Public Interest and the Challenges of

Corruption, Monopoly and Philanthropy

WEEK 3
Content
• What is public interest?
• What other institutional systems are at play when we talk about defending the
public interest?

• Democracy and public interest

 We don’t really know what public interest is?
For some commentators, the degree to which public servants are exhorted to protect the
public interest does little to mitigate a more fundamental problem – the elusiveness of the
concept.

Some theorists, who can be described as “abolitionists” (Cochran 1974), contend that the
concept is so elusive as to be meaningless and irrelevant.

Glendon Schubert (1960) argues that there is no “statement of public-interest theory that
offers much promise either as a guide to public officials who are supposed to make decisions
in the public interest, or to research scholars who might wish to investigate the extent to
which governmental decisions are empirically made in the public interest” (p. 220).

Arthur F. Bentley refers to the public interest and the general welfare as “mindstuff,
appropriately discussed by writers of fiction who spun fantasies, but with no place in the
reality which it was the business of the social scientist to explore” (quoted in Schubert 1957,
p. 357). Pg 88 - Kernaghan and Langford (2014)
What is public interest? Contradictions or moral challenge?
• Who defines the public interest?
• Where does our understanding of public
interest come from?
“Public servants receive
conflicting messages regarding
their duty to act in the public
interest. Frequently, they are
advised or required to establish
what the public interest is and to
safeguard it. On other occasions,
they are told that determining the
public interest is the job of elected
politicians, not of Public
Servants”.
 Who define public interest?
Abolitionist: They claim that there is
no such thing as the public interest or
the common good; rather there are
only the various interests of many
publics.
• Public choice theorists: All political
actors, including public servants, act in
a rational, self-interested manner.
Preservationists: People “as social
beings who form associations,
including political associations, for a
better common life and not simply
for private benefits”. They do not just
form interest groups seeking private
interest; rather they form
communities seeking a common
good (the public interest).
 Democracy and public interest
While controversies exist for who
determines public interest, there is no
doubt that public servants support it
• Under democratic systems, public
servants can speak truth to power
“James Mitchell (2007) argues that public
servants fail to speak truth to power when
they tell their hierarchical superiors what
they want to hear rather than what they
need to hear; when they hide the facts
rather than bring them forward, even if the
facts “run counter to received wisdom, or
someone’s preferred course of action”; and
“when they try to make their superiors feel
comfortable rather than helping them to do
the right thing” – pg 94 Kernaghan and
Langford (2014)
Discussion

• Is the ability of public servants to speak truth to power in

democratic systems over hyped?

• Whose truth is valid?

Conclusion