Passive Corruption: How Institutions Corrupt People

Authors

  • Colin Bird University of Virginia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36253/rifp-2275

Keywords:

corruption, accountability, role-morality, public service, virtue-ethics

Abstract

This paper questions the claim, advanced persuasively by Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti, that political corruption should primarily be understood as a “deficit of office accountability.” On the one hand, it identifies some ambiguities internal to their theory; these suggest that it underestimates the role of self-serving motives in corruption and overemphasizes the perversion of institutional mandates. On the other hand, it describes a form of “passive corruption” that their theory cannot easily accommodate. Passive corruption, I argue, consists in an excess, rather than a deficit, of “office accountability” and typically arises when different institutions come into conflict with each other.

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Published

2023-08-05

How to Cite

Bird, C. (2023). Passive Corruption: How Institutions Corrupt People. Rivista Italiana Di Filosofia Politica, (4), 37–57. https://doi.org/10.36253/rifp-2275

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Section

Il tema