Institutional Corruption, Institutional Corrosion and Collective Responsibility

Abstract

This article’s primary concern is with characterizing and distinguishing institutional corruption and institutional corrosion. While the concept of institutional corruption entails some degree of culpability on the part of institutional role occupants, this does not seem to be the case with institutional corrosion. The article outlines and motivates a prior definition of institutional corruption developed elsewhere to develop an account of the contrasting notion of institutional corrosion. Since both institutional corruption and institutional corrosion are typically the product of some form of collective action or omission on the part of multiple institutional role occupants, there is also a need to provide a serviceable notion of collective responsibility.

Keywords:

• institutional corruption
• institutional corrosion
• collective responsibility
• causal theory of corruption
• joint responsibility

In this article, the concern is primarily with characterizing and distinguishing institutional corruption and institutional corrosion. Intuitively, the concept of institutional corruption entails some degree of culpability on the part of institutional role occupants (in particular), whereas this does not seem to be the case with institutional corrosion.¹ An institution might undergo corrosion as a result, for instance, of a lack of resources for which no one might be at fault.

The strategy followed here is to outline and motivate a prior definition of institutional corruption developed elsewhere,² and using this definition as a starting point, to develop an account of the contrasting notion of institutional corrosion. Since both institutional corruption and institutional corrosion are typically products of some form of collective action or omission on the part of multiple institutional role occupants, there is also a need to provide a serviceable notion of collective responsibility.³

1. Social Institutions

In this article, social institutions are understood as organizations and systems of organizations. As such, they have three key dimensions, namely, function, structure and culture. The function is the goals or ends or purposes which the institution serves, e.g. police institutions have as a purpose fighting crime. The structure is the (usually formal) structure of task-defined roles constitutive of the institution, e.g. the rank structure favored by most police organizations. The culture is the ethos or “spirit” which pervades an organization; it consists in the informal attitudes which influence the way in which tasks are performed and, on occasion, whether they are performed at all. Notoriously, for example, police culture is solidaristic and puts a premium on loyalty to fellow officers, even to the point of shielding corrupt officers.

Elsewhere⁴ the teleological-cooperation normative theory of contemporary social institutions and their constitutive occupational roles has been elaborated and defended. Put simply, on this account social institutions are organizations and systems of organizations that provide collective goods by means of joint activity. This is the general normative theory of social institutions. However, the collective goods in question vary from one institution to another. They include the fulfilment of a variety of aggregated moral rights, such as needs based rights to security (police organizations), material well-being (businesses operating in market-based industries), education (universities), and so on. Hence the need for special normative theories of particular social institutions, e.g. the normative theory of a police force as opposed to a military force.

The central concept in the teleological account of social institutions is that of joint action.⁵ Joint actions are actions involving a number of agents performing interdependent actions in order to realize some common goal or collective end, e.g. members of a mortar squad loading and firing a mortar having as a common goal to destroy an enemy gun emplacement. A collective end is an individual end more than one agent has, and which is such that, if it is realized, it is realized by all, or most, of the actions of the agents involved; the individual action of any given agent is only part of the means by which the end is realized, and each individual action is interdependent with the others in the service of the collective end.

Organizational action typically involves a multi-layered structure of joint actions.⁶ One illustration of the notion of a layered structure of joint actions is an armed force fighting a battle. Suppose at an organizational level, a number of joint actions are severally necessary and jointly sufficient to achieve some collective end. Thus the joint action of the mortar squad destroying enemy gun emplacements, the joint action of the flight of military planes providing air cover, and the joint action of the infantry platoon taking and holding the ground might be severally necessary and jointly sufficient to achieve the collective end of defeating the enemy; as such, these three joint actions taken together constitute a single complex joint action, namely, the joint action of the combined military force (comprised of the mortar squad, the platoon and the flight of planes) defeating the enemy. Assume that the complex joint action is a level two joint action. From the perspective of the collective end of defeating the enemy, each of these three constitutive “actions” is an individual action that is a component of the level two (complex) joint action: the joint action directed to the collective end of defeating the enemy. Accordingly, from the perspective of the complex joint action, each of its three constitutive “actions” is a level two individual action.

