Accessibility, pluralism, and honesty: a defense of the accessibility requirement in public justification

ABSTRACT

Political liberals assume an accessibility requirement, which means that, for ensuring civic respect and non-manipulation, public officials should offer accessible reasons during political advocacy. Recently, critics have offered two arguments to show that the accessibility requirement is unnecessary. The first is the pluralism argument: Given the pluralism in evaluative standards, when officials offer non-accessible reasons, they are not disrespectful because they may merely try to reveal their strongest reason. The second is the honesty argument: As long as officials honestly confess their beliefs after offering non-accessible reasons, disrespect and non-manipulation do not occur. This paper defends the accessibility requirement and asserts that these two arguments overlook a unique feature of the political domain. While all citizens collectively own political power as a corporate body, an official does not privately own her political power. Instead, she is a trustee who has a duty to act on behalf of the corporate body, that is, she has to make decisions on grounds that are accessible to others. This duty explains why, despite pluralism, the accessibility requirement is necessary. Moreover, given that political decisions are profoundly influential to each person, requiring people to be honest is ineffective in discouraging disrespectful and manipulative acts.

KEYWORDS:

• Public justification
• public reason
• consensus
• convergence
• accessibility
• collective ownership
• Rawls
• Gaus

Acknowledgments

The earlier versions of this article is presented in the panel ‘Moral Equality and Equal Respect’ held in MANCEPT 14th Annual Conference and in the departmental seminar of Department of Philosophy in The Chinese University, Hong Kong. I would like to thank Leo Cheung, Michael Cholbi, Helen Brown Coverdale, Eike Duvel, Giacomo Floris, Yong Huang, Haley Mathis, Christopher Nathan, Constanza Porro, Wendy Salkins, Lei Zhong, as well as other audiences in these events, for their very helpful comments. I especially thank Kevin Vallier for his extremely inspiring criticisms and encouragements. I am also grateful to Edward Yeung for his assistance in research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I should clarify that not all religious reasons are non-accessible. As Laborde (2017, pp. 126–127) recently argued, some religious ideas can be detached from the doctrine and become ‘freestanding’ ideas. Only those religious reasons that ‘appeal to a personal experience of revelation, or to extra-human sources of authority’ are inaccessible. In this paper, I focus on the non-accessible religious reasons only.

2. Rawls (2005), p. 137; Vallier (2018). However, it should be noted that the approach of defending the requirement of public justification by coercion has recently become controversial. Some political liberals (cf. Bird, 2014; Lister, 2011; Quong, 2014) have argued that the requirement of public justification may arise even if no coercion occurs. These philosophers rather suggest other grounds for the requirement of public justification, such as civic friendship and justice. For a defense of the coercion-based account, see Wong (n.d.).

3. Apart from Rawls, Schwartzman and Quong, consensus liberals also include Audi (2011), Weithman (2010), Larmore (2015), Nussbaum (2011), Gutmann and Thomson (2004), Bohman and Richardson (2010).

4. A similar distinction is also suggested by Vallier (2014, p. 111), though in the name of strong symmetric consensus, which assumes shareability as the requirement of justificatory reason, and weak symmetric consensus, which assumes accessibility.

5. Rawls (2005, p. 241). A similar view can also be found in Audi (2011, p. 70), Quong (2011, p. 262), Bohman (1997, p. 83), and Gutmann and Thomson (2004, p. 144).

6. Nevertheless, the convergence liberals are not meant to argue that any reasons are permitted to enter into public justification. The reasons that justify a proposal to others must be intelligible to others. This intelligibility requirement would permit most religious reasons in public justifications, but would still exclude some unintelligible reasons, such as rejecting a proposal because of personal dislike. I further discuss the standard of intelligibility in Section 4.

7. I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me to clarify this point.

8. An example is Bernie Sanders’s speech at the Liberty University in 2015. He used religious language to persuade Christian audiences to support his economic reforms (Wong, 2019, pp. 123–124).

9. It should be noted that Quong used these two reasons to defend the sincerity requirement. Nevertheless, the idea of accessibility, rather than sincerity, is what should matter in the sincerity requirement. Sincerity concerns the correspondence between what people say they believe and what they actually believe. As some convergence liberals argue, people can sincerely endorse the same law for different intelligible reasons in the convergence conception of public justification (Vallier, 2014, pp. 123–124; Billingham, 2016, p. 144). In fact, when Quong offers the reasons for civic disrespect of manipulation, the purpose of his arguments is to show the negative results caused by permitting people to offer non-accessible reasons as the sole grounds of their political advocacy. Quong is concerned more with the kinds of reasons permitted in public justification than how these reasons correspond to the actual beliefs of people. My paper, therefore, uses his arguments as a defense of the accessibility argument. I am very grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helping me to clarify this point.

