Private Corruption

This paper extends Ceva and Ferretti’s (2021) office-accountability account of political corruption to the domain of private institutions. Although their theory is developed for public and political contexts, I argue that its core normative structure is not essentially public. It can be applied to firms, professional organizations, private universities, media organizations, and regulated markets. The central claim is that private corruption, like public corruption, is a distinctive form of institutional wrongdoing grounded in violations of role-based accountability. Ceva and Ferretti define corruption as conduct by an officeholder, acting in her institutional capacity, that cannot be justified by reference to the mandate of her office. Corruption is therefore not primarily a matter of illicit gain, harmful outcomes, or rule-breaking as such. It is a form of “interactive injustice” (Ceva 2016): a failure to meet the demands of accountability that structure relations among officeholders. I argue that this conception requires neither public authority nor democratic authorization, but only normatively structured roles with powers, responsibilities, and expectations of justification. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, many private institutions instantiate offices in the relevant sense. Corporate executives, auditors, compliance officers, physicians, journalists, and academic administrators occupy roles defined by mandates that allocate authority and specify standards for its exercise. These mandates generate accountability relations among role occupants, even when the institution’s aims are commercial or associative rather than public-regarding. Second, paradigmatic cases of private corruption can be reconstructed within this framework. Undisclosed conflicts of interest, favoritism, manipulation of internal procedures, misuse of privileged information, or bending rules to serve personal or factional agendas are corrupt insofar as the reasons guiding the action cannot be justified by reference to the mandate that authorizes the officeholder’s power. The wrongness does not lie merely in harm or rule violation, but in the loss of justificatory standing vis-à-vis others within the institutional scheme. Third, accountability in private institutions is relational and deontic. Even without citizens or a political constituency, officeholders owe one another reasons grounded in their shared roles. Corruption arises when conduct cannot be rendered intelligible and acceptable within these role-based relations, thereby damaging the normative basis of coordinated institutional action. The paper concludes that extending the Ceva–Ferretti paradigm to private institutions yields a unified account of corruption across the public–private divide. It avoids economic reductionism and purely consequentialist views while preserving the distinctive wrongness of corruption as an institutional pathology. Corruption, whether public or private, is best understood as a failure of office accountability: a breakdown in the relations of mutual justification that make institutional cooperation non-arbitrary and normatively intelligible.