Aristotle on Legality and Corruption

http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p191341/pdf/ch02.pdf

2. Aristotle on Legality and Corruption

Richard Mulgan

Defining corruption

For most people in public policy circles, one suspects, the main problems
surrounding corruption are practical. The concept itself is comparatively
straightforward and concrete in connotation, referring to certain specific
practices such as bribery, cronyism and nepotism. The harmfulness of such
practices is taken as self-evident because they are obvious abuses of power. The
only question is how to ‘stamp it out’.

For a political theorist, however, ‘corruption’ is a striking and perplexing term.
In the first place, it has proved remarkably difficult to define in general terms,
beyond a set of leading examples such as bribery, favouritism and nepotism.
We may know that it is wrong but we are not quite sure what ‘it’ is. Experts
disagree about what activities are to count as corrupt and about whether
activities condemned as corrupt in one political context should be seen as
functional in another. Secondly, ‘corruption’ is a term of unqualified ethical
condemnation. To label any person or practice as ‘corrupt’ is to stigmatise them
as beyond the moral pale. It combines the moralism of words such as ‘sin’, ‘evil’
or ‘wickedness’ with added psychological implications of personal depravity
and debased character.

This chapter explores the incongruity between these two aspects—between
the contextualism and the moralism inherent in corruption—in part through
a historical comparison of the use of similar terms by the Greek philosophers,
particularly Aristotle.

The problems of defining corruption have been well explored by others (for
example, DeLeon, 1993; Heidenheimer, 1970; Heywood, 1997; Philp, 1997). In
brief, definitions differ depending on whether they focus on the responsibilities
and duties of public office and office-holders, on compliance with law and legally
defined standards or more broadly on the clash between illegitimate personal
interest and the public interest. While this question can hardly be said to be
closed, the most compelling analyses would seem to be those that rely centrally
on acting contrary to the common or public interest because it involves the
illegitimate pursuit of a private interest (DeLeon, 1993; Philp, 1997). Definitions
that depend on compliance with the particular duties of an office or with existing
Corruption: Expanding the focus
26

legal rules certainly highlight key factors in identifying corrupt political actions
by individual politicians or officials. However, by taking existing duties and
rules as given, such definitions are too closely tied to a particular institutional
context. They do not provide an external standard by which to assess whether
the duties or rules themselves prohibit actions that should be regarded as
corrupt. If the definition of corruption is widened to include the illegitimate
pursuit of a private interest then it allows an independent judgment of precisely
what private interests existing ethical standards and rules ought to preclude.
Admittedly, the use of a term such as ‘illegitimate’ is itself question-begging
and does not provide an uncontested criterion for ruling selfish acts in or out,
which is why the definition of corruption is so contested.

Corruption needs to be understood in terms of its opposite: the condition of
soundness or health that either has subsequently degenerated into corruption or
at least provides a standard against which the corruption can be identified (Philp,
1997). In J. L. Austin’s (1962) colourful description applied to the term ‘real’,
‘corruption’ is a ‘trouser’ word, being filled and shaped by its complementary
counterpart. If we want to give an account of political corruption, we should
always begin by asking what uncorrupt—that is, sound or healthy—government
looks like.

On the definition given above, uncorrupt politics implies that personal or private
interests do not illegitimately override the public interest. At the same time,
though the public interest should prevail, private interests are not necessarily
ruled out altogether, especially in a liberal pluralist polity. Liberal democratic
politics, which provides the moral standard against which corruption is typically
characterised in present-day discourse, is based on the legitimate pursuit of selfinterest,
both by individuals and by sections of the community. True, the rituals
of political discourse demand that deliberation about public policy be cast in
the language of the public good and that individual or sectional self-interest
be suppressed as a reason for acting. At the same time, no-one doubts both
the actuality and the legitimacy of political self-interest in liberal democratic
politics. To outlaw all self-interested politics would rule out much of the
electioneering, lobbying, pork-barrelling and log-rolling on which democratic
pluralist politics is premised.