However, each of these three level-two “actions” considered in itself is a joint action with component individual actions and these component individual actions are level-one actions. Moreover, each of these component level one individual actions are severally necessary (let us assume this for purposes of simplification, albeit it is unlikely that every single action would in fact be necessary) and jointly sufficient for the realization of some collective end. Thus the individual members of the mortar squad jointly operate the mortar in order to realize the collective end of destroying enemy gun emplacements. Each pilot, jointly with other pilots, strafes enemy soldiers in order to realize the collective end of providing air cover for their advancing foot soldiers. Further, the set of foot soldiers jointly advance in order to take and hold the ground vacated by members of the retreating enemy force.

At level one there are individual actions directed to three distinct collective ends: the collective ends of (respectively) destroying gun emplacements, providing air cover, and talking and holding ground. At level one there are then three level one joint actions, namely, the members of the mortar squad destroying gun emplacements, the members of the flight of planes providing air cover, and the members of the infantry taking and holding ground. However, taken together these three level-one joint actions constitute a single level-two joint action. The collective end of this level-two joint action is to defeat the enemy; and, to reiterate, from the perspective of this level-two joint action and its collective end, these constitutive actions are level-two individual actions.

Note that on this multi-layered joint action analysis of organizational action, an organization per se does not perform intentional actions and, therefore, does not possess intentions, beliefs or ends, as some theorists such as Gilbert, Pettit, and (more recently) Bratman have argued.⁷ On the other hand, organizational action does not simply consist of interdependent individual actions (and regularities thereof), as rational choice and related atomistic theorists such as Guala have argued.⁸ Organizational action presupposes common or collective ends that might or might not be explained in terms of prior atomistic individual ends or preferences.

Note also that the notion of acting qua occupant of an institutional role, e.g. that of a foot soldier, is simply that of performing the tasks definitive of the institutional role (including the joint tasks), conforming to the norms and regulations that constrain the tasks to be undertaken, and pursuing the purposes or ends of the role (including the collective ends).

Collective goods of the kind favored here have three properties:⁹ (i) they are produced, maintained or renewed by means of the joint activity of members of organizations or systems of organizations, i.e. by institutional role occupants; (ii) they are available to the whole community (at least in principle); and (iii) they ought to be produced (or maintained or renewed) and made available to the whole community since they are desirable goods and ones to which the members of the community have an (institutional) joint moral right.¹⁰

Notwithstanding that natural rights such as the right to life and the right not to be tortured and their correlative obligations are logically prior to social institutions, many moral rights, duties, values, principles, and so on are not logically prior to social institutions. Such institutional moral rights and duties include ones that are: (i) derived at least in part from collective goods, and (ii) constitutive of specific institutional roles, e.g. the rights and duties of a fire officer, police officer, or regular soldier.

A further point to be made here is that any given institution is typically one component in an overall structure of institutions, and the single institution in question serves its institutional purpose (produces the relevant collective good) in the context of other institutions serving theirs. For example, the police are a component in the overall criminal justice system. Moreover, some institutions, notably governments, are meta-institutions; that is, they coordinate, regulate, etc. other institutions. Thus, single institutions have important structural and functional relationships to other institutions within the nation-state and frequently, in a globally connected world, to institutions in other nation-states; indeed, many institutions are trans-national in character, e.g. multinational corporations. An important consequence of this trans-national character of many institutions is the opportunities for corruption and evasion of law enforcement that it affords. Consider, for instance, the three-way relationship between the proceeds of crime and corruption, money laundering, and the global financial system, involving as it does international money transfers, off-shore shell companies, and international banks and legal firms.¹¹

2. Institutional Corruption

It is tempting to try to avoid the problem of providing a theoretical account of the concept of corruption by simply identifying corruption with specific legal and/or moral offenses. Perhaps the most plausible candidate is bribery. But what of nepotism? Nepotism does not necessarily involve bribery, yet it is often a species of corruption. In fact, corruption is exemplified by a very wide and diverse array of phenomena including, but not restricted to, bribery and nepotism. Paradigmatic 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.

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 particularly in the case of institutional corruption the despoiling of the moral character of institutional role occupants qua institutional role occupants.

