What information people are entitled to in the public justification process

The principle of public justification states that “a coercive law L is justified in a public P if and only if each member i of P has sufficient reason(s) Ri to endorse L”. What reasons people actually have is determined by the information available to them during the process of public justification. The amount and nature of information varies with respect to the degree of idealization espoused by the theorists of public reason. Rawls and Habermas, for instance, adhere to a fairly radical idealization that assumes that public’s reasons are modeled in conditions of perfect information. Gaus and Valier, on the other hand, argue for a rather moderate idealization assigning reasons based on some standard of adequate information. In other words, they assume that people have only limited information during the public justification process. Since the public justification principle inherently presupposes that people have certain entitlements (at the very least, the right to have coercive law justified to them), the paper discusses whether people – in order to have adequate reasons in the process of justification of political power – also have a right to information. If so, what kind of information. The paper subsequently posits that if there is a right to certain information during the public justification process, it varies according to the degree of idealization: radical idealization implies a right to a wide range of information, while moderate idealization establishes a right to a more limited range of information, but information that is all the more fundamental in the context of public justification. The paper argues that radical idealization is not sustainable as the proliferation of claims to information would make it impossible to justify political power. Although a moderate idealization assumes a limited scope of rights to information, these are rights to more fundamental information and are therefore more acceptable under conditions of deep pluralism.