Not that anything goes in the liberal pursuit of self-interest. Liberal pluralism
has always adopted some independent, public-interest standards. Some
standards are procedural, guaranteeing the political mechanisms by which
private interests may compete; others are substantive, limiting the decisions
that may be imposed on members of the citizen body. Constitutional and legal
rules lay down limits and constraints that competing players must respect.
Questions then arise about which types of procedure overstep the line between
the legitimate and the illegitimate pursuit of private interests. When does

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lobbying become bribery and when does bargaining become collusion? When
does redistributing resources to one’s supporters become an infringement of
other people’s rights? Opinions differ significantly about what types of selfserving
action are to be classed as illegitimate and therefore corrupt. Significant
examples of such contested areas include making government appointments for
partisan advantage (as in the NSW Metherall affair) or receiving payment for
asking parliamentary questions (as in the UK scandal cited by Philp, 1997). At
a more mundane level, public servants are clearly at odds over what type of
gift may be legitimately received from a public client (ICAC, 2001). Possibilities
for disagreement are multiplied when concepts of corruption are applied crossculturally,
for instance in countries where gift-giving or preference for one’s
own kin or ethnic group is considered appropriate and legitimate.

For present purposes, the important point is not so much the differences in
opinion over corruption in liberal democracies but the premises that underlie
such disagreement. Any realistic notion of corruption applicable in present-day
liberal democratic politics has to recognise that politicians (and citizens) cannot
reasonably be expected to be motivated solely by concern for the common good
or public interest. Instead, the concept of the public interest is institutionalised
more as a set of minimal side constraints—to adopt Nozick’s (1974) useful
term—on the pursuit of private interests. A condition of sound—that is, noncorrupt—politics
is not a polity where everyone pursues the public interest but
one where the pursuit of private interests is not allowed to transgress certain
minimal public-interest limits. Where public-interest constraints kick in and
force private interests to give way is a matter of dispute. As already noted,
the boundary between the legitimate and the illegitimate pursuit of private
interests is blurred and contested. More fundamentally, however, the judgment
is essentially a balance struck between competing values: the pursuit of
individual or sectional interests on the one hand, and concern for the common
good on the other.

If sound politics is identified as a compromise between selfishness and concern
for the common good, corruption then becomes a matter of tipping the balance
too far in the direction of selfishness. Such a nuanced view of where the line is
to be drawn between non-corruption and corruption may sit awkwardly with
the highly moralistic implications of the term itself. ‘Corruption’, as already
noted, carries very strong moral—indeed, moralising—overtones, redolent of
‘evil’ and ‘sin’, suggesting both universalistic standards of right and wrong
and a sense of righteous outrage at the practices in question. To label a practice
as ‘corrupt’ is to condemn it unequivocally in the strongest possible terms.
And yet, we now discover, corruption is not so much a festering disease in the
body politic as a possibly minor imbalance between two legitimate forces in the
C
2. Aristotle on Legality and Corruption
29

Plato, in The Republic, describes the contrast between the ideal and inferior
states in terms of an imagined ‘decay’ or ‘destruction’, using the word pthora
(546a), the Greek term later regularly Latinised as corruptio. The ideal state
undergoes a number of stages of such decay, through timocracy, oligarchy and
democracy, culminating in tyranny, which is the worst regime of all. Elsewhere,
the contrast between ideal and inferior is expressed in different images. In The
Statesman, for instance, inferior regimes are said to ‘mimic’ or copy the ideal
constitution (301a, 303c), an image often used by Plato in his epistemology to
represent the relationship between the inferior objects of the senses and the
objects of true knowledge. Aristotle, in The Politics, uses different terminology
again, ‘correct’ (orthos) for the good forms of government and ‘deviations’ or
‘perversions’ (parekbaseis) for the inferior. The implication is in all cases the
same: the ideal form of government is conceived as logically prior, and inferior
constitutions are defined in relation to it, as being in some sense lacking or
deficient.

