses not to pay a
bribe is not given serious consideration. Thus, not to engage in
corruption is to seriously disadvantage one's company. Even
those who do not want to engage in bribery do so. This is a collective
action problem (Olson 1965).



Notwithstanding the habitual nature of most corrupt actions there are
some cases in which a single, one-off action would be sufficient to
corrupt an instance of an institutional process. Consider a specific
tender. Suppose that one bribe is offered and accepted, and the
tendering process is thereby undermined. Suppose that this is the
first and only time that the person offering the bribe and the person
receiving the bribe are involved in bribery. Is this one-off bribe an
instance of corruption? Surely it is, since it corrupted that
particular instance of a tendering process.



Ontologically speaking, there are different kinds of entities that can
be corrupted. These include human beings, words of a language,
artefacts, such as computer discs, and so on. However, our concern in
this entry is with the corruption of institutions since this is the
main focus of the philosophical and, for that matter, the
non-philosophical, literature. Of course, institutions are comprised
in large part of institutional roles occupied by human beings. So our
focus on institutional corruption brings with it a focus on the
corruption of individual human beings. (I refer to the corruption of
individual human beings as personal corruption.) However in the case
of institutional corruption, the focus on the corruption of human
beings (personal corruption) is on human beings *qua institutional
actors*(and on those who interact with institutional role
occupants *qua* institutional role occupants)(Miller 2017:
65).



The upshot of this is that there are three sets of distinctions in
play here. Firstly, there is the distinction between institutional
corruption and non-institutional corruption--the latter being the
corruption of entities other than institutions, e.g., corruption of
artefacts. Secondly, there is the distinction between personal and
non-personal corruption--the former being the corruption of human
beings as opposed to, for instance, institutional processes. Thirdly,
with respect to personal corruption, there is the distinction between
the corruption of persons *qua* institutional actors and
non-institutional personal corruption. Non-institutional personal
corruption is corruption of persons outside institutional settings.
Personal corruption pertains to the moral character of persons, and
consists in the despoiling of their moral character. If an action has
a corrupting effect on a person's character, it will typically
be corrosive of one or more of a person's virtues. These virtues
might be virtues that attach to the person *qua* human being,
e.g., the virtues of compassion and fairness in one's dealings
with other human beings. Corrosion of these virtues amounts to
*non-institutional* personal corruption. Alternatively--or
in some cases, additionally--these virtues might attach to
persons *qua* occupants of specific institutional roles, e.g.,
impartiality in a judge or objectivity in a journalist. Corrosion of
these virtues amounts to *institutional* personal corruption,
i.e., corruption of a person *qua* institutional role
occupant.



In order to provide an adequate account of institutional corruption we
need a serviceable notion of an institution: the thing corrupted. For
our purposes here it is assumed that an institution is an organization
or structure of organizations that reproduces itself (e.g., by
training and recruitment processes) and is comprised of a structure of
institutional roles defined in terms of tasks (Harre 1979;
Giddens 1984; Miller 2010). Accordingly, the class of institutions is
quite diverse and includes political institutions, (e.g.,
legislatures), market-based institutions, (e.g., corporations),
institutions of learning, (e.g., universities), security agencies,
(e.g., police and military organizations), and so on. Importantly, as
we noted above, the various different types of, and even motives for,
institutional corruption vary greatly from one kind of institution to
another.



Note that in theorizing institutional corruption the distinction
between an entire society or polity, on the one hand, and its
constituent institutions, on the other, needs to be kept in mind. A
theory of democracy, for instance, might be a theory not only of
democratic government in the narrow sense of the legislature and
senior members of the executive, but also of the public administration
as a whole, the judiciary, the security agencies (police and
military), civil society and so on. Obviously, a theory of the
corruption of democratic political institutions (in the narrow sense
of the legislature and the senior members of the executive) might not
be generalizable to other sorts of institution within a democracy,
e.g., to security agencies or market-based institutions. Moreover,
fundamental differences regarding the specific form that a democracy
ought to take, e.g., between those of a republican persuasion (Pettit
1997; Sandel 2012) and libertarians (Nozick 1974; Friedman 1970),
might morph into disputes about what counts as institutional
corruption. For instance, on one view market-based institutions exist
to serve the common good, while on another they exist only to serve
the individual self-interest of the participants in them. Thus on the
latter, but not the former, view market intervention by the government
in the service of the common good might be regarded as a species of
corruption. Further, a theory of the corruption of democracy, and
certainly of the corruption of one species of democracy such as
liberal democracy, is not necessarily adequate for the understanding
of the corruption of many of institutions within a democracy and, in
particular, those institutions, such as military and police
institutions, hierarchical bureaucracies and market-based
institutions, which are not inherently democratic either in structure
or purpose, notwithstanding that they exist within the framework of a
democratic political system, are shaped in various ways by that
framework and, conversely, might be necessary for the maintenance of
that framework.


## 2. Institutional Corruption


### 2.1 General Features of Institutional Corruption


#### 2.1.1 Personal Corruption and Institutional Corruption



Our concern here is only with institutional corruption. Nevertheless,
it is plausible that corruption in general, including institutional
corruption frequently, if not typically, involves the despoiling of
the moral character of persons and in particular, in the case of
institutional corruption, the despoiling of the moral character of
institutional role occupants *qua* institutional role
occupants. To this extent institutional corruption involves personal
corruption and, thereby, connects institutional corruption to moral
character. If the moral character of particular institutional role
occupants, (e.g., police detectives), consists in large part of their
possession of certain virtues definitive of the role in question
(e.g., honesty, independence of mind, impartiality) then institutional
corruption will frequently involve the displacement of those virtues
in these role occupants by corresponding vices, (e.g., dishonesty,
weak mindedness, bias); that is, institutional corruption will
frequently involve institutional *personal* corruption.



As noted above, the relationship between institutional corruption and
personal corruption is something that has been emphasized
historically, e.g., by Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli. However, some
recent theorists of structural corruption have tended to downplay this
relationship. Lessig's notion of dependence corruption (Lessig
2011), in particular, evidently decouples structural corruption from
(institutional) personal corruption (see
 section 2.3.3
 below).



Personal corruption, i.e., the state of having been
corrupt*ed*, is not the same thing as performing a corrupt
action, i.e., being a corrupt*or*. Typically, corruptors are
themselves corrupted, but this is not necessarily the case. Consider,
for example, a parent who pays a one-off bribe to an immigration
official in order to be reunited with her child. The parent is a
corruptor by virtue of performing a corrupt action, but she is not
necessarily corrupted by her, let us assume, morally justifiable
action.



Does personal corruption imply moral responsibility for one's
corrupt character? This issue is important in its own right but it
also has implications for our understanding of structural corruption.
Certainly, many, if not most, of those who are corrupted are morally
responsible for being so. After all, they do or should know what it is
to be corrupt and they could have avoided becoming corrupt. Consider,
for instance, kleptocrats, such as Mobuto and Marcos, who have looted
billions of dollars from the public purse (Sharman 2017), or senior
members of multi-national corporations who have been engaged in
ongoing massive bribery in China and elsewhere (Pei 2016). These
kleptocrats and corporate leaders are not only corruptors, they are
themselves corrupt; moreover, they are morally responsible for being
in their state of corruption.



However, there appear to be exceptions to the claim that personal
corruption necessarily or always brings with it moral responsibility
for one's corrupt character, e.g., adolescents who have been
raised in criminal families and, as a result, participate in the
corrupt enterprises of these families. These individuals perform
actions which are an expression of their corrupt characters and which
also have a corrupting effect.



