Can Focusing on the Ethics of Public Office Address the Challenge of Contemporary Political Corruption?

Ceva and Ferretti have written an important book on how we should understand political corruption, which they argue entails a public official acting in their institutional capacity as an officeholder but pursuing an agenda that cannot be justified by the specific mandate of their role. Their definition, in stressing the relational nature of political corruption, underpins their argument that its wrongfulness must be understood as a breach of interactive justice and addressed from within. Only by ensuring that individual public officeholders remain accountable and mutually answerable for their conduct (because institutions are constituted by individuals who have interactive duties to their colleagues) can the threat of political corruption be meaningfully addressed. Office accountability as the core duty of officeholders, to be exercised through the practice of answerability, is crucial to developing a meaningful defense against the risk of corruption within organizations and institutions. The central argument of Ceva and Ferretti's book is both powerful and persuasive and makes a significant contribution to the literature on identifying and tackling political corruption.