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. So institutional corruption involves a causal process resulting in damage to institutional processes or purposes (and, potentially, the despoiling of the moral character of institutional role occupants). This emphasis on a causal process is captured by the causal theory of institutional corruption—the theory favored here.¹²

The causal theory of institutional corruption presupposes a normative teleological conception of institutions according to which institutions are defined not only as organizations or systems of organizations with a purpose (or many), but organizations or systems of organizations the purpose(s) of which is a human good, namely (as we saw above), a collective good. Accordingly, the condition of corruption exists only relative to an uncorrupted condition, which is the condition of being a morally legitimate organization, structure of organizations, or organizational sub-element, whose raison d’être is the provision, maintenance, or renewal of a collective good.

Moreover, one of the defining features of the causal theory pertains to the agents who cause corruption. It is an 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. 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.

A further point is that the undermining of institutional purposes or processes involved in institutional corruption typically requires the actions of multiple agents; the single action of a single agent is not very often 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.

Let us set out the causal theory of institutional corruption. 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:¹³

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(s) 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.

In the above definition (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.

Moreover, A’s moral responsibility for corruption might consist in an omission. A might be guilty of an intentional omission or of unintended culpable negligence. An instance of corruption in which a corruptor is culpably negligent might describe a safety inspector in an industrial plant who fails to do his moral and institutional duty to ensure compliance with safety protocols with the consequence that safety protocols are undermined.

Further, the causal theory is cast in general terms, i.e. the undermining of institutional purposes, processes and/or persons (qua institutional role occupants). This enables the causal theory to 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 final point concerns collective moral responsibility. Institutional actors in organizations can have collective moral responsibility—not merely individual (including aggregate individual—see next section) moral responsibility—for the undermining of institutional purposes, processes, and virtues. Consider, for instance, the Enron corruption scandal. It involved the collective moral responsibility for the corruption of multiple managers and employees. It was certainly not a matter of “a few rotten apples.”¹⁴

3. Collective Moral Responsibility

Collective moral responsibility is a species of moral responsibility and contrasts in particular with individual moral responsibility. The notion of moral responsibility, however, whether individual or collective, contrasts with a number of other notions.

First, we need to distinguish moral responsibility (including collective moral responsibility) from causal responsibility. A person or persons can inadvertently cause a bad outcome without necessarily being morally responsible for so doing.

Second, we can distinguish moral responsibility from what can be referred to as natural responsibility. Moral responsibility typically requires not only causal responsibility but also an intention to cause good or evil (or at least the knowledge that one’s action will or may well cause good or evil) and an intention that is itself under one’s control (and connects in the right way with one’s action).¹⁵ On the other hand, one is not necessarily morally responsible for one’s actions that are under one’s control since such actions might not have any moral significance.

Third, we need to distinguish moral responsibility from institutional responsibility, e.g. legal responsibility.

Finally, we need to distinguish prospective or forward-looking from retrospective or backward-looking responsibility. Suppose a thief is morally responsible for his past crimes; this is retrospective responsibility. Now suppose a police officer is morally (and, for that matter, institutionally) responsible for arresting the thief if he comes across him; this is prospective responsibility.

As is the case with individual responsibility we can distinguish between collective moral responsibility, on the one hand, and collective causal, collective natural and collective institutional responsibility, on the other.¹⁶ Moreover, we can distinguish between collective retrospective and collective prospective moral responsibility.

Collective moral responsibility is the moral responsibility that attaches to structured and unstructured groups of human persons for their morally significant actions and omissions. According to my favored theory, collective moral responsibility is joint moral responsibility (JMR).¹⁷

JMR takes joint actions as its starting point. According to JMR, at least one of the central senses of collective responsibility is responsibility arising from joint actions (and joint omissions). In this view of collective responsibility as joint responsibility, collective responsibility is ascribed to individuals. Each member of the group is individually morally responsible for his or her own contributory action, and (at least in the case of most small-scale joint action) each is also individually (fully or partially) responsible for the aimed at outcome, i.e. the realized collective end of the joint action. However, each is individually responsible for the realized collective end, jointly with the others; hence this conception is relational in character.

Note that on JMR it is possible that while each participant in a morally significant joint action makes a causal contribution to the aimed at outcome of the joint action, none of these contributing actions considered on its own is either necessary or sufficient for this outcome.

