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.

To Hedge or Not to Hedge: Scientific Claims and Public Justification

“…In our view, public justification should be held to a standard of accessibility on which a reason is public if and only if it is justified according to common evaluative standards (Badano and Bonotti 2020;Tyndal 2019;Wong 2022). 6 Badano and Bonotti (2020) show that accessibility is an attractive middle ground between intelligibility and shareability.…”

“…They also include "epistemic rules for the collection of factual evidence and for drawing inferences" (Badano and Bonotti 2020, 39). Wong (2022) explains that shared evaluative standards "enable people to scrutinize, dispute, or affirm the reasons offered by others" (238). Political deliberation would be hamstrung without common yardsticks of evaluation.…”