Responsible Leadership and Ethical Decision-Making

Sunil Savur, Sukhbir Sandhu, Sunil Savur, Sukhbir Sandhu

• Editore: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787149274
• Argomento: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoria: Unternehmensführung

This book is comprised of international author perspectives from the 2016 Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE) conference, hosted by the University of South Australia in Adelaide. The volume brings to life a number of the conference themes including corporate social responsibility, culture, academic integrity, vulnerability, health, military ethics, education, leadership, sustainability and philosophy and addresses concerns of many leading applied ethicists.

ARBITRARY POWER, ARBITRARY INTERFERENCE AND THE ABUSE OF POWER: CORRUPTION, NATURAL RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Hugh Breakey

ABSTRACT

What is the relationship between human rights and corruption? This question can take different forms, including moral, legal, socio-political and economic variants. This paper focuses on two key moral questions, asking whether corruption can violate or impact on people’s natural rights (on the one hand) or human rights (on the other). In answer, I aim to establish a strong conceptual link between (a) corruption’s ‘abuse of entrusted power’; (b) the ‘arbitrary power’ targeted by natural rights theorists like John Locke and the broader republican tradition and (c) the ‘arbitrary interference’ with protected freedoms prohibited by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I argue that the deep thematic links between systemic corruption and violations of human rights are stronger than have hitherto been recognized. In the twenty-first century, corruption should be recognized as a ‘standard threat’ (in Shue’s sense) to human flourishing and protected freedoms, vindicating the human right to freedom from systemic corruption.

Keywords: Corruption; natural rights; human rights; republicanism; arbitrary power; arbitrary interference

The paper proceeds as follows. The first two sections deal with preliminary concerns settling some definitional and conceptual issues and specifying the paper’s focus on moral questions (as distinct from legal, socio-political and economic questions). The section ‘Corruption and Natural Rights’ argues that the way Lockean and republican traditions of natural rights prohibited arbitrary power rendered state corruption almost an archetypal rights violation. I borrow the language of Henry Shue to characterize systemic corruption as a ‘standard threat’ to rights in the twenty-first century. Turning to human rights in the section ‘Corruption and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’, I focus on the notion of arbitrary interference with protected freedoms employed in the Universal Declaration, and show how well this notion captures the intrusions of systemic corruption. Yet there is a complication that must be considered here: contemporary human rights suffer from an equivocal relationship with one particular entitlement – the right to property. I argue this ambivalence is unfortunate, as property rights are often the very entitlement rapacious rulers want to get their hands on. I suggest that the historical situation at the time of the drafting of the Declaration and its ensuing Covenants may have elided the large-scale threat to human dignity posed by systemic corruption. The final section concludes, reflecting on invocations of ‘the human right to freedom from corruption’.

DEFINITIONS

Let’s begin with some definitions.

Corruption

Transparency International’s definition of corruption presents a useful starting point: ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’.¹ Various theorists and institutions have attempted to further specify the term’s extension, by enumerating the different forms that the abuse of power may take, including usual suspects such as bribery, extortion, embezzlement, influence-peddling, nepotism and so on (ICoHRP & TI, 2009, pp. 16–21).

Transparency International’s simple definition requires some specification, as ambiguities lurk in both the notion of ‘abuse of entrusted power’ and the idea of ‘private gain’. To specify these notions, we can follow Charles Sampford’s (2009, pp. 563, 564) observation that corruption is a derivative notion, and that the negative concept of ‘abuse’ can only be understood in the context of the positive and prior concept of proper ‘use’, which describes the underlying reason for entrusting power in the first place. An ‘abuse of entrusted power’ is thus any employment of the power that (typically intentionally) departs from the authorized use, including the prescribed activities, constraints and purposes set down by those who entrusted the power. These aspects of the ‘proper use’ of the entrusted power will usually be defined in law, and by democratic decision-making. This spotlight on the ‘proper use’ also helps specify the notion of ‘private gain’. Once we have identified the prescribed beneficiaries of the entrusted power, we can identify abuses of power as corruption when they are intentionally performed to benefit – through money, resources, freedoms, entitlements, opportunities and favours – anyone outside of the authorized beneficiaries. This set of proscribed beneficiaries includes all those who are the usual heirs of corrupt actions: family members, kinship groups and political parties. In what follows, I will thus speak of corruption as ‘the abuse of entrusted power for wrongful gain’ (as a shorthand for more definitive: ‘the abuse of entrusted power for the gain of unauthorized beneficiaries’).