What of large-scale morally significant joint actions and omissions, such as the Bhopal Gas disaster,¹⁸ in which due to culpable negligence with respect to safety protocols a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal (India) emitted lethal gas killing thousands? These introduce a range of issues which are often not present in small-scale, morally significant joint actions and omissions. For one thing, large-scale cases often involve hierarchical organizations and hence the potential for those in subordinate positions having diminished moral responsibility. For another thing, the extent of the contribution to the outcome of a joint action or omission can vary greatly from one participant to another; the causal contributions can be direct and significant and/or indirect and diffuse. Indeed, some of those who make a causal contribution to a joint action—and especially to large-scale joint actions—might, nevertheless, not be genuine participants in that joint action because in performing their contributory action they were not aiming at the outcome constitutive of the joint action; did not have its collective end as their end. On a relational view such as JMR, Union Carbide can be ascribed collective moral responsibility for the disaster to the extent that Union Carbide personnel jointly acted or, more likely, jointly (and culpably) failed to act in ways that led to the disaster. Here the network of joint actions and omissions could be quite wide and complex without involving (either causally or in terms of their intentions, ends or responsibilities) all, or even most, Union Carbide personnel. Moreover, some joint actions or omissions are likely to be of greater moral significance than others, and some individual contributions, e.g. those of the Union Carbide managers, of greater importance than others, e.g. those of lower echelon employees.

4. Institutional Corrosion

Armed with the accounts of institutions, institutional corruption, and collective responsibility above, let us now turn to the concept of institutional corrosion. In doing so some assumptions will be made. Firstly, as with institutional corruption, institutional corrosion is a causal concept. Thus, as with institutional corruption, institutional corrosion involves the undermining of institutional purposes, of institutional processes, and/or of the virtues constitutive of the character of institutional role occupants qua institutional role occupants.

Second, the condition of institutional corrosion exists only relative to the condition of non-corrosion. As in the case of non-corruption, the condition of non-corrosion is the condition of being a morally legitimate organization, structure of organizations, or organizational sub-element, whose raison d’être is the provision, maintenance or renewal of a collective good.

Third, in the light of the above two just mentioned, defining conditions, other things being equal,¹⁹ there is a collective moral responsibility of institutional actors to rectify corrosion, supposing this is possible and does not incur too great a moral cost. After all, other things being equal, there is a collective moral responsibility of those occupying the roles in an institution to ensure that it is in a condition of non-corruption (or, at least, that it is no more than minimally corrupt). For if the institution is essentially corrupt then it will not be a morally legitimate organization realizing its institutional purpose.²⁰ Likewise, if the institution is fundamentally corroded then, presumably, it is not realizing its institutional purpose and its moral legitimacy is called into question (at least in part because it is failing to realize its institutional purpose).

Notwithstanding these similarities between institutional corruption and institutional corrosion, there are some important differences. First and foremost, someone is morally responsible for performing a corrupt action or omission (or, at least, a corrupt action is the expression of the character of a corrupt person), but no-one is necessarily morally responsible for corrosive action and nor is corrosive action necessarily the expression of the character of a corrupt person. Consider, for example, funding decisions that gradually reduce public monies allocated to the court system in some large jurisdiction. Consequently, magistrates might be progressively less well trained and there might be ever fewer of them to deal with the gradually increasing case workload. 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, evidently there has not been judicial corruption. How so?

For institutional corrosion to constitute corruption, the institutional damage done needs to be avoidable. Indeed, the relevant institutional role occupants, i.e. members of the institution in question, must be capable of being held morally responsible for the damage, at least in the generality of cases.²¹ Therefore, 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 by virtue of their culpable negligence.

Notice that whereas institutional corrosion does not necessarily involve moral responsibility on the part of members of the institution undergoing corrosion it can involve the moral responsibility of non-members. If it does, then it does not necessarily constitute institutional corruption. Thus, a government-funded hospital whose numbers of medical staff and beds are depleted by unjustified ongoing budget cuts may undergo institutional corrosion but not institutional corruption, although the government officials in question (who are non-members of the hospital) might be guilty of corruption; corruption of government.