There is thus a close parallel with the modern concept of political corruption
understood in terms of the absence of sound or non-corrupt politics. In
Greek, however, the equivalent term to ‘corruption’ (pthora) retains more of
its literal meaning and implies actual decay or disintegration. In Aristotle,
pthora is the standard philosophical opposite of genesis or ‘coming into being’
and in The Politics its main use arises in connection with the destruction of
particular constitutions (Bonitz, 1955). In modern English, on the other hand,
the metaphor of organic decay is less prominent. We talk of corrupt regimes
without necessarily implying that they have degenerated from a former healthy
condition. In this respect, corruption is closer in meaning to ‘deviant’, the term
Aristotle himself uses to describe inferior constitutions.

For both Plato and Aristotle, the key feature that the ideal regimes possess as a
result of their wise and virtuous rulers is that they are governed in the common
interest. Conversely, the leading characteristic that distinguishes deviant
regimes from the ideal is that their rulers rule in their own interest rather than
the common interest. In The Republic, the guardians’ training and communal
living lead them totally to suppress any notion of self-interest and to find their
personal fulfilment in the happiness of the whole (420b–421c). The imagined
corruption of the ideal state and its decline to tyranny through descending
stages of moral degradation can be read as a gradual assertion of individual
self-interest and a retreat from commitment to the common good. Aristotle gives
even more prominence to the contrast between pursuit of the common interest
and self-interest, making it the only criterion defining the difference between
correct and deviant constitutions:

Corruption: Expanding the focus
30

The correct forms of government are those in which the one, the few or the
many govern with a view to the common interest: but the governments which
rule with a view to the private interest whether of the one, or of the few or of
the many are deviations (Pol. III 7, 1279a28–32)
Aristotle initially allows three types of correct constitution—namely kingship
(rule of one), aristocracy (rule of few) and polity (rule of many)—all in the
common interest. Later, however, he concentrates on two varieties: absolute
kingship, the (largely hypothetical) rule of one outstandingly able man, and
aristocracy, the regime where power lies with a citizen body consisting of
virtuous men of property. The third correct option, polity—rule by a virtuous
majority— quickly slips down the ranking. A majority of citizens are capable
of only a limited, military-style virtue (Pol. III 7, 1279b1–2) and polity becomes
a somewhat deviant constitution, better than oligarchy and democracy but not
fully correct and therefore, by implication, not fully governed in the common
interest (Pol. IV 8, 1293b22–7). Rule in the common interest rather than in the
interest of the rulers remains the touchstone of a correct regime. Aristotle’s
account of political deviance thus resonates again with modern analyses of
political corruption: both establish a nexus between political deviance and the
rulers’ pursuit of their own private interest against the common interest.
However, despite this conceptual parallel, the ancient and modern views of
political corruption exhibit important differences. One such difference concerns
the practicality of achieving non-corrupt politics. In the modern conception,
corruption is seen as remediable, at least at the systemic level; the best existing
regimes, such as those at the top of the Transparency International (TI) table, are
considered to be largely free of corruption. Though corruption, like crime, will
never be totally stamped out, it can be relegated to the margins as it has been
in many present-day polities. In particular, from the perspective of developed
donor countries like Australia, political corruption is mainly a problem for
‘messy’ or ‘failed’ states, such as Indonesia or Papua New Guinea. Even where
more systemic corruption is evident, as in Australian State police forces, such
practices can be interpreted as intolerable pockets of corruption to be stamped
out by anti-corruption agencies and mercifully absent from other branches of
government.

For Aristotle, however, as for Plato, all existing regimes fall on the corrupt or
deviant side of the corrupt/non-corrupt line. Plato certainly considered his
philosopher’s city to be beyond practical reach; he may have intended it to be
impossible even in principle. His ideal state in The Laws makes more concessions
to human frailty but is still clearly an unachieved ideal that is most unlikely
ever to be put into practice. In a similar vein, Aristotle considers absolute rule
to be practically impossible (Pol. VII 14, 1332b, 2207). Even his ideal aristocracy,
which contains everything one could wish for but nothing impossible (Pol. VII

2. Aristotle on Legality and Corruption
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4, 1325b38–40), though in principle attainable, is an imagined ideal—not a
realistic possibility. The function of the ideally best constitution was to provide
a moral contrast with the inferior specimens of everyday experience, not to
provide some model of constitutional ‘best practice’ to which struggling nations
and failed states should be expected to aspire as a condition of receiving loans
from richer countries.

