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Public Vices: a Taxonomy of the Pathologies of Government

Institutions
Analytic
Public Opinion
Nikolas Kirby
University of Glasgow

Abstract

There is an emerging drive to define a new praiseworthy governance goal: a goal that not only implies addressing corruption, but as it were going beyond to establish institutions truly worthy of trust. That goal is ‘public integrity.’ In early work, I argued that most current accounts of public integrity have adopted what we might call an ‘officer-first’ approach. They have sought to define public integrity primarily as a quality of individual public officers; and only derivatively, if at all, as a quality of public institutions themselves. I argued that this approach was flawed. Analysing the current debate on public officer integrity, we discover a need to define a role-specific sense of praiseworthy behaviour for public officers. In turn, we can only define this role-specific sense by reference to a public officer’s contribution to the overall moral ideal of her institution. Assuming this ideal itself is a form of public integrity, then it follows we must define such institutional integrity ‘first,’ in order to then define a public officer’s praiseworthy contribution to it second. Substantively, I argued that, ‘public institutional integrity’ is the robust disposition of an institution to pursue its purpose efficiently, within the constraints of legitimacy, consistent with its commitments. ‘Public officer integrity’ is the robust disposition of an officer to support the integrity of her institution, within the course of her duties, to the best of her abilities. Assuming this ‘institution-first’ conception of public integrity stands, then public integrity is compromised by the negation of any combination of its multiple necessary conditions. It follows that public integrity has not merely one but a number of potential opposites: pathologies of government. A disposition towards such pathologies might be considered public vices to the virtue of public integrity. This paper aims to provide a taxonomy of institutional pathologies, so implied, giving conceptual clarity to ideas like institutional corruption, capture, confusion, inefficiency, irrationality, untrustworthiness, and fragility. It also hopes to leverage the normative structure of the concept of institutional integrity to discern the relative importance of these pathologies vis-à-vis one another. I hope to indicate the path towards a full normative theory of the opposites of institutional integrity that will account for the comparative importance and/or lexical priority of devoting resources to preventing or ameliorating such pathologies.