Second, there can be one-off acts of corruption, such as a one-off bribe. The single one-off act of bribery might not have the effect of undermining or contributing to the undermining of some institutional process, purpose or virtue. Accordingly, it is not corrosive; it is not an instance of institutional corrosion. Nevertheless, being a bribe, it 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, purpose, or virtue. This is another reason there can be institutional corruption without institutional corrosion.

Now consider a single action of an institutional role occupant which is an instance of a recurring pattern of actions that are frequently performed by this role occupant and by multiple other role occupants, such as police officers accepting free cups of coffee at a particular roadhouse cafe thereby ensuring that the café is afforded a much higher degree of protection than that available to competing roadhouse cafes. In these circumstances the practice of free cups of coffee is corrosive of the principle of impartiality and, therefore, of good police practice. However, a single free cup of coffee on one occasion to one officer is not in and of itself corrosive of good police practice. Moreover, arguably, it is not necessarily an instance of a kind of act that has the tendency to undermine good police practice. Perhaps the occasional free cup of coffee is available to all police officers at any café in a second jurisdiction in which case the principle of impartiality is not compromised and, indeed, it may promote good community-police relations without corrupting police officers, given the trivial cost of a cup of coffee. Thus, considered in itself, this is not an act of corruption. Therefore, while there can be one-off acts of institutional corruption, this is not always the case; some acts of corruption are only acts of corruption if they are an element of a pattern of actions that undermines institutional purposes, processes or virtues.

At any rate, the point to be emphasized here is that unlike institutional corruption, institutional corrosion requires recurring actions (or omissions) on the part of multiple institutional role occupants. This is, of course, not to say that a single very influential role occupant might not have a far greater corrosive effect than anyone else, whether by virtue of his or her corrupt or merely corrosive action. Donald Trump’s consistent lie that he won the 2020 United States presidential election against Joe Biden is a case in point; it has contributed to undermining to a non-trivial degree the public confidence in electoral processes in the United States.²² However, in an institutional setting even the most powerful individual relies on many others to do his or her bidding, or to otherwise directly or indirectly contribute to the corrosive impact of the individual’s actions, e.g. the corrosive impact of Trump’s lie has relied to a considerable extent on its public endorsement by Republican members of the US Congress and by his other followers.

We have seen that both institutional corruption and institutional corrosions are causal concepts and that they are both morally problematic phenomena. Indeed, other things being equal, there is a collective moral responsibility on the part of relevant institutional role occupants to rectify institutional corruption and institutional corrosion. We have also distinguished between these two phenomena, notably by recourse to moral responsibility. Roughly speaking, if there is a corrupt action then someone is morally responsible for performing that action²³ whereas this is not the case for corrosive actions. Let us now briefly turn to the relationship between institutional corruption and institutional corrosion and then provide a definition of institutional corrosion.

As we have seen, institutional corrosion does not entail institutional corruption, given that moral responsibility is (some special cases exempted) a necessary condition for the latter but not the former. However, since institutional corruption involves the undermining of institutional purposes, processes, or virtues, it follows that serious, widespread, ongoing, institutional corruption will be corrosive; indeed, such institutional corruption will consist in part in institutional corrosion.

Moreover, corrosion is conducive to corruption via the proverbial slippery slope. Consider the more or less unavoidable reduction in grading standards in a university newly reliant on intakes of poor-quality students. It is now a matter of either closing down the university or taking in these poor-quality students and passing a majority of them, albeit in accordance with somewhat lower standards. This is, let us assume, institutional corrosion, but not yet institutional corruption. However, the university’s administrative and academic managers now decide to pass almost all poor-quality students in accordance with the newly prescribed much lower standards and more generally to inflate all students’ grades. They do this in order greatly to increase their student intake and thereby to make a considerable financial profit and enable inter alia higher staff salaries, notably for managers. Presumably, this is now institutional corruption.

Institutional corruption and institutional corrosion are often interdependent; one phenomenon reinforces the other. Consider a police force in which there is a culture that combines a poor work ethic, a punitive management unsupportive of street police, and high absenteeism on the one hand, with a prevalence of bribe-taking, excessive use of force, and failure to report corruption (the so-called “blue wall of silence”) on the other. The former features are constitutive of institutional corrosion, the latter of institutional corruption yet they tend to go hand-in-glove.²⁴

In light of the above discussion, let us now offer the following definition of institutional corrosion.

