The notion ‘public interest’ is frequently used as a justification of public policy, and advancing it is often seen as the central task of the political process. What it refers to, however, is often vague, imprecise and unclear. Considering the diversity in human nature, the sheer breadth of human needs and desires, wouldn’t any policy which claims to be ‘in public interest’ inevitably be against the interest of one group or another? (A road thats good for some people is a source of noise, pollution, and collision risk to others.) Consensus is a rare in almost any public policy issue, and conflicts of interest abound. What, then, is public interest? Or is the term fraudulent, a misleading shorthand for the interest of the majority or the politically dominant group? In this essay, I argue that it is possible to make sense of public interest, in all its various applications, without assuming a perfectly homogenous population and without identifying the term with majoritarianism or regulatory capture.
Medieval thinkers like Aquinas and Suarez, writing on the objectives of the state, implicitly equated public interest to ‘the common good’. The nature of these goods - such as peace, prosperity, community, justice, and order - was such that their benefits were shared by everyone, they contributed to general well being, and they were moral in an Aristotlean sense. However, because this idea of public interest was highly vulnerable to perversion by the state, an alternative interpretation of public interest came to be preferred by later writers . For classic liberals (like Hobbes, Locke, Malthus), public interest constituted the promotion of private well being of individual citizens, through measures such as protection of property rights and private accumulation of wealth. (This, indeed, was the socio-political context in which the term originally arose [Douglas]). In the utilitarian version of this view, public interest lay in the collective aggregation of individual interests. In a similar spirit, the foundation of classical economist was based on the idea of an ‘’an invisible hand’’ which guides the behavior of men and produces a ‘natural harmony of conflicting interests’, while Marx, aligned with classical economics in his premises but differing with them in his conclusion, envisaged a “communistic fiction’’ of classless society where everyone’s interests coincide. [Foonote: saw conflicts of interests as conflicts of class. Myrdal’s work]. We now see modern economists, more mindful of the pitfalls of the invisible hand, argue for policies which maximise social welfare (with the latter term left almost as vague as public interest). All these interpretations (of public interest) entailed their own political commitments, and carried with them their own challenges. (For instance, could public interest qua ‘common good’ be used to endorse illiberal attitudes? Does ‘prosperty’ justify colonial conquests, and ‘order’ justify totalitarianism? Similarly, what separates the liberal-utilitarian view from majoritarianism - in other words, can collective public interest justify the scuppering of minority interests in favour of majority interests? )
For the purpose of this essay, a minimalistic definition of public interest along the lines suggested by Brian Barry would suffice. According to Barry, a policy, law or institution is in public interest if it increases the opportunities of an individual to get what they want in their role as a member of the public. This might seem, at first glance, as abstract a definition as the term public interest itself. But as we’ll see, it deftly handles many arguments that are flinged at the concept of public interest. (Just to be clear, we are not concerned, at least at this stage, whether there is a reason for any individual to privilege the public interest (as defined) over his other interests. What we are concerned with is whether there any public interest in the first place.)
The first one goes at the heart of human nature. As is often said, the only thing common among humans is their uniqueness. And different human beings have different needs and desires. How, then, can they have a common interest? To quote Bruce Douglas on this apparent paradox, ‘‘The more the benefits are linked with personal preference, the more difficult it becomes to demonstrate the existence of benefits which pertain to all members of society’’. Following the same reasoning, Hannah Arendt has concluded that the existence of public interest requires the unreal assumption of one-ness of mankind (“The monolithic character of every type of society, its conformism which allows for only one interest and one opinion, is rooted in the oneness of mankind”). And not only is this assumption unreal, but it can, by itself, produce real effects - like a repressive tyrant who shepherds its subjects into herd behavior: ‘‘The fiction of public interest assumes a real existence only in a conformist mass society, where the “one-ness of mankind is not a fantasy but where man as a social animal reigns supreme and the apparent survival of the human species can be guaranteed on the world-wide scale…. This nobody, the assumed one interest of society as a whole in economics….does not cease to rule for having lost its personality….The rule of nobody is not necessarily a no-rule, it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its most tyrannical and cruel versions. ‘’
But the concept of public interest isn’t that demanding as the above criticism suggests. Public interest, as defined, doesn’t require absolute equality - only political equality. All that is necessary for public interest to exist is that every member of the society have the same interest in capacity as a member of the public. The one-ness of mankind here is one-ness in their political status - the bedrock of a democratic society. (On the other hand, the societies Arendt has in mind - the Greek polis and the Roman republic - allowed for rampant discrimination against women and slaves (groups excluded from the public) in the name of public interest!) In most cases where a policy in public interest seems to be in conflict with personal preferences, it is not the case that the individuals have nothing at all to gain from the policy, but that they have other interests which compete with their interest as a member of the public. Thus, the conformism required by public interest is not as pervasive as Arendt suggests, but only conformity with the political authority, that is, conformity with the law of the land or a common body politic. (Something that is part and parcel of the social contract).
Still, if people do have a shared interest as members of the public, why are public policy issues so ripe with disagreement? After all, in public policy debates, even the fact of benefits to the general public are disputed (and not only private interests which could and would differ). Consensus among the general population is an extremely rare outcome in any public policy issue of significant import - be it economic policies, environmental regulation or national security. Isn’t that an undeniable evidence against the presence of a common public interest?
While it would be absurd to assert that people could be mistaken about what they desire, they can certainly be mistaken about their interests (as defined here). Two individuals might agree on what is benefitial to them as members of the public, but they can disagree about which policies will result in the desired benefits. A person might think that a particular policy will increase their opportunity to do what they want (as a member of the public), when in actuality it will do the opposite. Thus, apart from competing special interests, disagreement about policies can also result from conflicting opinions. (Especially in the modern age, where some issues are so complex that only few are adequately equipped to understand it, public opinion is becoming increasingly delinked with public interest).
Two other related challenges are posed to public interest. One, public interest is often accused of being a handy smoke-screen for the tyranny of the majority (‘‘might is always right’’) or the most effectively deployed interests (regulatory capture). This is especially true where ‘public’ is taken to mean the majority or simple, ‘the many’. And even if there is such a thing as public interest, does it have anything going for it? Why should the private interests of individuals be sacrificed for the public cause? While both of these are interesting questions in their own right, they are outside the scope of this essay. For the problem that the term public interest is often misappropriated to advance vested interests is irrelevant to the question of its existence. Similarly, the question of how much weight does public interest holds in the justification of a policy is only secondary to whether such an interest exists.
What is relevant to the question at hand is whether the term, as it is used in various matters of public policy, has any meaningful content. Brian Barry’s handling of public interest as interests that everyone shares qua members of the public is not only consistent with the observation of interest conflicts, but also explains them. Far from being vacuous, vague or misleading, it presents a fairly definable criteria against which any policy’s claim of being public interest can be checked and verified.
27 January 2016