The Burden of Explaining Yourself
Article by Ayman Fouad Abdelgawad
Imagine a rule that is never asked to explain itself. It has existed for years, appears in a handbook, and is repeated by people who did not write it. Anyone seeking a different outcome must provide a detailed account of why their circumstances deserve consideration.
The arrangement looks orderly. Yet it distributes the work of justification unevenly. The person affected must assemble evidence, anticipate objections, and make themselves intelligible. The rule needs only to point to its own existence.
Continuity does have value. Reopening every settled question would make ordinary administration impossible. People also depend on knowing what to expect. A standing rule can carry good reasons without rehearsing them on every occasion.
The difficulty begins when age becomes the only available reason. A practice may have solved a problem that no longer exists. Its exceptions may reflect the convenience of those who designed it. Familiarity can conceal these possibilities because the challenger attracts more attention than the challenged arrangement.
A fair institution would not need to abandon its rules whenever somebody objected. It would need to know what purpose a rule serves and what evidence might show that the purpose is being defeated. That knowledge makes a response possible beyond repetition.
The question is not whether a person should ever have to explain their request. It is whether the institution can explain its answer with comparable care. Where explanation travels in only one direction, the burden of being reasonable falls most heavily on those with the least power to decide what reasonableness means.