A set of single or joint actions, S(x₁, x₂, x_3, etc.), performed by corresponding multiple institutional members, A₁, A₂, A_3, etc., (e.g. x₁ by A₁) of an institution, I, or by others, B₁, B₂, B₃ etc., constitute acts of institutional corrosion if:

S(x₁, x₂, x_3, etc.) has the direct or indirect effect of seriously undermining an institutional process and/or purpose (collective good, G) of I.²⁵

5. Categories of Institutional Corrosion

With the benefit of the foregoing discussion, we can describe and distinguish various categories of institutional corrosion. We do so under four headings of which the first two fall straightforwardly out of the definitions of institutional corruption and institutional corrosion (albeit their boundaries in specific instances might be vague). The third and fourth categories are somewhat more problematic.

5.1. No Culpable Persons

Our first category of institutional corrosion consists of examples in which there is no culpability on the part of either persons occupying roles constitutive of the institution suffering corrosion or on the part of persons not occupying these roles. Our above-described scenario of judicial corrosion is one such example. While there is a diminution in the quality of the adjudications of the judges as a result of under-resourcing, no-one, whether within or without the institution, is at fault; the under-resourcing is unavoidable as are its corrosive consequences. Therefore, this is not institutional corruption.

5.2. Culpable Persons External to the Institution

Our second category consists of examples in which there is culpability for the corrosion, but it attaches to persons who do not occupy roles constitutive of the institution suffering this corrosion. Therefore, it does not necessarily involve institutional corruption. Our above-described scenario of deliberate, avoidable, under-funding of a hospital by the government is one such example. Notice that those who are morally responsible for the corrosion of the institution (the hospital) are not engaged in institutional corruption of the hospital. The hospital itself has been corroded but not corrupted. This is because no institutional role occupant of the hospital is morally responsible for the undermining of the hospital’s institutional purposes or processes (and nor, let us assume, has the moral character of any role occupant of the hospital been despoiled in the process of corrosion). On the other hand, the members of the government may have engaged in acts of corruption and, if so, undermined the purposes and/or processes of government as an institution.

5.3. Factionalism

Internal disputes within an institution on fundamental issues can generate factions engaged in ongoing non-violent conflict that is nevertheless corrosive of the efficient and effective functioning of its processes. For instance, within some Christian churches there is a serious ongoing dispute between rival factions on fundamental issues such the ordination of priests living in open homosexual relationships. Moreover, factionalism can lead to gridlock thereby undermining the realization of the institutional purposes. For instance, the U.S. Congress now regularly suffers periods of gridlock when it fails to pass finance bills, thereby leading to a shutdown of the federal government.

Factionalism is conducive to institutional corruption. However, it may stop short of corruption in cases where there are fundamentally different perspectives or policies being pursued but pursued more or less within the rules. Or perhaps one faction might be combatting the corrupt practices of another faction while itself eschewing corruption. The Democratic Party in U.S. Congress in its political fight against a Trump-dominated Republican Party evidently sees itself in this light. Nevertheless, the ongoing political factionalism in the United States is evidently corrosive of its political institutions.

5.4. Linkage to Institutional Corruption

Our third category of institutional corrosion consists of examples of corrosion which have systematic links to institutional corruption but are not in themselves instances of institutional corruption. The links in question include causal ones, e.g. actions which contribute to sustaining corrupt practices, and moral ones, e.g. beneficiaries of corruption. The example we will consider here has a number of such links to a corrupt practice. The example involves institutional role occupants (and potentially those who are not members of the institution in question, but here we will focus on the former) who do not themselves engage in corruption but are: (i) beneficiaries of corruption; (ii) have no institutional means to combat the corruption from which they benefit, indeed the corruption in question is lawful; (iii) indirectly contribute to the continuation of the corruption.

Consider bribes paid by multinational companies to members of certain foreign officials to secure important contracts. Prior to the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act paying bribes was not a criminal offense or even a lesser regulatory offense. Now suppose that in this industry at this time in order to win tenders it is necessary to pay bribes; moreover, failure to win at least some tenders would put a company out of business. Thus, each company faces a moral dilemma. Paying bribes is a paradigmatic case of institutional corruption, but if a company does not pay bribes it will go out of business. Thus a moral justification for paying bribes is available and apparently, therefore, paying bribes is an instance of morally justified corruption.²⁶ This justification is not entirely persuasive since, let us assume, the companies actually face a collective action problem which they could resolve if they all cooperated in refusing to pay bribes. At any rate, in the absence of such cooperation the managers of the companies who are the ones who pay the bribes are guilty of institutional corruption (as are the foreign officials who demand and receive the bribes). What of the employees of the companies paying the bribes?