10. Similar arguments can also be found in Audi (1997, pp. 135–136), and Bohman and Richardson (2010, pp. 269–270). Apart from these two arguments, Schwartzman (2011, p. 386) offered an argument of quality of debate: Limiting the scope of reasons within accessible reasons would improve the quality of public political discourse. Since we may be mistaken about our reasons for or against a law, making these reasons public may give us a chance to listen to the views of others and gain ‘epistemic benefits.’ While the aim of this paper is to show the moral weakness of the convergence conception, I put this argument, which argues for the epistemic weakness, aside.

11. Similar examples can also be found in Gaus (2010, pp. 25–26), Billingham (2016, p. 140), and Thrasher (2016, pp. 623–624). Despite not being a convergence liberal and not making a distinction between shareability and accessibility, Eberle (2002, p. 113) also challenged the link between respect and offering accessible reasons. According to Eberle, respect for persons implies a need to offer public justification, but it does not imply that citizens should not support a law that can only be justified by non-accessible reason.

12. Rawls (2005, p. 465).

13. The distinction between soundness and rationality was suggested by Billingham (2016, p. 140). Vallier (2017, p. 193) endorsed a similar distinction as well, though he used the terms ‘warranted choice’ and ‘justified choice.’

14. A similar reply, though brief, can also be found in Vallier (2017, p. 192).

15. My discussion of ownership is indebted to Christman (1994, pp. 23–27), Waldron (1988, pp. 40–41), and Munzer (1990, pp. 22–27). While these philosophers mainly discussed collective ownership in economic markets, I use this idea to interpret the political relation between citizens and their state.

16. This shared goal of a democratic body is suggested by Cohen (1996, pp. 420–422).

17. The view that public officials are trustees of the ruled has a long history. One of the earliest advocates was Locke, who understood the political relationship to be one of trust, establishing a fiduciary relationship. See Simmons (1993, pp. 68–72).

18. Note that my argument works even when the non-accessible reason is not a defeater reason. Although Ada’s non-accessible reason may be defeated in the democratic decision-making procedure and Ben is eventually treated justly, it does not entail that Ada’s action is not disrespectful. Exercising political power based on a non-accessible reason already violates the responsibility of a trustee, who is supposed to use her political power in a way accessible to the shareholders. Regardless of the final result, the action is disrespectful. The result is that Ada perpetuates the unjust basic structure, which merely deepens this problem of disrespect. Since Vallier (2016, p. 256) argued that disrespect does not exists when non-accessible reason is a defeater reason, my reply thus focuses on discussing this possibility. I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me to clarify this point.

19. For this paper, I focus on whether the honesty principle can rule out civic disrespect and manipulation when it is applied to public officials, though Carey stated that both officials and ordinary citizens have to comply with this principle.

20. For definitions of intelligibility, see Gaus (2011, pp. 289–292) and Vallier (2014, pp. 106–108). I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting me to discuss more about why offering non-accessible yet intelligible reasons is disrespectful.

21. Some may ask whether offering accessible reasons is sufficient to establish the relationship of trust between officials and citizens and whether offering shareable reasons is required. I believe that offering accessible reasons is sufficient. A trustee does not need to ensure that each of her decisions reflects reasons that her trustor endorses. Instead, she only needs to ensure that her reasons mirror common evaluative standard that can be used by her trustors to evaluate her decisions. For example, say I employ a fund manager to manage my equity portfolio, who is bestowed with the power to manage my investment for a certain period of time. I may not like the stocks that my manager picks for me as I speculate that the prices of those stocks may not rise and, hence, the investments will not be profitable. The manager, nevertheless, can provide a reasonable account that explains why this stock has a good prospect. Although I may disagree with my manager’s reason behind her decision, I will not have a feeling that she disrespects me because I understand that her reason is justified by some common evaluative standards shared by us, such as the norm that client profits should be maximized and she is to act in her client’s best interest. Hence, although a trustor may not affirm her trustee’s reason as her own, the trustor is still respected as long as some common evaluative standards enable the trustee to justify her reason. I do not deny that offering shareable reasons is also sufficient to establish a relationship of trust between officials and citizens. However, I focus on accessibility in this article for two reasons. First, as I mentioned in Section 1, the major consensus liberals define public justification in terms of accessibility. Second, some political philosophers have already argued that if public justification is defined in terms of shareability, then public justification is over-restrictive, and very few state policies are likely to be publicly justifiable. (Bonotti & Barnhill, n.d.) I thank an anonymous reviewer for helping me to clarify these points.

22. I have benefited from discussion this point with Kevin Vallier.

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Baldwin Wong

Baldwin Wong is a Lecturer of the General Education Foundation Programme and an Adjunct Lecturer of the Department of Government and Public Administration at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before coming to CUHK, he taught at the University of Hong Kong and was a Junior Research Fellow of the University of Essex. He holds a PhD in Government from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His academic interests lie mainly in public justification and Confucianism. His works were published (and forthcoming) in Journal of Social Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, Res Publica and Public Reason.