Some norms are bad. Norms of revenge, female genital mutilation, honor killings, and other norms strike us as destructive, cruel, and wasteful. The puzzle is why so many people see these norms as authoritative and why these norms often resist change. To answer these questions, we need to look at what “bad” norms are and how we can evaluate them. Here I develop an integrative analysis of norms that aims to avoid parochialism in norm evaluation. After examining and rejecting several evaluative standards, I propose what I call a comparative-functional analysis of norms that is both operationalizable/testable and nonparochial, and that can sort better and worse norms. One conclusion of this approach is that norms are not so much “bad” and “good” as “better” and “worse.” This approach should be of interest to theorists and practitioners alike.

This essay develops a notion of “functional corruption,” adapted from sociology, to note that the harm of corruption appears to be contingent. In a system of dysfunctional institutions, corruption can improve the efficiency and speed of allocative mechanisms of the bureaucracy, possibly quite substantially. The problem is that this “short run” benefit locks in the long run harm of corruption by making institutions much more difficult to reform. In particular, a nation with bad institutions but without bureaucracy may be much more open to reform than a nation with similarly bad institutions but with “efficiently corrupt” bureaucrats. The idea of a “long run” is developed using the North, Wallis, and Weingast conception of open access orders. Corrupt systems are likely to be locked into closed access orders indefinitely, even though everyone knows there are better institutions available.

This essay argues that moral accountability depends upon having a shared system of social norms. In particular, it argues that the Strawsonian reactive attitude of resentment is only fitting when people can reasonably expect a mutual recognition of the justified demands to which they are being held. Though such recognition should not typically be expected of moral demands that are thought to be independent of any social practice, social norms can ground such mutual recognition. On this account, a significant part of a society’s social norms are also properly seen as moral norms. The essay defends this overlap of social and moral norms in contrast to views on which moral norms and social norms are sharply distinguished. Lastly, the essay concludes by addressing challenges for accountability in circumstances of norm change.

Corruption of public officials is the silent killer of the U.S. economy, and we should reflect carefully on how it might be reined in. That’s the thought behind campaign finance laws. But broad grants of discretion to authorities, which might work in New Zealand, are more likely to be abused in low-trust America, and campaign finance laws are one example of this. First Amendment free speech rights, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, represent its reflection on the American character and the possibility of abuse when Congress tries to restrict political speech. So conservatives are apt to think, and not entirely without reason.

This essay defends deliberative democracy by reviving a largely forgotten idea of corruption, which I call “cognitive corruption”—the distortion of judgment. I analyze different versions of this idea in the work of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bentham, and Mill. Historical analysis also helps me rethink orthodox notions of corruption in two ways: I define corruption in terms of public duty rather than public office, and I argue that corruption can be both by and for political parties. In deliberative democracy, citizens can take off their party hats and may be more influenced by the force of the better argument than in party democracy.

I examine from a conventionalist perspective the Nash bargaining problem that philosophers use as a tool for analyzing fair division. From this perspective, the solutions to bargaining problems are conventions that can emerge from inductive learning and focal point effects. I contrast the conventionalist approach to analyzing the bargaining problem with the better-known rational choice approach, which I criticize for having overly demanding epistemic presuppositions and for producing disappointing results. I apply a simple model of inductive learning to specific bargaining problems to show that agents can learn from repeated experience to follow a variety of bargaining conventions in a given problem. I conclude that such agents can come to regard two such conventions as focal for the bargaining problem, one that assigns claimants equal shares of a good and another egalitarian solution of equal payoff gains, and that the egalitarian solution tends to prevail when these two solutions differ. I conclude further that the above analysis lends support for admitting interpersonal utility comparisons into the analysis of fair division problems, and also suggests a focal point explanation of the wide acceptance of the Aristotelian proportionality principle of distributive justice.

In this essay I argue that adversarial institutional systems, such as multi-party democracy, present a distinctive risk of institutional corruption, one that is particularly difficult to counteract. Institutional corruption often results not from individual malfeasance, but from perverse incentives that make it the case that agents within an institutional framework have rival institutional interests that risk pitting individual advantage against the functioning of the institution in question. Sometimes, these perverse incentives are only contingently related to the central animating logic of an institution. In these cases, immunizing institutions from the risk of corruption is not a theoretically difficult exercise. In other cases, institutions generate perverse or rival incentives in virtue of some central feature of the institution’s design, one that is also responsible for some of the institution’s more positive traits. In multi-party democratic systems, partisanship risks giving rise to too close an identification of the partisan’s interest with that of the party, to the detriment of the democratic system as a whole. But partisanship is also necessary to the functioning of such a system. Creating bulwarks that allow the positive aspects of partisanship to manifest themselves, while offsetting the aspects of partisanship through which individual advantage of democratic agents is linked too closely to party success, is a central task for the theory and practice of the institutional design of democracy.

In this essay I take issue with the problem of institutional corruption. A number of scholars have recently established a discontinuity thesis, according to which an institution may be corrupt even if its members are not. Against this view, I defend a continuity thesis and argue that institutional corruption can always be traced back to the blameworthy corrupt behavior of individual agents. Certain instances of corrupt behavior spread their effects and tip in a way that subvert (and not simply violate) the public rules that govern an institution. This occurs, I argue, following either summative, morphological, or systemic modalities. I show that such a taxonomy of institutional corruption is useful for the purpose of disentangling and understanding the variety of mechanisms that generate the phenomenon. Most importantly, the taxonomy allows for a more nuanced way of attributing responsibility for political corruption, including collective responsibility. I conclude that a continuity approach offers the tools for diagnosing institutional corruption, but also facilitates the task of formulating answers to political corruption, both from a backward-looking and from a forward-looking perspective.

Is corruption merely a flaw of character, or is it more fundamentally related to the institutional environment? Scholars from various disciplines mainly side with the narrative that, ultimately, corruption is a problem of character flaws. Policy prescriptions around the world are designed based on this understanding. In this essay, I challenge this understanding, arguing that it is at best incomplete, and misleading at worst. I argue that we should focus instead on three aspects of how the prevalence of virtuous acts is profoundly tied to people’s institutional environment and the incentive structure that derives from it. First, I observe that there is a difference between virtue and acting virtuously, and that even with the aid of moral education and coercion, virtue itself is hard to come by. Second, I discuss how formal institutions and social norms influence people’s propensity to perform virtuous acts rather than engage in corruption. Finally, I explore how institutions that increase the transaction costs associated with everyday life also increase the prevalence of corruption. Based on these three explorations I derive some public policy guidelines that, if followed, might increase the probability of success of anticorruption programs.