If these employees know about the bribes and if bribing was unlawful and there were institutional mechanisms available to them to report corruption—and, moreover, it was unlawful not to report corruption—then these employees would themselves be guilty of corruption. However, in our example there are no such mechanisms and, to reiterate, paying bribes is not even unlawful; there is no formal institutional means to combat corruption. Accordingly, an employee would need to go to extraordinary efforts to combat this corruption. He or she would need, for instance, to go to the media and, in doing so, risk losing their job. Clearly, if a person unconnected to the company who came to know of this corruption did nothing to combat it then they would not be guilty of corruption or even corrosion. But the employees benefit from the corruption; without the bribes tenders would not be won and they might find themselves without a job. Relatedly, the employees indirectly contribute to this ongoing corruption. For company managers only pay bribes because their companies, including themselves, can benefit by winning contracts and, thereby, stay in business. Moreover, if all company managers, and therefore all companies, refused to pay bribes then this corrupt practice would cease (we are assuming). Thus, the company managers and the companies by participating in this corrupt practice are directly sustaining it. However, the company managers and the companies could not participate in this corrupt practice if their employees refused to undertake the work resulting from the corruptly awarded tenders. So the company employees, while they are not participants in the bribe giving or receiving, and may indeed even disapprove of it, are nevertheless indirectly sustaining this corrupt practice. On the other hand, while each employee is contributing to sustaining a corrupt practice, the causal contribution is indirect and miniscule; the sustaining causal chain from employees to the corrupt practice is both indirect and diffuse.

In our example, the employees’ actions taken in combination indirectly causally support corruption and, therefore, they are indirectly corrosive. But are they engaged in institutional corruption? Arguably, they are not. Firstly, they are not themselves performing acts of bribe-giving or taking. Secondly, they do not have the formal institutional means available to them to combat it, given bribery is not unlawful and there are no reporting or other mechanisms in place.

They are, of course, beneficiaries of the corruption. However, this in itself does not entail that they are corrupt. More importantly, they contribute causally to the corruption albeit indirectly and in a diffuse manner. Note that while they contribute causally to the corruption, they do so in a context in which all firms are paying bribes. Therefore, arguably, they are not necessarily acting unfairly.

What of the obligation to cease to contribute causally to corruption? To reiterate: If any single employee refused to work he or she would simply lose their job and their livelihood without impacting the corrupt practice. Accordingly, this does not appear to be a moral requirement; the moral cost is too great to warrant what would amount to an ineffective protest gesture.

That said, the employees could engage in cooperative i.e. joint action to combat corruption. Indeed, since they face a collective action problem, they would need to do so. However, this would have to be industry-wide; it could not simply be undertaken by the employees in a single company. Yet perhaps the employees have an industry-wide collective moral responsibility to organize themselves and, for instance, take strike action to combat the corruption. It is not clear that this collective moral responsibility, supposing it exists would not be overridden by the moral weight of their own interests and moral obligations to their families to provide livelihoods. Moreover, in the order of priorities it is surely the collective responsibility of the managers (or of managers and owners) to act to overcome their collective action problem and combat the corruption that they are participating in rather than that of their employees; in any case, without the support of the managers and owners, the strike action might not succeed, e.g. the workforce might simply be replaced. In short, if the employees have a collective moral responsibility not to contribute (even if only indirectly and in a diffuse manner) to the corrupt practice, in these circumstances it is one that seems to be overridden or its moral force otherwise diminished by other considerations, notably the prior collective responsibility of their managers to engage in joint anti-corruption activity and of governments to enact legislation to render bribery unlawful.

Further, given that the corrupt actions are lawful and there is an absence of institutional means to combat them, and given that employees do not intentionally contribute to their continuation and do not contribute, all things considered, culpably, it seems that the most that can be said is that they knowingly (but not intentionally) act in a matter that indirectly, and in a diffuse manner, causally contributes to the corruption, i.e. they are engaged in institutional corrosion but not institutional corruption.

