E. M. S. Anno II n. 3 Settembre-Dicembre 2010 Ricerche/Articles

4. Conclusion

Bentham’s argument that auctioning for the lowest salary and for the sale of offices is a means for selecting those who are morally apt to occupy government positions and for avoiding corruption is obviously questionable. Today’s economists believe that professional skill and effort (Bentham’s intellectual and active aptitude) can be better intercepted by high wages, a view that Bentham partially shared in his early writings on reward. However, in the political writings following his conversion to radicalism, Bentham was obsessed by the problem of the opposition between the interest of the ‘ruling few’ and that of the ‘subject many’. The selection mechanisms required in these cases must first of all detect the ‘moral’ qualities of candidates, and especially their aversion to corruption. Therefore, whereas it is perfectly legitimate to hold contra Bentham that those who accept low wages might conceal a high propensity to idleness and corruption, the reverse is not so evident: it is not possible to exclude in principle that high wages are a sufficient way of avoiding the adverse selection of moral qualities. This argument should be carefully examined before judging Bentham’s analysis more or less severely: there is a possible ‘failure’ in a labour market regulated by efficiency wages when corruption is taken into consideration, and in such a case alternative instruments of selection should be cautiously weighed. The use of emulation as an instrument of selection and management might also prove inefficient if it stimulates corruption and abuses.

In a way, the strategy based on public reputation recommended by Bentham converges towards the direction later undertaken by John Stuart Mill in Considerations on Representative Government. According to Mill (1861: ch. 3) the most important political problem consisted in reaching that ‘natural state’ of political society in which the power is entrusted to the most educated and competent persons, who are able to break away from a narrow vision of their own interests, and are committed to work with sense of duty and self-fulfilment for the improvement of humankind. Moreover, despite important differences of opinion, both Bentham and Mill considered a representative government elected at universal suffrage as the best way of obtaining these goals. But whereas this perspective was fully consistent with Mill’s revised version of utilitarianism and with his evolutionary vision of democracy, it might appear scarcely compatible with Bentham’s narrower assumptions on individual motivation and with his conception of representative government as an institutional device for countering the sinister interest of governors. There is something contradictory in Bentham’s proposal: why should calculative individuals, uniquely guided by self-interest, be perfectly rational in competing for offices, and then be content with such vague and ephemeral benefits as those attributed by public opinion? And why should they be satisfied with quite uncertain material advantages? Unfortunately, this vagueness is essential to Bentham’s proposal, since otherwise rational and optimising calculation would necessarily lead to sinister interest, i.e. to the use of all available means to maximize the net benefit of power and reputation – including illegal means. In such circumstances, the only instruments against corruption would consist in the wide range of punitive sanctions that Bentham himself suggests in order to enforce responsibility (Guidi 1997). These sanctions, in fact, as far as they are employed, replace emulation, rendering the positive incentives provided by the ‘pleasure of hope’ useless.

In short, on the one hand, Bentham – having excluded from the range of motives the desire for ‘factitious distinctions’ – is obliged to resort to the material and immaterial benefits of reputation in order to provide a foundation to his plan of ‘pecuniary competition’. But, on the other hand, he is constrained to admit that such benefits must remain vague, because otherwise the competition for public offices would be contradictory with ‘moral aptitude’.

Nevertheless, and despite these shortcomings, Bentham’s analysis of the ways of selecting and governing bureaucracies contains many interesting insights: it contributes to discover the main features of the principal-agent logic, some basic elements of the economic analysis of corruption, and the role of social rewards as economic motives. Bentham emphasised the activating effect contained in emulation and in social rewards and considered the latter as powerful incentives to individual efficiency. Finally, the evolution of his reflections on the goals of emulation invites modern scholars to observe that different types of social rewards may producee different consequences on the efficiency, stability, and evolution of a democratic constitution.

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