The Principle of Restraint: Public Reason and the Reform of Public Administration
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321719831984 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719831984
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(1) 110 –127
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321719831984
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The Principle of Restraint:
Public Reason and the Reform
of Public Administration
Gabriele Badano
Abstract
Normative political theorists have been growing more and more aware of the many difficult
questions raised by the discretionary power inevitably left to public administrators. This article
aims to advance a novel normative principle, called ‘principle of restraint’, regulating reform of
established administrative agencies. I argue that the ability of public administrators to exercise
their power in accordance with the requirements of public reason is protected by an attitude of
restraint on the part of potential reformers. Specifically, they should refrain from any reform of
an administrative agency that involves a switch to a considerably more loosely interconnected
system of values underlying the work of that agency. To illustrate the importance of the principle
of restraint, I examine a case from British health policy, showing that a recent reform of the
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence well exemplifies the serious problems brought
by any violation of that principle.
Keywords
public administration, discretion, public reason, National Institute for Health and Care
Excellence, NHS
Accepted: 29 January 2019
The officials populating public administration agencies are much more than the rigid
executors of policy decisions that popular belief sees them as. There is indeed a growing,
although belated, recognition from within normative political theory that the large spaces
of discretionary power inevitably left to public administrators call for in-depth analyses
aimed at determining how discretion can be made consistent with the ideals that should
govern our institutions.
This article, which aims to provide one such analysis, has two main goals. My first
goal is to put forward a novel normative principle regulating reform of any established
administrative agency, laying down a set of circumstances under which elected politi-
cians and other relevant actors should refrain from carrying out reform. My justification
Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK
Corresponding author:
Gabriele Badano, Department of Politics, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: gabriele.badano@york.ac.uk
831984PSX0010.1177/0032321719831984Political StudiesBadano
research-article2019
Article
Badano 111
for this ‘principle of restraint’ (PR), which provides a strong reason against any reform
condemning an administrative agency to serve a much more loosely interconnected set of
ends than it previously did, is that it preserves the ability of public administrators to rea-
son publicly about the discretionary decisions they face. To illustrate my justification for
this principle, I use a recent reform to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
(NICE), an administrative body in charge of appraising health technologies for use in the
British National Health Service (NHS). This reform, which saw NICE take over a dedi-
cated fund for cancer drugs in 2016, well exemplifies a violation of my PR and the prob-
lems coming with it. My second goal is to take advantage of my discussion of the PR to
suggest that this principle can identify fresh reasons why commentators should criticise
the cancer fund in question.
My argument builds upon and aims to contribute to the vast literature on public reason
in political philosophy and normative political theory. The basic idea behind public rea-
son is that a specific method for reflecting upon and making decisions is called for when
important issues are at stake, and the decisions made about them will be backed by the
power of the state. For example, judges and members of parliament will often, if not
always, be subject to the discipline of public reason when on the job, while members of a
church or an association typically are not if they meet to plan their activities as members
of their church or association.
Many appealing justifications have been proposed for the duty to provide public rea-
sons. For some, this duty is justified by a principle of respect for the equal moral status of
persons, none of whom are subject by nature to the will of others. For others, public rea-
sons are needed to solve the tension between the idea that the public enjoy ultimate demo-
cratic authority over laws and policies and the fact that its members will routinely have to
live with laws and policies shaped by others. Similarly, several accounts exist of exactly
what it means to reason publicly.1 One influential account contends that to reason pub-
licly is to refrain from supporting laws or policies if the only reasons we have for accept-
ing them are grounded in our religious views, our conception of the good explaining how
individuals should lead their personal lives or other controversial ‘comprehensive’ doc-
trines (Rawls, 1997). Independent of whether comprehensive reasons can ever be public
reasons, complying with public reason involves providing the public with a transparent
justification for one’s decisions, a feature that will be crucial to my argument.
After explaining the importance of the problems posed by public administration to
normative political theory and the framework of public reason in particular, Section 1
reconstructs Henry Richardson’s compelling account of what it means to reason publicly
at the level of public administration. Building on such an account, Section 1 also intro-
duces the novel PR before sketching a justification for it. Section 2 reconstructs the work-
ings of NICE and its Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF), while Section 3 suggests that the issues
raised by the CDF should be understood as a restructuring of the system of values served
by NICE.
The new elements introduced into NICE’s system of values through the CDF can be
reconciled with its traditional commitments only if NICE settles for its mission being
made up of considerably more loosely connected elements than used to be the case.
Section 4 explains that this constitutes a violation of the PR before using the CDF to
illustrate how violating that principle hinders the ability of public administrators to pro-
vide the public with transparent justifications. Section 4 also clarifies that the PR is best
understood as providing pro tanto reasons against certain kinds of reform. Finally, Section
5 replies to two possible objections.
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