Do We Owe Others an Explanation for Every Decision?

Someone declines a dinner invitation and a friend asks, “Why?” A manager denies an employee a promotion, and the employee asks the same question. The form is identical, but the duty to explain is not. The first is primarily a personal choice. Courtesy or the relationship may call for a brief account, yet the friend is not necessarily entitled to every reason. The second decision exercises institutional power and alters another person’s opportunities, so it requires reasons that can be examined.

Political philosophy makes this distinction especially clear through the idea of public justification. In the Rawlsian tradition, coercive political power should be justifiable through reasons that affected citizens can recognise. This does not mean that every decision-maker must expose their inner life; it means that power cannot rest on “because I said so”. Philosophical accounts of privacy, meanwhile, often connect control over personal information, spaces and choices with autonomy. If every private choice required a complete disclosure of motives, self-government would also be diminished.

My view is that the duty to explain grows with three things: the degree of power exercised, the size and unavoidability of the effect on others, and whether the decision-maker occupies a shared role. Managers, teachers and public bodies therefore usually owe more reasons than friends or strangers. Still, identifying the assessable basis of a decision is not the same as revealing every private fact. A good explanation lets affected people check whether rules were applied consistently, whether facts were mistaken and whether review is possible. It need not satisfy every observer’s curiosity.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justification-public/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy/