The Normative Question of Institutional Well Functioning

Political philosophers standardly understand the normative assessment of social and political institutions in terms of their founding values, including the purposes that institutions are intended to serve. Analyses and normative accounts of the justification of the state have largely focused on patterns of social justice, or the conditions for the exercise of the state’s coercive power, chiefly through the lenses of political legitimacy. Only scant attention has been paid to the normative assessment of the properties that make an institution well functioning once it has been established on sound normative grounds. Yet, if there are good reasons for valuing the establishment of just and legitimate institutions in politics and society, it is also important to consider how an institution should work to stand up to its grounding reasons (its raison d’être), and what should be done to respond to the dysfunctions that may make it fail those reasons. This paper is intended as a contribution to the normative discussion of institutional well functioning. It revolves around the question of what it means for an institution to honour its raison d’être. It argues that a focus on institutional well functioning reveals the normative import of the functional relations between the occupants of institutional roles and the centrality of the ethics of office accountability that ought to govern those relations. Specifically, it shows how the interrelatedness of institutional roles establishes a normative order of relations, which is the source of a mutual duty of accountability for officeholders. The paper thus discusses the normative sources of the duty of office accountability as the primary duty binding on officeholders when they act in their institutional capacity. It argues that such a duty exceeds the legal requirements attached to each role description and is not coextensive with general rules of personal morality or professional ethics. The duty of office accountability is the centrepiece of a public ethics of office. In this sense, to study the well functioning of the state’s social and political institutions from a normative point of view brings to the fore the tenets of a public ethics of office.