Disclosure Statement:

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Notes

1 See Kleinig, “Judicial Corrosion” for a theoretical account of institutional corrosion that draws on literature on institutional entropy and applies it to the judiciary as an institution. The informing idea of entropy here is that institutions tend to decline unless proactive measures are taken to rectify this. See Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty.

2 Miller, Institutional Corruption.

3 There is a voluminous philosophical literature on the concept of collective responsibility. For a useful recent collection see Bazargan-Forward and Tollefsen, Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility.

4 Miller, Moral Foundations of Social Institutions, Chapter 1.

5 Miller, “Joint Action”; Social Action Chapter 2; Miller, Moral Foundations of Social Institutions, Chapter 1. The notion of joint action can in turn be used to construct more complex notions, such as that of joint activity and joint task.

6 Miller, Social Action, Chapter 5; Miller, Moral Foundations of Social Institutions, Chapters 1 and 2.

7 Gilbert, On Social Facts; List and Pettit, Group Agency; and Bratman, Shared and Institutional Agency

8 Guala, Understanding Institutions.

9 See Miller, Moral Foundations of Social Institutions, Chapter 2. Collective goods might be intrinsic good or instrumental goods, e.g., goods that are a means to intrinsic goods. For a more expansive view of collective or common goods, see Riordan, Human Dignity and Liberal Politics.

10 Miller, Social Action, Chapter 7.

11 Obermayer and Obermaier, Panama Papers.

12 Miller, Institutional Corruption. For influential competing accounts, see Lessig Republic Lost, Thompson Ethics in Congress. For an overview of theories of corruption see Thompson “Theories of Institutional Corruption.”

13 Miller Institutional Corruption Chapter 3 Section 3.6.

14 Cruver Anatomy of Greed.

15 Davidson “Actions, Reasons and Causes.”

16 Here I assume that there is some, at least notional, distinction to be made between aggregate causal responsibility and collective causal responsibility, e.g., by virtue of the causal power of the collective per se being greater than the sum of the causal power of each of the contributing agents.

17 See Miller, “Collective Moral Responsibility”; “Collective Responsibility as Joint Responsibility.”

18 Eckerman, Bhopal Gas Saga.

19 Naturally, other things might not be equal. Thus, the collective good historically provided by an institution might now be more efficiently and effectively provided by another institution in which case there is no collective responsibility to maintain or renew the original institution. Stagecoach companies are a case in point.

20 If it is essentially corrupt presumably it will not be realizing its institutional purpose. However, even if it is, nevertheless, realizing its institutional purpose, it will be seriously morally compromised by virtue of being essentially corrupt. Therefore, there will be a collective moral responsibility to rectify this situation, other things being equal.

21 Miller, Institutional Corruption Chapter 3.

22 In fact, Trump’s lie is an instance of a corrupt rather than merely corrosive action, given that it is a lie rather than merely a false claim that he believes to be true. Most, if not all members of United States Congress who endorse Trump’s lie also know it to be false, and are therefore engaged in acts of corruption. On the other hand, many of Trump’s followers presumably sincerely believe it to be true; hence their public endorsements may constitute acts of corrosion rather than corruption. See Miller and Bossomaier, Cybersecurity, Ethics and Collective Responsibility, Chapter 3.

23 Except for some instances in which an act is an expression of a corrupt moral character and the person is not responsible for their moral character. Note the distinction between dispositions constitutive of a corrupt moral character and those constitutive of a character that performs corrosive actions, e.g., is incompetent. There is a gray area. Thus a poor work ethic is corrosive but might or might not constitute a vice constitutive of a corrupt moral character.

24 Miller, Corruption and Anti-Corruption in Policing.

25 If the dispositions, especially virtues, of role occupants are undermined this might or might not constitute corrosion without constituting corruption depending on the nature of these dispositions. See note 23. At any rate, the corrosive but non-corruptive impact on dispositions is omitted from this definition of institutional corrosion in the service of simplification.

26 Miller, Corruption and Anti-Corruption in Policing, Chapter 3: “Noble Cause Corruption in Policing.”