Throughout, because of its focus on entrusted power, this paper explores corruption by or with state authorities, rather than private actors. Even so, the conclusions will carry some application to this latter group. After all, private actors can not only be involved in state corruption as active or passive facilitators, but can even stand at the epicentre of networked corruption systems (Chayes, 2016, pp. 8, 9). As well, purely corporate corruption might itself violate human rights in cases where the corporation effectively holds state-like powers over local citizens.

Systemic Corruption

The broad notion of corruption can be subdivided in various ways, with a common line of distinction dividing ‘grand’ corruption (of high level state actors) from ‘petty’ corruption by low-level officials. For our purposes, the important type of corruption is what I will call systemic corruption. (Commentators use different names to pick out aspects of this phenomenon. Rajagopal (1999, p. 499) highlights ‘institutionalized impunity’, Sampford (2009, pp. 564–566) speaks of ‘corruption systems’, while Chayes (2015, p. 136) explores ‘malign actor networks’).

In the limit case of systemically corrupt networks, the entire system of government amounts to a vertically integrated criminal organization: petty bribery and extortion by local public officials facilitate the higher-level ‘grand’ political corruption that protects and profits from such acts – and vice versa (Chayes, 2015, 2016). Systemic corruption extends beyond just one sector of government; its tendrils intertwine throughout myriad different sources of power, across any public-private divide, giving the network a capacity for resilience, self-protection and expansion. Money, influence, protection, power and resources course through these inter-locking networks in complex ways, giving rise to a toxic environment where attempts at integrity and honesty – rather than at corruption and chicanery – become perilous endeavours. The contagious nature of systemic corruption is hardly a modern phenomenon. Back in the early sixteenth century, Machiavelli (1514/1961, p. 108) could observe that:

A prince who wants to maintain his rule is often forced not to be good, because whenever that class of men on which you believe your continued rule depends is corrupt, whether it be the populace, or soldiers, or nobles, you have to satisfy it by adopting the same disposition; and then good deeds are your enemies.

Some human rights violations and impacts can occur through isolated, well-hidden and even opportunistic corruption. However, and as we will see below, many types of corruption require the support of system-wide networks before they can violate human rights.

Natural Rights and Human Rights

By ‘natural rights’, I refer to the entitlements that politico-moral theories of rights set down as each person’s intrinsic moral entitlements, owed to them by all other people (whether as citizens in a political system, or as ordinary people in a ‘state of nature’). These theories include those like John Locke’s, whose works were written in the early Enlightenment, and subsequently influenced later Declarations and Bills of Rights. My aim in exploring natural rights theorizing is to show how some of its large-scale commitments – in particular its concerns with ‘arbitrary power’ – categorically prohibit corruption.²

The content of human rights is set down in the ‘International Bill of Human Rights’,³ including the entitlements enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (General-Assembly, 1948), and in the main international treaties on human rights, especially the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (both adopted in 1966 and entered into force in 1976 (General-Assembly, 1966a, 1966b)). While the content of human rights is thus reasonably well-settled, complications do arise when they are treated (as I am treating them here), as moral entitlements, rather than purely legal entitlements corresponding to specific state responsibilities.⁴ My intention is merely to set out plausible ways whereby – if we take human rights as setting down universal entitlements owed morally to every person on the basis of respect for their humanity – corruption will breach those entitlements.