What of the moral responsibility of corruptors for their corrupt
actions? It is plausible that many, if not most, corruptors are
morally responsible for their corrupt actions (e.g., the legions of
those rightly convicted of corruption in criminal courts--and
therefore, presumably, morally responsible for their actions--in
jurisdictions around the world), but there appear to be exceptions,
e.g., those who are coerced into offering bribes.



One school of thought in the theory of social institutions that might
well reject the view that corruptors are necessarily or even typically
morally responsible (or, therefore, blameworthy) for their corrupt
actions is structuralism (Levi-Strauss 1962 [1966]) and
especially structural Marxism (Althusser 1971). According to the
latter view institutional structure and, in particular, economic
class-based relations largely determine institutional structures and
cultures, and regularities in the actions of institutional actors. On
this anti-individualist conception neither institutional corrosion nor
institutional corruption--supposing the two notions can be
distinguished (see below)--are ultimately to be understood by
recourse to the actions of morally responsible individual human
agents. Strong forms of structuralism are inconsistent with most
contemporary philosophical accounts of institutional corruption, not
the least because these accounts typically assume that institutions
have an inherently normative--rather than merely
ideological--dimension. However there are echoes of weaker forms
of structuralism in some of these accounts when it comes to the issue
of the moral responsibility of human persons for institutional
corruption. One influential contemporary theorist of corruption who
apparently does not accept the view that corruptors are necessarily or
always morally responsible (or, therefore, blameworthy) for their
corrupt actions is Lessig (Lessig 2011) (see
 section 2.3.3
 below).



The upshot of our discussion of (institutional) personal corruption
and moral responsibility is as follows. We now have, at least
notionally, a fourfold distinction in relation to corruptors: (1)
corruptors who are morally responsible for their corrupt action and
blameworthy; (2) corruptors who are morally responsible for their
corrupt action but not blameworthy; (3) corruptors who are not morally
responsible for having a corrupt character, but whose actions: (a) are
expressive of their corrupt character, and; (b) have a corrupting
effect; (4) corruptors who do not have a corrupt character and are
neither morally responsible nor blameworthy for their corrupt actions,
yet whose actions have a corrupting effect, e.g., by virtue of some
form of structural dependency for which individual human persons are
not morally responsible.


#### 2.1.2 Institutional Corrosion and Structural Corruption



Naturally, in the case of institutional corruption typically greater
institutional damage is being done than simply the despoiling of the
moral character of the institutional role occupants. Specifically,
institutional processes are being undermined, and/or institutional
purposes subverted. A further point is that the undermining of
institutional purposes or processes typically requires the actions of
multiple agents; the single action of a single agent is typically not
sufficient. The multiple actions of the multiple agents in question
could be a joint action(s) or they could be individual actions taken
in aggregate. A joint action is one in which two or more agents
perform a contributory individual action in the service of a common or
collective end (Miller 2010: Chapter 1) or, according to some
theorists, joint intention (Bratman 2016: Chapter 1). For instance,
motivated by financial gain, a group of traders within the banking
sector might cooperate with one another in order to manipulate a
financial benchmark rate, such as LIBOR (London Interbank Borrowing
Rate) (Wheatley 2012).



However, arguably, the undermining of institutional processes and/or
purposes is not a sufficient condition for institutional corruption.
Acts of institutional damage that are not performed by a corruptor and
also do not corrupt persons might be thought to be better
characterized as acts of institutional *corrosion*. Consider,
for example, funding decisions that gradually reduce public monies
allocated to the court system in some large jurisdiction. As a
consequence, magistrates might be progressively less well trained and
there might be fewer and fewer of them to deal with the gradually
increasing workload of cases. This may well lead to a diminution over
decades in the quality of the adjudications of these magistrates, and
so the judicial processes are to an extent undermined. However, given
the size of the jurisdiction and the incremental nature of these
changes, neither the magistrates, nor anyone else, might be aware of
this process of judicial corrosion, or even able to become aware of it
(given heavy workloads, absence of statistical information, etc.). At
any rate, if we assume that neither the judges nor anyone else can do
anything to address the problem then, while there has clearly been
judicial corrosion, arguably there has not been judicial corruption.
Why is such corrosion not also corruption?



For institutional corrosion to constitute corruption, it might be
claimed (Miller 2017: Chapter 3), the institutional damage done needs
to be avoidable; indeed, it might also be claimed that the relevant
agents must be capable of being held morally responsible for the
damage, at least in the generality of cases. So if the magistrates in
our example were to become aware of the diminution in the quality of
their adjudications, could cause additional resources to be provided
and yet chose to do nothing, then arguably the process of corrosion
might have become a process of corruption.



An important question that arises here is whether or not institutional
corruption is relative to a teleological or purpose-driven conception
of institutions and, relatedly, whether the purposes in question are
to be understood normatively. Arguably, the institutional purposes of
universities include the acquisition of new knowledge and its
transmission to students; moreover, arguably, knowledge acquisition is
a human good since it enables (indirectly), for instance, health needs
to be met. However, it has been suggested that the purposes of
political institutions, in particular, are too vague or contested to
be definitive of them (Ceva & Ferretti 2017; Warren 2004). One
response to this is to claim that governments are in large part
meta-institutions with the responsibility to ensure that
society's other institutions realize their distinctive
institutional purposes. On this view, an important purpose of
governments is provided, in effect, by the purposes of other
fundamental institutions. For instance, an important purpose of
governments might be to ensure market-based institutions operate in a
free, fair, efficient and effective manner (Miller 2017: 14.1).


#### 2.1.3 Institutional Actors and Corruption



Naturally, there are many different kinds of entities which might
causally undermine institutions, including other collective entities.
However, collectivist accounts of institutions go beyond the
ascription of causal responsibility and, in some cases, ascribe moral
responsibility. Firstly, such collectivist accounts of institutions
ascribe intentions, beliefs and so on to organizations and other
collective entities per se. Secondly, this ascription of mindedness to
collective entities leaves the way open to ascribe moral agency to
these entities (French 1979; List & Pettit 2011). On such
collectivist accounts corruptors include collective entities; indeed,
corruptors who are morally responsible for their corrupt actions. Thus
Lockheed Corporation, on this view, was a moral agent (or, at least,
an immoral agent) which corrupted the Japanese government (a second
moral agent) by way of bribery. Other theorists, typically referred to
as individualists, reject minded collective entities (Ludwig 2017;
Miller 2010). Accordingly to individualists, only human agents are
possessed of minds and moral
 agency.[4]
 Thus collective entities, such as organizations, do *not* have
minds and are not per se moral agents. Accordingly, it is only human
agents who culpably perform actions that undermine legitimate
institutional processes or purposes.



An important related issue that arises at this point pertains to the
human agents who perform acts of corruption. Are they necessarily
institutional actors? It might be thought that this was not the case.
Supposing a criminal bribes a public official in order to get a permit
to own a gun. The criminal is not an institutional actor and yet he
has performed an act of institutional corruption. However, in this
example the public official has accepted the bribe and she is an
institutional actor. So the example does not show that institutional
corruption does not necessarily involve the participation of an
institutional actor. What if the criminal offered the bribe but it was
not accepted? While this may well be a crime and is certainly an
attempt at institutional corruption, arguably, it is not an actual
instance of an act of institutional corruption but rather a failed
attempt. Moreover, it is presumably not an instance of institutional
corruption because the institutional actor approached refused to
participate in the attempted corrupt action. Let us pursue this issue
further.



As we saw in
 section 1,
 corruption, even if it involves the abuse of public office, is not
necessarily pursued for private gain. However, according to many
definitions of corruption institutional corruption necessarily
involves abuse of public office. Moreover, our example of an attempted
bribe to secure a gun permit involves a public official. However, we
have canvassed arguments in section 1 that contra this view acts of
corruption might be actions performed by persons who do not hold
public office, e.g., price-fixing by market actors, a witness who
gives false testimony in a law court. At this point in the argument we
need to invoke a distinction between persons who hold a public office
and persons who have an institutional role. CEOs of corporations do
not hold public office but they do have an institutional role. Hence a
CEO who embezzles his company's money is engaged in corruption.
Again, citizens are not necessarily holders of public offices, but
they do have an institutional role *qua* citizens, e.g., as
voters. Hence a voter who breaks into the electoral office and stuffs
the ballot boxes with falsified voting papers in order to ensure the
election of her favored candidate is engaged in corruption,
notwithstanding the fact that she does not hold public office.


### 2.2 Causal Theory of Institutional Corruption



The causal theory of institutional corruption (Miller 2017)
presupposes a normative teleological conception of institutions
according to which institutions are defined not only as organizations
or systems of organizations with a purpose(s), but organizations or
systems of organizations the purpose(s) of which is a human good. The
goods in question are either intrinsic or instrumental goods. For
instance, universities are held to have as their purpose the discovery
and transmission of knowledge, where knowledge is at the very least an
instrumental good. (For criticisms see Thompson 2018 and Ceva &
Ferretti 2021.)



If a serviceable definition of the concept of a corrupt action is to
be found--and specifically, one that does not collapse into the
more general notion of an immoral action--then attention needs to
be focused on the moral *effects* that some actions have on
persons and institutions. An action is corrupt only if it corrupts
something or someone--so corruption is not only a moral concept,
but also a *causal* or quasi-causal concept. That is, an action
is corrupt by virtue of having a *corrupting effect* on a
person's moral character or on an institutional process or
purpose. If an action has a corrupting effect on an institution,
undermining institutional processes or purposes, then
typically--but not necessarily--it has a corrupting effect
also on persons *qua* role occupants in the affected
institutions.



Accordingly, an action is corrupt only if it has the effect of
undermining an institutional process or of subverting an institutional
purpose or of despoiling the character of some role occupant
*qua* role occupant. In light of the possibility that some acts
of corruption have negligible effects, such as a small one-off bribe
paid for a minor service, this defining feature needs to be qualified
so as to include acts that are of a type or kind that tends to
undermine institutional processes, purposes or persons (*qua*
institutional role occupants)--as well as individual or token
acts that actually have the untoward effects in question. Thus
qualified, the *causal character of corruption* provides the
second main feature of the causal theory of institutional corruption,
the first feature being the normative teleological conception of
institutions. I note accounts predicated on these two assumptions have
ancient origins, notably in Aristotle (Hindess 2001).



In keeping with the causal account, an infringement of a specific law
or institutional rule does not in and of itself constitute an act of
institutional corruption. In order to do so, any such infringement
needs to have an institutionally undermining *effect*, or be of
a kind that has a tendency to cause such an effect, e.g., to defeat
the institutional purpose of the rule, to subvert the institutional
process governed by the rule, or to contribute to the despoiling of
the moral character of a role occupant *qua* role occupant. In
short, we need to distinguish between the offence considered in itself
and the institutional effect of committing that offence. Considered in
itself the offence of, say, lying is an infringement of a law, rule,
and/or a moral principle. However, the offence is only an act of
institutional corruption if it has some institutionally undermining
effect, or is of a kind that has such a tendency, e.g., it is
performed in a courtroom setting and thereby subverts the judicial
process.



A third feature of the causal theory of institutional corruption
pertains to the agents who cause the corruption. As noted in
 section 2.1.3,
 there are many different kinds of entities which might causally
undermine institutions, including other collective entities. However,
it is an assumption of the causal theory of corruption that only human
agents are possessed of minds and moral agency. Accordingly, on the
causal theory it is only human agents who culpably perform actions
that undermine legitimate institutional processes or purposes.



A fourth and final feature of the causal theory also pertains to the
agents who cause corruption. It is a further assumption of the causal
theory that the human agents who perform acts of corruption (the
corruptors) and/or the human agents who are corrupted (the corrupted)
are necessarily institutional actors (see discussion above in
 section 2.1.3).
 More precisely, acts of institutional corruption necessarily involve
a corruptor who performs the corrupt action *qua occupant of an
institutional role* and/or someone who is corrupted *qua
occupant of an institutional role*.



In light of the above discussion the following normative theory of
corruption suggests itself: the causal theory of institutional
corruption (Miller 2017: Chapter 3).



An act *x* (whether a single or joint action) performed by an
agent (or set of agents) *A* is an act of institutional
corruption if and only if:


1. *x* has an effect, or is an instance of a kind of act that
has a tendency to have an effect, of undermining, or contributing to
the undermining of, some institutional process and/or purpose
(understood as a collective good) of some institution, *I*,
and/or an effect of contributing to the despoiling of the moral
character of some role occupant of *I*, agent (or set of
agents) *B*, *qua* role occupant of *I*;
2. At least one of (a) or (b) is true:
	1. *A* is a role occupant of *I* who used the
	opportunities afforded by their role to perform *x*, and in so
	doing *A* intended or foresaw the untoward effects in question,
	or should have foreseen them;
	2. *B* could have avoided the untoward effects, if
	*B* had chosen to do
	 so.[5]



Note that
 (2) (a)
 tells us that *A* is a corruptor and is, therefore, either
(straightforwardly) morally responsible for the corrupt action, or
*A* is not morally responsible for *A*'s corrupt
character and the corrupt action is an expression of
*A*'s corrupt character.



Notice also that the causal theory being cast in general terms, i.e.,
the undermining of institutional purposes, processes and/or persons
(*qua* institutional role occupants), can accommodate a
diversity of corruption in a wide range of institutions in different
social, political and economic settings, past and present, and
accommodate also a wide range of mechanisms or structures of
corruption, including structural relations of dependency, collective
action problems and so on.



A controversial feature of the causal account is that organizations
that are entirely morally and legally illegitimate, such as criminal
organizations, (e.g., the mafia), are not able to be corrupted (Lessig
2013b). For on the causal account the condition of corruption exists
only relative to an uncorrupted condition, which is the condition of
being a morally legitimate institution or sub-element thereof.
Consider the uncorrupted judicial process. It consists of the
presentation of objective evidence that has been gathered lawfully, of
testimony in court being presented truthfully, of the rights of the
accused being respected, and so on. This otherwise morally legitimate
judicial process may be corrupted, if one or more of its constitutive
actions are not performed in accordance with the process as it ought
to be. Thus to present fabricated evidence, to lie under oath, and so
on, are all corrupt actions. In relation to moral character, consider
an honest accountant who begins to "doctor the books"
under the twin pressures of a corrupt senior management and a desire
to maintain a lifestyle that is only possible if he is funded by the
very high salary he receives for doctoring the books. By engaging in
such a practice he risks the erosion of his moral character; he is
undermining his disposition to act honestly.


### 2.3 Theories of Political Corruption


#### 2.3.1 Proceduralist Theories of Political Corruption



Let us term theories of corruption which focus on the undermining of
institutional procedures or processes, as opposed to institutional
purposes, proceduralist theories of institutional corruption. Mark
Warren has elaborated a proceduralist theory of the corruption of
democracies, in particular; a theory which he terms "duplicitous
exclusion" (Warren 2006). (Relatedly and more recently, Ceva
& Ferretti speak of bending public rules in the service of
"surreptitious agendas" as definitive of corruption (Ceva
& Ferretti 2017: 6), although in a recent work they have shifted
to a notion of corruption in terms of lack of accountability (Ceva
& Ferretti 2018; Ceva & Ferretti 2021). See discussion below
in 2.3.4.)



Democratic political institutions are characterized by equality (in
some sense) with respect to these processes. Warren offers a
particular account of democratic equality and derives his notion of
corruption of democratic political institutions from this. According
to Warren, democracies involve a norm of equal inclusion such that



> 
> 
> every individual potentially affected by a collective decision should
> have an opportunity to affect the decision proportional to his or her
> stake in the outcome. (Warren 2004: 333)
> 
> 
> 



Corruption of democracies occurs under two conditions: (1) this norm
is violated and; (2) violators claim to be complying with the norm
(Warren 2004: 337). Warren contrasts his theory of duplicitous
exclusion with what he terms "office-based" accounts
(Warren 2004:329-32).The latter might be serviceable for
administrative agencies and roles but is, according to Warren,
inadequate for democratic representatives attempting to "define
the public interest" (Warren 2006: 10) and relying essentially
on the political process, rather than pre-existing agreement on
specific ends or purposes, to do so. This latter point is made in one
way of another by other theorists of modern representative
democracies, such as Thompson (2013) and Ceva & Ferretti (2017:
5), and is an objection to teleological accounts (such as the causal
 account--section 2.2
 above).



Warren's other necessary condition for the corruption of
institutions, namely duplicity, resonates with the emphasis in the
contemporary anti-corruption literature and, for that matter, in much
public policy on transparency; transparency can reveal duplicity and
thereby thwart corruptors. Moreover, the duplicity condition--and
the related surreptitious agenda condition of Ceva &
Ferretti--is reminiscent of Plato's ring of Gyges (Plato
*Gorgias*); corruption is something done under a cloak of
secrecy and typically involves deception to try to ensure the cloak is
not removed. Unquestionably, corruption often flourishes under
conditions of secrecy. Moreover, corruptors frequently seek to deceive
by presenting themselves a committed to the standards that they are
(secretly) violating. But contra Warren--and, for that matter,
Ceva & Ferretti--corruption does not necessarily or always
need to be hidden in order to flourish. Indeed, in polities and
institutions suffering from the most serious and widespread forms of
corruption at the hands of the very powerful, there is often little or
no need for secrecy or deception in relation to the pursuit of corrupt
practices; corruption is out in the open. Consider Colombia during the
period of the drug lord, Pablo Escobar's, "reign";
the period of the so-called "narcocracy". His avowed and
well-advertised policy was "silver or lead", meaning that
politicians, judges, journalists and so on either accepted a bribe or
risked being killed (Bowden 2012). Against this it might be suggested
that at least corruption in democracies always involves hiding
one's corrupt practices. Unfortunately, this seems not to be the
case either. As Plato pointed out long ago in *The Republic*,
democracies can suffer a serious problem of corruption among the
citizenry and when this happens all manner of corrupt practices on the
part of leaders and others will not only be visible, they will be
tolerated, and even celebrated.



Warren's theory is evidently not generalizable to many other
institutions, namely, those that are not centrally governed by
democratic norms and, in particular, by his norm of equal inclusion.
Consider, for instance, military institutions. Most important
decisions made by military personal in wartime--as opposed to
those made by their political masters, such as whether to go to war in
the first place--are made in the context of a hierarchical
structure; they are not collective decisions, if the notion of a
collective decision is to be understood on a democratic model of
decision-making, e.g., representative democracy. Moreover, with
respect to, for instance, the decision to retreat or stand and fight a
combatant does not and cannot reasonably expect to have "an
opportunity to affect the decision proportional to her stake in the
outcome". The combatant's personal stake might be very
high; his life is at risk if he stands and fights and, therefore, he
might prefer to retreat. However, military necessity in a just war
might dictate that he and his comrades stand and fight and, therefore,
they are ordered to do so by their superiors back at headquarters and,
as virtuous combatants, they obey. I note that Machiavelli contrasts
combatants possessed of the martial virtues with corruptible
mercenaries who only fight for money and who desert when their lives
are threatened (Machiavelli *The Prince*: Chapter 12).


#### 2.3.2 Thompson: Individual versus Institutional Corruption



Thompson's groundbreaking and influential theory of
institutional corruption takes as its starting point a distinction
between what Thompson refers to as individual corruption and
institutional corruption. When an official accepts a bribe in return
for providing a service to the briber, this is individual corruption
since the official is accepting a personal benefit or gain in exchange
for promoting private interests (Thompson 2013: 6). Moreover, the
following two conditions evidently obtain: (i) the official intends to
provide the service (or, at least, intends to give the impression that
he will provide the service) to the bribee; (ii) the official and the
bribee intentionally create the link between the bribe and the
service, i.e., it is a *quid quo pro*. By contrast,
institutional corruption involves political benefits or gains, e.g.,
campaign contributions (that do not go into the political
candidates' own pockets but are actually spent on the campaigns)
by public officials under conditions that tend to promote private
interests (Thompson 2013: 6). The reference to a tendency entails that
there is some kind of causal regularity in the link between acceptance
of the political benefits and promotion of the private interests
(including greater access to politicians than is available to others
(Thompson 2018)). However, the officials in question do not intend
that there be such a link between the political benefits they accept
and their promotion of the private interests of the provider of the
political benefits. Rather



> 
> 
> the fact that an official acts under conditions that tend to create
> improper influence is sufficient to establish corruption, whatever the
> official's motive. (Thompson 2013: 13)
> 
> 
> 



I note that in the case of institutional corruption and, presumably,
individual corruption (in so far as it involves the bribery of public
or private officials) the actions in question must undermine some
institutional process or purpose (and/or perhaps institutional role
occupant *qua* role occupant). Thus Thompson says of
institutional corruption:



> 
> 
> It is not corrupt if the practice promotes (or at least does not
> damage) political competition, citizenship representation, or other
> core processes of the institution. But it is corrupt if it is of a
> type that tends to undermine such processes and thereby frustrate the
> primary purposes of the institution. (Thompson 2013: 7)
> 
> 
> 



While Thompson has provided an important analysis of an important
species of institutional corruption, his additional claim that
officials who accept personal benefits in exchange for promoting
private interests, i.e., a common form of bribery, is not a species of
institutional corruption is open to question (and a point of
difference with the causal theory). As mentioned in
 section 1,
 this species of bribery of institutional actors utilizing their
position--whether that position be one in the public sector or in
the private sector--can be systemic and, therefore, extremely
damaging to institutions. Consider the endemic bribery of police in
India with its attendant undermining of the provision of impartial
(Kurer 2005; Rothstein & Varraich 2017), obligatory (Kolstad 2012)
and effective police services, not to mention of public trust in the
police. Some police stations in part of India are little more than
unlawful "tax" collection or, better, extortion agencies;
local business people have to pay the local police if they are to
guarantee effective police protection, truck drivers have to pay
bribes to the police at transport checkpoints, if they are to transit
expeditiously through congested areas, speeding tickets are avoided by
those who pay bribes, and so on. Moreover, endemic bribery of this
kind is endemic in many police forces and other public sector agencies
throughout so-called developing countries, even if it is no longer
present in most developed countries.



Thompson invokes the distinction between systemic and episodic
services provided by a public official in support of his distinction
between individual and institutional corruption. By
"systemic" Thompson means that the service provided by the
official



> 
> 
> is provided through a persistent pattern of relationships, rather than
> in episodic or one-time interactions. (The particular relationships do
> not themselves have to be ongoing: a recurrent set of one-time
> interactions by the same politician with different recipients could
> create a similar pattern.) (Thompson 2013: 11)
> 
> 
> 



However, as our above example of bribery of police in India makes
clear, Thompson's individual corruption can be, and often is,
systemic in precisely this sense. In more recent work Thompson has
drawn attention to mixed cases involving, for instance, both a
personal and a political gain--the political gain not necessarily
being a motive--and suggested that if the dominant gain is
political rather than personal then it is institutional corruption or
perhaps a mix of individual and institutional corruption (Thompson
2018). Fair enough. However, this does not remove the objection that
systemic bribery (for instance) involving only personal gain (both as
a motive and an outcome) are, nevertheless, cases of institutional
corruption.



Thompson uses the case of Charles Keating to outline his theory
(Thompson 1995 and 2013). Keating was a property developer who made
generous contributions to the election campaigns of various U.S.
politicians, notably five senators, and then at a couple of meetings
called on a number of these to do him a favor in return. Specifically,
Keating wanted the senators to get a regulatory authority to refrain
from seizing the assets of a subsidiary of a company owned by Keating.
The chair of the regulatory authority was replaced. However, two years
later the assets of the company in question were seized and
authorities filed a civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating
accusing him of diverting funds from the company to his family and to
political campaigns. Thompson argues that the Keating case involved:
(1) the provision or, at least, the appearance of the provision of an
improper service on the part of legislators (the senators) to a
constituent (Keating), i.e., interfering with the role of a regulator
on his behalf; (2) a political gain in the form of campaign
contributions (from Keating to the senators), and; (3) a link or, at
least, the appearance of a link between (1) and (2), i.e., the
tendency under these conditions for the service to be performed
because of the political gain.



Accordingly, the case study involves at least the appearance of
corrupt activity on the part of the senators. Moreover, Thompson
claims that such an appearance might be sufficient for institutional
corruption in that damage has been done to a political institution by
virtue of a diminution in public trust in that institution. Thus the
appearance of a conflict of interest undermines public trust which in
turn damages the institution. The appearance of a conflict of interest
arises when legislators use their office to provide a questionable
"service" to a person upon whom they are, or have been,
heavily reliant for campaign contributions. Evidently, on
Thompson's account of institutional (as opposed to individual)
corruption it is not necessary that the legislators in these kinds of
circumstance ought to know that their actions might well have the
appearance of a conflict of interest, ought to know that they might
have a resulting damaging effect, and ought to know, therefore, that
they ought not to have performed those actions. Certainly, the
senators in the Keating case ought to have known that they ought not
to perform these actions. However, the more general point is that it
is not clear that it would be a case of corruption, if it were
*not* the case that the legislators in question ought to have
known that they ought not to perform the institutionally damaging
actions in question. On the causal account
 (section 2.2
 above), if legislators or other officials perform institutionally
damaging actions that they could not reasonably be expected to know
would be institutionally damaging then they have not engaged in
corruption but rather incidental institutional damage (and perhaps
corrosion if the actions are ongoing).



As outlined above, Thompson has made a detailed application of his
theory to political institutions and, especially to campaign financing
in the U.S.. However, he views the theory as generalizable to
institutions other than political ones. It is generalizable, he
argues, in so far as "public purposes" can be replaced by
"institutional purposes" and "democratic
process" with "legitimate institutional procedures"
(Thompson 2013: 5). Certainly, if the theory is to be generalizable
then it is necessary that these replacements be made. The question is
whether making these replacements is sufficient. Moreover, the
particular species of institutional corruption that he has identified
and analyzed might exist in other institutions but do so alongside a
wide range of other species to which his analysis does not
apply--including, but not restricted to, what he refers to as
individual corruption. Thompson has recently identified some other
forms of institutional corruption to which he claims his theory
applies (Thompson 2018). For instance, the close relationship that
might obtain between corporations and their auditing firms. The
salient such relationships are those consisting of auditing firms
undertaking profitable financial consultancy work for the very
corporations which they are auditing; hence the potential for the
independent auditing process to be compromised. These relationships
certainly have the potential for corruption. However, they do not
appear to be paradigms of institutional corruption in Thompson's
sense since, arguably, undertaking such consultancy work is not
*prima facie* an integral function of auditing firms
*qua* auditors in the manner in which, for instance, securing
campaign finance is integral to political parties competing in an
election (to mention Thompson's paradigmatic example of
institutional corruption).



Newhouse has attempted to generalize Thompson' theory, but in
doing so also narrows it. Newhouse argues that Thompson's theory
is best understood in terms of breach of organizational fiduciary
duties (Newhouse 2014). An important underlying reason for this, says
Newhouse, is that Thompson's (and, for that matter,
Lessig's) account of institutional corruption presuppose that
institutions have an "obligatory purpose" (Newhouse 2014:
555) Fiduciary duties are, of course, obligatory. Moreover, they are
widespread in both the public and private sector; hence the theory
would be generalized. On the other hand, there are many institutional
actors who do not have fiduciary duties. Thus if Newhouse is correct
in thinking that Thompson's theory of institutional corruption
provides a model for breach of organizational fiduciary duty and
*only* for breach of organizational fiduciary duty, the
ambition to generalize Thompson's theory will remain
substantially unrealized.


#### 2.3.3 Lessig's Dependence Corruption



Lawrence Lessig has argued that the U.S. democratic political process
and, indeed, Congress itself, is institutionally corrupt and that the
corruption in question is a species of what he calls "dependency
corruption" (Lessig 2011 and 2013a). Lessig argues that although
U.S. citizens as a whole vote in the election of, say, the U.S.
President, nevertheless, the outcome is not wholly dependent on these
citizens as it should be in a democracy or, at least, as is required
by the U.S. Constitution. For the outcome is importantly dependent on
a small group of "Funders" who bankroll particular
candidates and without whose funding no candidate could hope to win
office. Accordingly, there are really two elections. In the first
election only the Funders get to "vote" since only they
have sufficient funds to support a political candidate. Once these
candidate have been "elected" then there is a second
election, a general election, in which all the citizens get to vote.
However, they can only vote on the list of candidates
"pre-selected" by the Funders. Lessig's account of
the U.S. election is complicated, but not vitiated, by the existence
of a minority of candidates, such as Bernie Sanders, who rely on
funding consisting of small amounts of money from a very large number
of Funders. It is further complicated but not necessarily vitiated by
the rise of demagogues such as Donald Trump who, as mentioned above,
can utilise social media and computational propaganda to have an
electoral influence much greater than otherwise might have been the
case (Woolley and Howard 2019).



On Lessig's view there are two dependencies in play, namely, the
dependency of the outcome of the election on the citizenry and the
dependency of this outcome on the Funders. However, these two
dependencies are inconsistent. Therefore, the question that now arises
is which dependency is legitimate. Clearly, the dependency on the
citizenry as a whole is legitimate since this is what the Constitution
clearly intended. Since these funders are not representative of the
U.S. citizenry the dependency on the Funders is illegitimate and a
corruption of the democratic process in the U.S..



Lessig states that his notion of dependency corruption cuts across
Thompson's notions of individual and institutional corruption
(Lessig 2013a: 14). Regarding the relation to Thompson's notion
of institutional corruption: On the one hand, dependence corruption
involves a tendency, as does Thompson's notion of institutional
corruption (see above
 section 2.3.2).
 On the other hand, on Thompson's theory, a politician, or set
of politicians, can receive campaign contributions from Funders and
further their private interests without being dependent on them. So in
this respect Thompson's notion of institutional corruption is
wider than Lessig's notion of dependence corruption. Regarding
the relation to Thompson's notion of individual corruption: A
politician, or set of politicians, may come to depend on personal
benefits from Funders. This is dependence corruption but on
Thompson's theory it is presumably individual corruption.
(Although, perhaps, it might not be individual corruption in
Thompson's sense, if it involves a regularity and hence
tendency).



Lessig offers a plausible analysis of the corruption of the U.S.
electoral system by the Funders. Two related questions now arise. Is
Lessig's theory of dependence corruption correct? Is the notion
of dependence corruption generalizable to institutions other than
political institutions and, if so, to what extent?



The extent to which Lessig's notion of dependence corruption is
generalizable is ultimately an empirical question; it is a matter of
seeking to apply it widely and waiting on the outcome (see, for
instance, Light's analysis of corruption in the pharmaceutical
industry (Light, Lexchin, & Darrow 2013)). However, as mentioned
above in the comparison of Lessig's account with that of
Thompson, Lessig does not see his dependence account as entirely
generalizable.



Unlike the causal account of corruption (see
 section 2.2
 above), Lessig's notion of institutional corruption commits him
only to normatively neutral institutional purposes (Lessig 2014;
Lessig 2013b: 14) rather than to morally good or otherwise valuable
institutional purposes. Accordingly, by Lessig's lights, to say
of a university that it has as a fundamental purpose to educate (to
some objectively acceptable, minimum standard) is merely to say that
this is a *de facto* fundamental purpose. Therefore, being
market-based it could change its order of priorities; i.e., it would
be perfectly entitled to prioritize profit over educational standards,
just as, for instance, a retail store is perfectly entitled to
prioritize profit over its standards of service to its customers.



According to Lessig, dependence corruption does not necessarily
involve corrupt persons. As we have seen, Lessig's favored
example of dependence corruption is the dependency of the outcome of
U.S. elections on a small group of large funders of those campaigning
for political office rather than on the American people. Lessig
suggests that those who engage in dependence corruption could be
"good souls" (Lessig 2011: 17). Here we need to keep in
mind distinctions between being evil and being corrupt, and between
being corrupt and being morally responsible for one's
corruption. A corrupt person is not necessarily an evil person. After
all, as we have seen, a corrupt person might only be corrupt
*qua* institutional actor. Thus a corrupt police officer might
be a good father and husband. Moreover, corruption admits of degrees.
So a corrupt police officer might be a so-called grass-eater rather
than a so-called meat-eater; their corrupt character might only
manifest itself in relatively minor forms of corruption, e.g., minor
bribe-taking, rather than in major forms of corruption, e.g.,
on-selling large quantities of heroin seized from drug dealers.



What of moral responsibility and corruption? Consider Lessig's
own favored example of dependence corruption. Surely, moral
responsibility for corruption of the U.S. electoral system can be
assigned to U.S. legislators, in particular, as well as the Funders
who finance campaigns in the expectation (presumably) of favorable
legislation if their candidates are elected. Lessig distinguishes
between



> 
> 
> responsibility for changing individual behavior within the system and
> responsibility for changing the system itself. (Lessig 2013a: 15)
> 
> 
> 



According to Lessig



> 
> 
> the sin of a Congressman within such a system is not that she raises
> campaign money. It is that she doesn't work to change the
> corruption that this dependence upon a small set of funders produced.
> (Lessig 2013a: 15)
> 
> 
> 



So apparently direct participation in the corruption of the electoral
system by legislators and (?) Funders is not a sin. Lessig's
claim here might be that the corruptors of the U.S. electoral system
are not engaged in sinful acts because they are not morally
responsible for this wrongdoing. This claim is open to question. The
actions of the legislators and Funders (and, for that matter, the
lobbyists) that are constitutive of dependence corruption (offering
and receiving (directly and indirectly) campaign funds) are avoidable
and the legislators and Funders are, or ought to be, aware of the
institutional damage being done by their combined actions. Moreover,
in suggesting that the legislators have a moral responsibility to
change the system, Lessig, in effect, concedes as much. How could they
have a moral responsibility to change the system if they were not
aware of it and their role in it?



What might be influencing Lessig at this point is the degree of the
moral responsibility, specifically, full and partial responsibility.
It is the combined effect of the many individual actions of a large
number of legislators (and Funders and lobbyists) that does the
institutional damage. Therefore, each only makes a small causal
contribution and each, therefore, only has a small share in the moral
responsibility for the outcome. Moreover, in relation to changing the
system, there is a need for joint action; it is a joint moral
responsibility involving shared *partial* individual
responsibility. Thus legislators could, and know they could, jointly
act to enact campaign finance reform to address the problem of
dependency by, for example, restricting campaign contributions.
Accordingly, the moral responsibility in play is a species of
collective responsibility; specifically, joint moral responsibility
(Miller 2010: Chapter 4).


#### 2.3.4 Ceva & Ferretti: Office Accountability



Ceva & Ferretti understand political corruption widely to include
not only the corruption of politicians but of public officials in
general, including police officers, members of the professions, such
as doctors and teachers, and others in the public sector. They define
political corruption in terms of two individually necessary and
jointly sufficient conditions: "There must be a public official
who (1) acts in her institutional capacity as an officeholder (office
condition) (2) for the pursuit of an agenda whose rationale may not be
vindicated as coherent with the terms of the mandate of her power of
office (mandate condition)" (Ceva & Ferretti 2021: 19). The
first condition, namely that political corruption involves a public
official who acts in her institutional capacity, is familiar (see
above). What of condition (2), the mandate condition?



The mandate condition concerns the motive or reason guiding the office
holder's action; the action is performed for the pursuit of an
agenda with a rationale. So the officeholder's action considered
in itself might or might not be an exercise of a constitutive
institutional right or duty of the office in question. But what is
this rationale that would render the action corrupt? The rationale in
question is one that "may not be vindicated as coherent with the
terms of the mandate of her power of office". The key notion
here is that of coherence with the mandate of the powers of office.
Here the powers of office are presumably simply the institutional
rights and duties constitutive of an office, e.g., the right of
legislators to vote on legislation, the duty not to take bribes. So,
in summary, corruption involves the performance of an action(s) the
motivating reason for which does not cohere with the mandate
authorizing an office holder's rights and duties qua office
holder.



Ceva & Ferretti further argue that the relations between
organizational roles generate a deontic dimension. For instance, they
say: "Office accountability governs the institutional relations
between office holders. As participants in these relations,
officeholders are established with the authority to require that one
another 'gives an account' of their actions" (Ceva
& Ferretti 2021: 25). They provide the example of a physician:
"By following this course of action, the physician is also in
the position of justifying her conduct to her colleagues with
reference to the terms of her power mandate, thus fulfilling office
accountability. By her action, the physician is accountable not only
to the other doctors...but also to the hospital staff"
(Ceva & Ferretti 2021:26).