This difference in practicality is also reflected in differences over the meaning
of corruption. Modern notions of corruption, as already noted, concentrate on
the illegitimate pursuit of self-interest in preference to the common interest.
In this respect, they establish a balance between the pursuit of public and
private interests and do not require governments (or citizens) to be completely
dedicated to the common interest. By contrast, Aristotle, like Plato before him,
did require such complete dedication. Ideal, non-corrupt states are governed
by ideally virtuous rulers who are wholly focused on the common interest and
would never consider pursuing their own interests at the expense of the good
of the community. Aristotle’s ruling aristocrats had their own private lives and
personal interests, but insofar as they acted politically they would be wholly
devoted to the good of the polis. In this respect, the ancient accounts, though
more utopian, may be said to be more in tune with the moral absoluteness
implicit in the concept of pure, non-corrupt government.

On the other hand, if the standard of non-corrupt government is placed so high
as to be unachievable, it could be argued that such conceptual purity is bought
at too high a price. In particular, if all regimes are essentially corrupt because all
are ruled in the interest of the rulers, what becomes of the distinctions that we
want to make between corrupt and non-corrupt regimes, between Finland and
Nigeria or between New Zealand and Indonesia? If all are corrupt, what is the
point of condemning corruption?

For Aristotle, as for Plato, the fact that all existing regimes are deviant because
all are governed in the interest of the rulers does not mean that all are equally
deviant. Such a categorical conclusion may have been drawn by the more radical
anti-political philosophers, such as the Cynics and Stoics. But both Plato and
Aristotle, and particularly the latter, were interested in distinguishing between
varying degrees of deviance in everyday politics. That is, the model of the ideal,
correct state was used not only to criticise all everyday regimes as fundamentally
flawed but also to provide a standard against which everyday regimes could be
assessed and found more or less deviant.

Here the key factor was the rule of law. Rulers might all be self-interested,
whether they were single rulers (tyranny), the rich few (oligarchy) or the poor
majority (democracy). But their rule could be better or worse, depending on
whether they were constrained to act within the law or whether they were free
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to follow their wishes. Plato makes the case most compellingly in The Statesman
in the context of an argument intended to highlight the weaknesses as well
as the strengths of the rule of law (291–300). Law is deficient because rules
are blunt and circumstances varied. The true professional, such as a skilled
doctor, is not bound by the instructions left for subordinates but assesses
each case on the basis of individual judgment. So too the true politicians—the
philosopher rulers— will not be bound by general laws but will judge each
issue on its merits. However, while the constraint of law curbs the wisdom of
the philosopher, it also serves to restrain the selfishness of the ordinary ruler.
Amongst inferior regimes that lack the benefit of having philosophers as their
rulers, those governed in accordance with law are all superior to those where
rulers can rule as they wish. The theme of the value of the rule of law in curbing
the self-interest of rulers is developed in much more detail in the dialogue The
Laws and was also taken over by Aristotle, who uses it as a major criterion in
distinguishing between more moderate and more extreme versions of inferior
constitutions.

Aristotle, too, recognises that the bluntness of law can create problems and also
that laws themselves may be unjust if they are the product of an unjust regime
(Pol. III 11, 1282b12). Yet lawful rule is on the whole better than lawless rule,
because all laws are general and therefore to some extent impartial and a curb
on the rulers’ self-interest. Ordinary people who are called on to make decisions
in particular cases are too likely to be carried away by feelings of friendship or
hatred and to be blinded by personal pleasure and pain (Rhetoric I 1, 1354a34–
b11). This argument is summed up in the famous epigram that ‘law is intellect
without desire’ (Pol. III 16, 1287a32). Thus, in each case, the most extreme and
worst forms of oligarchy (Pol. IV 6, 1293a30–1), democracy (Pol. IV 6, 1293a8–
10), and tyranny (Pol. IV 10, 15–23) are characterised by the absence of the rule
of law, whereas the more moderate and more stable are ruled in accordance with
law.

