What Facts Should be Treated as ‘Fixed’ in Public Justification?

ABSTRACT

In his account of public reason Rawls assumes that some facts ought to be treated as ‘fixed’, or beyond reasonable disagreement. These include, for him, facts upon which there is a scientific consensus. Some fixed facts might not be accessible to all citizens in the sense that to verify them requires specialist or local knowledge that is unattainable; this is the case with many facts upon which there is a consensus amongst scientists or experts but not laypeople. In such circumstances it appears problematic to claim that those who dispute these facts are unreasonable. This paper sets out a partial resolution to this problem: that laypeople can still reach a reasonable consensus on factual claims that are based on expert knowledge through an assessment of the debate between experts and the way that knowledge is produced. However, this can only be done on a case-by-case basis, and applies more narrowly than Rawls’ suggestion of deference to the scientific consensus. Whether a fact can be treated as fixed by these standards will depend on all citizens being able to obtain enough relevant information given a reasonable effort on their part.

KEYWORDS:

• Normative theory
• public reason
• testimony
• expertise
• facts in politics

Acknowledgments

This paper was presented at a workshop at MANCEPT in 2017 on ‘Facts, Knowledge and Democratic Politics’, and I would like to thank all of the participants for their useful feedback. Thank you also to Andrew Knops and Paul Billingham for their very detailed discussion of, and comments on, earlier drafts respectively.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the term ‘expert’ in a broad sense to mean anyone who has superior knowledge on some subject matter either because of access to information most people do not, or because of superior cognitive skills and knowledge built up over time (Fricker 2006, 235).

2. By ‘second-order’ here I mean any assessment of another’s testimony that is based in part on an evaluation of their credentials rather than factual information that all relevant actors have access to.

3. This state of non-culpable ignorance will not necessarily continue indefinitely. It might be reasonable to expect an individual who rejects P now for reasons beyond their control to accept P in the future when circumstances change.

4. Discussion around deep epistemic disagreements tends to draw a dichotomy between conciliation and steadfastness in one’s position (Matheson 2018). Treating a fact as fixed does not require conciliation, but it requires that even if someone is steadfast in their position that a fixed fact is wrong, they exercise restraint in deliberation.

5. Some have gone as far as to argue that expanding our social knowledge in a particular domain is a primary motivation behind assessing expert testimony (John 2011, 499).

6. It is worth noting that the authors conclude that this inconsistency is regrettable, and that there is intuitive appeal to treating certain facts in science as fixed.

7. For this reason, religious reasons are excluded. For a good summary and critical discussion see Gaus and Vallier (2009).

8. This both echoes and contradicts Jønch-Clausen and Kappel’s argument. They reject this strategy, as I do, for justifying deference to a consensus amongst scientists (2016, 130). However, they do not commit on the question of whether the strategy of appealing to reasonableness in second-order assessments can work in isolated cases.

9. I use the term ‘status trust’ after Buchanan (2004, 112–113) to mean trust based solely on the credentials of the alleged expert.

10. See, also, (Kappel 2018), for an account of deep disagreement that argues that differing core beliefs can lead us to embrace different epistemic standards and heuristics, and vice versa. We can also think of people having different epistemic frameworks, where one’s ‘epistemic framework is a set of principles that you endorse that gives an account of what is evidence for what, and assigns evidential weights’ (Matheson 2018).

11. For example, in response to Anderson, Jønch-Clausen and Kappel note that climate change is an example where the debate is uniquely lop-sided and the information easily accessible. (2016, 126, fn. 11).

12. Note that I include a degree of reflection on the information acquired here, so the duty that I am describing, to be reasonably informed, extends beyond just information acquisition.

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Reid

Andrew Reid is a Teaching Fellow in Political Theory at the University of Birmingham. His research interests are in contemporary normative theory, particularly debates around political liberalism and democratic theory.