Ceva & Ferretti also address the question, What is wrong with
corruption? In doing so they offer a distinctive theory. According to
them political corruption is inherently wrong (as opposed to wrong by
virtue of its consequences) because it is "a specific form of
interactive injustice consisting in a violation of the duty of office
accountability" (Ceva & Ferretti 2021: 122). Thus, it turns
out that political corruption is inherently wrong because it is
unjust. More specifically, political corruption involves an action by
an institutional member which is unjust to his colleagues since each
member owes it to every other member to do his duty.



A question might arise at this point in relation to the scope of the
notion of an institution that Ceva & Ferretti's employ in
their account of political corruption (understood as corruption of
public institutions). For instance, are those who are entitled to vote
in a democracy themselves institutional role occupants of the
institution of government? Are patients in a public hospital
themselves role occupants of the hospital or students in a public
school role occupants of the school? Ceva & Ferretti deploy an
account of a public institution according to which the answer to these
questions is in each case in the negative. For on their account of the
corruption of public institutions there must be an officeholder
possessed of a mandate who engages in corruption. But citizens,
hospital patients and school students are not office holders with
mandates. Indeed, citizens are the source of the mandate as, arguably
(supposing there is a mandate), are patients and if not students, at
least their parents (on the students' behalf). One untoward
consequence of this view is that evidently citizens, patients and
students cannot themselves directly engage in acts of corruption
(understood as corruption of public institutions) or, at least, if
they can their actions would fall outside Ceva & Ferretti's
theory of institutional corruption.



At any rate, to return to the question of the wrongness of corruption,
we saw above that on Ceva & Ferretti's view this consists in
corruption being a form of interactive injustice. Accordingly,
interactive justice goes hand in glove with office accountability. On
this view a teacher who fails students who do not provide her with
sexual favors, and gives high marks to those who do, is performing
corrupt actions by virtue of her unjust treatment of her teaching
colleagues. Ceva & Ferretti argue that the normative source
(relevant to the inherent wrongness of corrupt actions) of the
principle of impartiality in the practice of the assessment by
teachers of their students' work lies in the role-based
relations that the teacher has with her fellow teachers (and other
school staff) (Ceva & Ferretti 2021: 98). So this teacher's
action is not corrupt by virtue of the injustice done to the students
(although Ceva & Ferretti agree that it would be unfair to the
students), but rather by virtue of the injustice done to the
teacher's colleagues. Contrary to Ceva & Ferretti it could
reasonably be claimed that the primary form of institutional
corruption involved here lies in the corruption of the teacher-student
relationship (and its harmful consequences). More generally, Ceva
& Ferretti's theory of political corruption evidently
privileges relationships between office holders at the expense of
those whom they serve.


## 3. Noble Cause Corruption



As we saw earlier, in the paradigm cases corrupt actions are a species
of morally wrong, habitual, actions. What of the motive for corrupt
actions? We saw above that there are many motives for corrupt actions,
including desires for wealth, status, and power. However, there is
apparently at least one motive that we might think ought not to be
associated with corruption, namely, acting for the sake of the good.
Here we need to be careful. For sometimes actions that are done for
the sake of the good are, nevertheless, morally wrong actions. Indeed,
some actions that are done out of a desire to achieve the good are
corrupt actions, namely, acts of so-called noble cause corruption.



This is not the place to provide a detailed treatment of the
phenomenon of noble cause corruption (Kleinig 2002; Miller 2016:
Chapter 3). Rather let us simply note that even in cases of noble
cause corruption--contra what the person who performs the action
thinks--it may well be the case that the corrupt action morally
ought not to be performed; or at least the corrupt action is *pro
tanto* morally wrong, even if it is morally permissible all things
considered. Accordingly, the person who performs it may well be
deceiving him or herself, or be simply mistaken when they judge that
the action morally ought to be performed. So their motive, i.e., to
act for the sake of what is right, has a moral deficiency. They are
only acting for the sake of what they *believe* is morally
right, but in fact it is not morally right; their belief is a false
belief. So we can conclude that corrupt actions are habitual actions
that are at the very least *pro tanto* morally wrong and quite
possibly morally wrong all things considered, and therefore in all
probability not motivated by the *true* belief that they are
morally right.



Here there are more complex excuses and justifications available for
what might first appear to be an act of noble cause corruption.
Perhaps a police officer did not know that some form of evidence was
not admissible. The police officer's false belief that an action
is right (putting forward the evidence in a court of law) was
rationally dependent on some false non-moral belief (that the evidence
was admissible); and the police officer came to hold that non-moral
belief as a result of a rational process (he was informed, or at least
misinformed, that the evidence was admissible by a senior officer).
This would incline us to say that the putative act of noble cause
corruption was not really an act of corruption--although it might
serve to undermine a morally legitimate institutional
process--and therefore not an act of noble cause corruption. This
intuition is consistent with the causal account of corruption in
particular. The police officer in question did perform an action that
undermined a legitimate criminal justice process. However, his action
was not corrupt because he is not a corruptor. He did not intend to
undermine the process, he did not foresee that the process would be
undermined, and (let us assume) he could not reasonably have been
expected to foresee that it would be undermined. Nor is his action the
expression of a corrupt character.



Earlier, it was suggested that acts of noble cause corruption are
*pro tanto* morally wrong and that this is typically contra
what the actor believes. However, it is conceivable that *some*
acts of noble cause corruption are morally justified all things
considered. Perhaps the act of noble cause corruption while wrong
*in itself*, nevertheless, was morally justified from an all
things considered standpoint. If so, we might conclude that the action
was not an act of corruption (and therefore not an act of noble cause
corruption). Alternatively, we might conclude that it was an act of
corruption, but one of those few acts of corruption that was justified
in the circumstances. Perhaps both options are possibilities.



Suppose an undercover police officer offers a "bribe" to a
corrupt judge for the purpose, supposedly, of getting the judge to
pass a lenient sentence on a known mafia crime boss. The police
officer is actually engaged in a so-called "sting"
operation as part of an anti-corruption strategy. The judge accepts
the bribe and is duly convicted of a criminal offence and jailed. (Let
us also assume that the judge is already so corrupt that he will not
be further corrupted by being offered the bribe.) The police officer
offers the bribe for the purpose of achieving a moral good, i.e.,
convicting a corrupt official. However, we are disinclined to call
this a case of corruption. Presumably the reason for this is that in
this context the "bribe" does not have a corrupting
effect; in particular, it does not succeed in undermining the judicial
process of sentencing the crime boss. So this is a case in which a
*prima facie* act of noble cause corruption turns out not be an
act of corruption, and therefore not an act of noble cause corruption.
A less straightforward case is the one where the action does have a
corrupting effect. Consider two possibilities: (i) The sting is
continued for a while (to catch other corrupt judges) and paid for (by
bribes) verdicts are temporarily enforced during the sting; (ii) The
process of considering and accepting the money offered by the
disguised police officer further despoils the judge's character
but has no further effect on court proceedings (because the judge is
arrested within minutes). In both cases, arguably, the officer
conducting the sting operations committed an act of corruption.