Aristotle’s argument for the rule of law does not depend on the content of the
laws so much as on the nature of any law. Laws themselves can be partial and
unjust in their intent. Indeed, all laws in deviant regimes are inevitability
skewed in the interest of the ruling group. What makes the rule of law superior
(or less inferior) is that any law impartially applied must reduce, though it
will not eliminate, the personal benefits that rulers derive from decisions. For
instance, laws in an oligarchy will always favour the wealthy and propertied and
will always penalise the poor and property-less. But at least the wealthy will be
treated equally with one another and in accordance with legal precedents; rulers
will not be able to make unpredictable, ad-hoc decisions to suit themselves.
Again there is a parallel with modern accounts of corruption in which legality
or the rule of law is sometimes taken as a defining feature. Corruption is often

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equated with breaking the law for the sake of securing a personal advantage.
Anti-corruption campaigners are therefore always putting their weight behind
greater respect for the rule of law. However, as already noted, such a conception
of corruption is question-begging in that it does not stipulate what types of selfinterested
action should be considered corrupt and therefore illegal. For instance,
a case can be made that some lawful activities, such as corporate contributions
to campaign funds, involve an illegitimate pursuit of self-interest and should
therefore be outlawed as corrupt. That is, a conception of corruption that is
grounded in existing law is open to charges of circularity or moral relativism
because it offers no independent standard of what should count as corrupt.
Aristotle, however, avoids this difficulty because he is assuming that all regimes,
lawful and lawless, are deviant and unjust, though to varying degrees. He is
not, at this point, trying to draw a line between sound and corrupt regimes
or between just and unjust laws. He therefore does not face the issue of an
independent ethical standard implicit in the modern use of corruption. That
issue has been dealt with elsewhere, in the conception of the correct (and
unattainable) constitution. Here, he has a more modest aim: simply to mark
out a means by which the harmful effects of self-interested (and corrupt) rule
may be mitigated. Self-interested rulers constrained by law will deviate less
from the standard of good government and do less harm than the same rulers
unconstrained by law. The rule of law is thus not overburdened with any moral
connotations of being linked with the concept of uncorrupt government. In this
case, the question of whether particular laws are good or bad can be more safely
left to one side. The main point is that keeping within any law, whether good
or bad, will be better and less corrupt than allowing self-interested rulers the
freedom to disregard the law at will.

Aristotle is similarly pragmatic in his advice about how best to ensure that
members of the ruling groups rule in accordance with law. General commitment
to the values of the regime is a key component, to be achieved through public
education (Pol. V 9, 1310a14–18). But equally important are socioeconomic
factors. Citizens who must give most of their energy to making a living will take
little interest in politics and will therefore be content to let the law take its course
rather than try to impose their own solutions (Pol. IV 6, especially. 1293a17–19).
Hence, the most law-abiding form of democracy is one where the people are
predominantly agricultural without the time or incentive to come into town to
attend meetings. The rule of law is under most threat either from the idle rich,
with the leisure to use government to enrich themselves still further, or from
the indigent urban poor who also have both the time and the incentive to make
decisions in their own interests. Those of moderate wealth, on the other hand,
can generally be trusted to be law-abiding (Pol. IV 11, 1295b2–34).

