Abstract
Political corruption has a ‘double nature’: it can manifest in individual and also in institutional action. (p. 45) In Political Corruption: The Internal Enemy of Public Institutions, Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti ambitiously aim to supply a unified explanation for these phenomena by means of a careful analysis of the metaphysics of institutions. They identify a ‘shared structural root’ of corruption in its individual and institutional forms: the interdependent nature of officeholders’ exercises of official power within any given institution. (p. 45) The authors then relate their theory causally to the kinds of negative consequences on which some other views focus, and they develop a plausible decision-making framework to be used when deontological duties and consequentialist considerations appear to conflict. (pp. 109–11)
Ceva and Ferretti’s contribution to the political corruption literature is distinctively valuable because their theory is well-suited to structure ethical deliberations by individual public officials who wish to do the right thing. Its primary weakness lies in the authors’ failure to firmly anchor the reciprocal norms that bind institutional insiders to the rights of the general public. However, this weakness is not fatal to the authors’ deontological strategy. A future extension of their work could anchor the mutual rights and duties of institutional insiders to a more plausible moral foundation: a conception of ‘the people’ as a unitary constructive agent.