What of morally justified acts of noble cause corruption. Suppose
someone bribes an immigration official in order to ensure that his
friend--who is ineligible to enter Australia--can in fact
enter Australia, and thereby have access to life-saving hospital
treatment. This act of bribery is evidently an act of institutional
corruption; a legitimate institutional process has been subverted.
However, the person acted for the sake of doing what he believed to be
morally right; his action was an instance of noble cause corruption.
Moreover, from an all things considered standpoint--and in
particular, in the light of the strength of the moral obligations owed
to close friends when their lives are at risk--his action may
well be morally justified. Accordingly, his act of corruption may well
not have a corrupting effect on himself. Plausibly, this explains any
tendency we might have not to describe his action as an action of
corruption. But from the fact that the person was not corrupted it
does not follow that the act did not corrupt. Moreover, it does not
even follow that some person or other was not corrupted. Clearly, in
our example, the immigration official was corrupted and, therefore,
the action was *pro tanto* morally wrong, even if the action
was morally right all things considered.



In this section the following propositions have been advanced: (a) the
phenomenon of noble cause corruption is a species of corruption, and
it is seen to be so by the lights of the causal account of corruption
in particular; (b) conceivably, some acts of noble cause corruption
are morally justified all things considered; (c) instances of
structural corruption favored by Lessig and/or Thompson are
potentially cases of noble cause corruption, but this is not
necessarily the case.


## 4. Integrity Systems



Thus far our concern has been with theorizing institutional
corruption. Indeed, most of the philosophical work undertaken to date
has consisted in such theorizing. However, there are some salient
exceptions to this. For instance, Pogge has suggested undermining the
international borrowing privileges of authoritarian governments who
have removed democratic governments (Pogge 2002 [2008]: Chapter 10);
Wenar (2016) argues for the enforcement of property rights (popular
resource sovereignty) in relation to the resources curse; Lessig
(Lessig 2011) has elaborated a raft of specific measures to reform the
system of campaign contributions in the U.S.; Alexandra and Miller
(2010) have outlined ways to utilize reputational devices in some
sectors in which reputational loss hurts the "bottom line"
(see also Brennan & Pettit 2005 for an account of the theoretical
underpinnings of such practical reforms).



However, at a more general level there is an apparent need on the part
of philosophers to conceptualize the notion of an anti-corruption
system or, more broadly, an integrity system for institutions
(Klitgaard 1988; Pope 1997; Anechiarico & Jacobs 1998; Klitgaard
et al. 2000; Preston & Sampford 2002; Baker 2005; Miller 2017). An
integrity system is an institutional arrangement the purpose of which
is to promote ethical attitudes and behavior and, crucially, to
prevent or, at least, reduce institutional corruption. For instance,
an integrity system for a police organization might consist of a set
of laws and regulations, an internal affairs department comprised of
corruption investigators, an external oversight body, professional
reporting mechanisms, an enforceable code of ethics, a complaints and
discipline process, and so on. The contribution of philosophers to
integrity systems has been threefold. Firstly, they have offered
synoptic or "birds-eye" views of the architecture of such
systems and in so doing determined whether they are fit for normative
institutional purpose. Naturally, this work presupposes theories of
the normative institutional purposes of the institutions in question
(Lessig 2011; Thompson 1995). Secondly, they have addressed a variety
of ethical issues that have arisen in the design and implementation of
integrity systems and their various institutional components.
Consider, for instance, the range of ethical issues that arise in
relation to anti-corruption systems for police organizations, e.g.,
entrapment, privacy/surveillance (Miller 2016). Thirdly, they have
identified the underlying causal and/or rational basis of the
corruption and, in light of this, designed appropriate anti-corruption
measures. (Pogge 2002 [2008]: Chapter 6; Lessig 2011); van den Hoven,
Miller, & Pogge 2017). An important set of structural problems
facilitating corruption are collective action problems, e.g.,
regulatory arbitrage in the global financial system and tax havens
(Obermayer & Obermaier 2016; Rothstein & Varraich 2017). One
kind of solution proposed is that of an enforceable cooperative scheme
at the international level (Eatwell & Taylor 2000).



Integrity systems can be thought of as being either predominantly
reactive or predominantly preventive, albeit the distinction is
somewhat artificial since there is always a need for both reactive
elements, e.g., investigations of corrupt actions, and preventive
elements, e.g., ethics training and transparency mechanisms. Reactive
systems are fundamentally linear. They frame laws and regulation that
set out a series of offences, wait for transgressions, investigate,
adjudicate and take punitive measures. In many areas, including
institutional corruption, resources are limited and, thus, ethically
informed decisions have to be made in relation to the prioritization
of corrupt activity to be investigated and to what extent. This
ethical problem is to be distinguished from the problem of
under-resourcing motivated by a desire to hamstring anti-corruption
initiatives. Moreover, both problems are to be distinguished from the
debate between those who favor increased laws and regulations to
combat, for instance, financial corruption, and those who argue for a
decrease in such laws and regulations since they unnecessarily
increase the cost of doing business.



Preventive institutional mechanisms for combating corruption can be
divided into four categories. Mechanisms designed to reduce the
motivation to engage in corruption, e.g., ethics education programs;
mechanisms to reduce the capacity of those motivated to engage in
corruption, e.g., legislation to downsize oligopolies to prevent
cartels (Rose-Ackerman 1999), exploitation of the lack of trust
between corruptors (Lambsdorff 2007), democratization and the
separation of powers ("power corrupts" (Acton 1887 [1948:
364]) to reign in powerful, corrupt governments (Johnston 2014);
mechanisms to eliminate or reduce the opportunity to engage in
corruption, e.g., conflict of interest provisions; mechanisms to
expose corrupt behavior, e.g., oversight bodies, media organizations
(Pope 1997; Spence et al. 2011).



It is self-evident that there is need for both reactive and preventive
elements if an integrity system is to be adequate. This point obtains
whether or not the integrity system in question pertains to a single
organization, an industry, an occupational group, or an entire
society. However, the reactive and preventive elements need to cohere
in an overall holistic integrity system (Miller 2017). A further point
often overlooked is that if an integrity system is to be effective it
presupposes a framework of accepted social norms in the sense of
socially accepted moral principles. Social norms provide the standards
which determine what counts as corruption. Moreover, in so doing they
determine whether or not such behavior will be tolerated or not.
Revealing corruption has very little effect if the wider community to
whom the corruption is revealed are tolerant or otherwise accepting of
it.


## 5. Conclusion



Corruption is a highly diverse phenomenon, including bribery,
nepotism, false testimony, cheating, abuse of authority and so on.
Moreover, corruption takes different forms across the spectrum of
institutions giving rise to political corruption, financial
corruption, police corruption, academic corruption and so on. The
causal theory of corruption is a sustained attempt to provide an
account which accommodates this diversity. In doing so it emphasizes
the causal as well as the normative dimension of institutional
corruption. The most influential contemporary philosophical theories
of political corruption are those of Dennis Thompson and Lawrence
Lessig. Moreover, Lessig's notion of dependence corruptions
looks to be generalizable to a degree to institutions other than
political institutions. Likewise the mechanism that lies at the heart
of Thompson's theory may be generalizable to a degree to
institutions other than political institutions. However, as they
stand, neither of these theories provides a general or comprehensive
theory of institutional corruption (and Lessig's theory, at
least, is not intended to do so). The wide diversity of corrupt
actions implies that there may well need to be a correspondingly wide
and diverse range of specific anti-corruption measures to combat
corruption in its different forms, and indeed in its possibly very
different contexts. Recent decades have seen the rise of whole systems
of anti-corruptions mechanisms encased in what are referred to as
integrity systems. Here we can distinguish reactive from preventive
elements of an integrity or anti-corruption system and, arguably, an
effective integrity system should integrate reactive and preventive
elements in an overall holistic system.