Corruption: Expanding the focus
34

Aristotle’s insistence on the importance of law—any law—in reducing the
incidence of political corruption does not provide a defining mark for corruption.
Nonetheless, it may be instructive for modern debates about corruption. It
resonates, at least, with the practical focus in much anti-corruption work on
the importance of preventing government officials from breaking actual laws
for personal gain. Most anti-corruption campaigns are concerned with breaches
of actual laws and regulations, regardless of the actual content of the laws and
regulations in question and regardless of whether such laws and regulations are
justified. True, this point begs the broader and more fundamental question about
what types of self-interested activity should be treated as corrupt and therefore
made the subject of anti-corruption laws and regulations. But for the most part,
laws and regulations are taken as given and the task is simply to make sure
that those in positions of power and responsibility uphold the law as it stands
and are not tempted into breaking it for their own private benefit. Indeed, it
is for this reason that many modern accounts of corruption adopt illegality as
a defining feature of corruption. Thus, both ancient and modern perspectives
agree on the importance of rulers ruling within the law, whatever the law may
be. The ancients viewed this more as a task of reducing the inevitable corruption
or deviance of all governments, whereas in the modern view the issue of legality
marks the difference between corrupt and non-corrupt governments.
Structural weakness and moral failure

So far, we have found reason to criticise modern notions of political corruption
because they either do not provide a clear account of what should be
considered corrupt/non-corrupt politics or, if they do attempt such an account,
inappropriately apply a term of absolute moral condemnation to what is in
practice a realistic balance struck between self-interest and the common interest.
Aristotle avoids these objections, because the equivalent term for political
corruption is clearly applied to all non-perfect regimes and is not used to draw a
line between the more or less imperfect. Corruption becomes a matter of degree,
a characteristic essential to all existing regimes.

The focus of discussion has been at the general level of the regime as a whole,
in the attempt to distinguish a corrupt from a non-corrupt polity. Yet corruption
can also be approached at the individual level, from the perspective of the
individual politician or official who may or may not break a particular law
or code of conduct for personal gain. In this context, the language of moral
absolutes appears less inappropriate. We talk often of people of ‘total honesty’ or
‘unimpeachable integrity’ who would never ‘cross the line’ to commit a corrupt
act. In such individualised contexts, judging the behaviour of, say, individual
tax officers or individual police, black-and-white moralising descriptions such

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as ‘honest’ or ‘corrupt’ seem wholly appropriate. They indicate an assumption
that there are important ethical standards which individuals can reasonably be
expected to uphold.

Moreover, breaching such standards for personal gain marks an abhorrent
betrayal of public trust. In contrast with the collective perspective, judging
individual corruption in terms of existing law seems less question-begging.
Individual officials cannot be expected to set the standards for themselves and so
are appropriately judged in terms of the rules set for them. Entire governments,
on the other hand, are properly judged not just on whether their rules are
complied with but also on whether they have set the right rules—a much more
nuanced judgment where terms such as ‘corruption’ may be more contestable.
Note that a judgment of individual corruption, although couched in the
strongest moral terms, is very context specific. This is not to say that the person
concerned is wholly depraved or, more importantly, that the persons not so
condemned are moral paragons, wholly dedicated to the common good in all
their actions. All it means is that, in relation to the specific range of professional
ethical demands that most people can be expected to meet, a particular
individual has failed to measure up, and culpably so. For this reason, the sense
of moral condemnation implicit in the label ‘corruption’ is strongest within a
context of everyday compliance. We are most comfortable in the allocation of
moral blame if the individual has been surrounded by non-corrupt colleagues
and therefore has had every encouragement to stay on the right side of the line.
By contrast, in contexts where corrupt behaviour is endemic, the very use of the
term ‘corruption’ to describe such individual acts appears more questionable.

The behaviour in question is much less obviously due to individual moral
weakness but is more a matter of institutional structures and social norms, as
Aristotle recognised. For individuals, avoiding corruption is not meant to set
heroic ideals, but rather a basic level of honesty that only the very weak or
wicked will fall beneath.

Judgments of individual corruption therefore appear less problematic than
those made of whole governments, particularly insofar as they take existing
standards and general compliance with such standards for granted. Of course,
collective assessments of corruption can be made in terms of the amount of
individual corruption that occurs. Country A may be less corrupt than Country
B, not because its government is more concerned with the common good, but
because fewer politicians and officials are on the take. Indeed, most collective
assessments, such as those conducted by TI, seem to be of that type. It is for
this reason also that definitions of corruption so often concentrate on actual
illegality or the duties of an actual office—definitions that fit the individual case
much more than the collective.