MORAL, LEGAL, SOCIO-POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC QUESTIONS

Several different questions lurk within the broad question, ‘Is corruption linked to human rights violations’? We can isolate moral, legal, socio-political and economic questions.

A moral or normative perspective will ask: ‘Does corruption violate or impact upon people’s natural rights’? and ‘Does corruption violate or impact upon the human rights laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?’

Legal analyses will take a different perspective, querying: ‘Does corruption constitute state failure to fulfil its human rights obligations under constitutional, domestic or international law’? (ICoHRP & TI, 2009; OHCHR, 2013; Boersma, 2012; Rose, 2016). If corruption does violate state responsibilities, then this opens further legal questions, such as whether remedies can be sought through the jurisdiction of relevant domestic, constitutional, regional or international courts (Hatchard, 2010).

An economic approach differs again, enquiring whether corruption stymies (or, alternatively, facilitates) sustainable development and economic activity – and whether it does so in such a way as to ultimately impair (or improve) citizens’ economic and social rights.

Finally, theorists may ask socio-political questions about corruption’s cultural and institutional dimensions, such as whether corruption is hindered by established human rights practices, including increased media freedoms, the institutional protection of the ‘right to information’, the legal protection of dissidents’ free-speech and political tolerance of community activism (Kumar, 2011).

These various types of questions must be approached distinctly, as none of the above queries simply collapse into the other. For example, some types of corruption might turn out to stimulate economic development even as they impact deleteriously on civil and political human rights.

In particular, the moral questions differ from the legal ones. Legal questions can hinge on issues of justiciability and jurisdiction, which pertain to the possibility of a court being able to render a definitive judgment on a discrete case. Legal analyses will also confine themselves to state duties, rather than the obligations of individual people (as states are enroled as duty-bearers through constitutional law or as signatories to multilateral conventions). Moral systems suffer from no such limitations. They may impose duties on anyone, whether ordinary citizens or state officials. As a result, the moral and legal links between corruption and human rights must be considered separately. It may be that – as a moral matter – a state official’s action intentionally violates a citizen’s human rights, even if – as a strictly legal matter – the state as a whole has not breached its legal responsibilities.

While prior literature has explored the legal questions in some depth,⁵ this paper investigates the two moral questions noted above, beginning with the links between corruption and violations of natural rights.

CORRUPTION AND NATURAL RIGHTS

Most moral-political philosophies will hold that corrupt acts count as (at least) a prima facie moral or political (and not just legal) wrong. Simply, if corruption is the abuse of entrusted power, then in terms of political philosophy, whatever justified the power being entrusted hinged on the bearer using that power within the bounds and for the purposes for which it was entrusted. Equally, in terms of moral philosophy, corruption inevitably implies a kind of deceit and abuse of trust – both straightforward failures of common-sense moral duties.

For this reason, corruption has proved an age-old concern of political t...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Mindfulness, Reperceiving, and Ethical Decision Making: A Neurological Perspective
• Role of Exemplars in Ethical Decision-Making in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
• Military Ethics and Responsible Leadership: The Enduring Contribution of Guillaume-Henri Dufour
• Effective Use of Reflection and Research Activities in Teaching Business Ethics
• Spirituality and Its Role in Responsible Leadership and Decision-Making☆
• Would a Hippocratic Oath of Business Encourage Business Leaders to Make Ethical Decisions? A Study into What Business Students Learn in Business Ethics Class
• Ethical Decision-Making in Early Childhood Education
• The Ethical and Leadership Challenges Posed by the Royal Commission’s Revelations of Sexual Abuse at a Satyananda Yoga Ashram in Australia
• Arbitrary Power, Arbitrary Interference and the Abuse of Power: Corruption, Natural Rights and Human Rights
• Mixing the Sexes in New South Wales Hospitals – A 15-Year Saga
• Index