A Common Tragedy:
Corruption as a Tragedy of the
Commons
Jason van Niekerk
Wits Centre for Ethics (WiCE)
What can Philosophy tell us about
how to fight corruption?
 Nothing you don’t know better at the coalface.
 What philosophy is good for is providing perspective
on value-claims.
 Philosophy is thus valuable in addressing why it
matters to confront corruption.
Corruption as normally defined
Corruption is normally understood in one of two ways:
 Fraud: Breaking a (possibly implicit) contract to use
money in specific ways.
 Free-riding: Benefitting from others’ hard work
without a commensurate benefit in return.
Problem with the normal definitions
Both views are true descriptions of corruption, and
both are useful ways to understand the harm done.
They have a drawback, however. Both focus on the
wrongness of the wrongdoer, with little attention to
the harm the wrongdoing does.
An Alternative Understanding of
Corruption
Another way to understand corruption is as a “Tragedy
of the Commons.”
 “Tragedy of the Commons” problems occur when
individuals, rationally seeking the best outcomes for
themselves, deplete a common resource, making
things worse for themselves and everyone else.
Tragedies of the Commons
Classic Examples:
 Over-grazing common land
 Over-fishing.
Newer examples:
 Pollution
 Greenhouse Gas Emission
 Using electricity in South Africa in the winter
What “the Commons” have in
common: 1
Robustness
 What is common across all these examples is that the
common resource which is depleted is a system’s
robustness: its ability to absorb damage and continue
functioning.
 A robust system can absorb some overgrazing or
overfishing; some chemical pollution; some greenhouse
gasses; some heavy demand.
 But too much depletion, and the system loses the
robustness to recover from each insult, tipping into a new,
less effective equilibrium.
What “the Commons” have in
common: 2
The other common feature of these common resources is
that we didn’t recognise them as such until we became
aware that the robustness of the system was being
reduced.
 Grazing land’s fertility, fish population’s capacity to
regenerate numbers, natural environments’ capacity to
absorb pollution, the atmosphere’s stability, Eskom’s
capacity to provide base-load electricity: none seemed like
limited resources until they became limited.
Common Resource in Corruption?
Q: So what is the common resource depleted by
corruption?
A: Trust in the fairness of the system.
 Adam Smith argued that monopolies stifle economic
innovation because new players in markets
dominated by monopolies cannot trust that their
efforts will be fairly repayed.
Fairness as a Common Resource
 Similarly to Smith, philosopher Patricia Werhane has
argued that stock trading environments where
insider-trading is rampant discourage newcomers
from participating or taking significant risks, knowing
that the rules they play by are not applied evenly.
Fairness as a Common Resource
In the same vein, we might say that public trust in the fairness of
society’s mechanisms is the resource which grants the system
robustness.
 The system can absorb some corruption, some bribery, some
tender-fixing, and continue to function. But only because it is
trusted that society’s systems are generally fair.
 A society without trust in the general fairness of public systems
collapses into a new equilibrium, in which processes are less
effective, and incentives to participate are radically reduced.
Accountability and Public Trust
 In this context, Accountants exposing corruption are
not simply reporting the wrongdoing of others.
 Rather, by holding persons accountable, they are
reinforcing accountability and thus can be understood
as conserving the resource that is public trust in the
system’s fairness.