Transparency is often treated as a tool for building public trust. Bryn Williams-Jones argues that it is first an ethical obligation to the public.

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Public trust is often treated as a means to an end. Trust is valuable, we are told, because it facilitates compliance: people follow recommendations, accept constraints, and cooperate with policies that restrict their freedom in the name of collective goals. When trust erodes, misinformation spreads, resistance grows, and public policy becomes difficult, if not impossible, to implement.

There is truth to this instrumental view, but it ultimately gets the ethics backwards.

Compliance may be one consequence of trust, but it is not what trust means. People may comply because they fear sanctions, lack alternatives, or accept that authorities have the legal power to act. None of this necessarily shows that they trust the institutions making the decisions.

Trust should not be understood primarily as obedience. It is not a psychological disposition that can be managed through messaging or restored through better branding. Instead, trust is a relationship grounded in expectations of honesty, reciprocity, and respect. Relationships of trust do not simply exist; they impose responsibilities on those who ask others to trust them. Like any relationship, trust must be nurtured if it is to grow. Trust can also be damaged, sometimes irrevocably, not only by what happens, but by how decisions come to be made.

Photo Credit: freesvg.  Image Description: A picture of two hands shaking, to symbolize “trust”.

In public crises — whether related to public health, the economy, or politics — what undermines trust is often not disagreement with particular government policies, but exclusion from the reasoning that justifies them.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was frequently asked whether governments were communicating “enough” information to the public. The question itself reflected a broader debate in public health communication: transparency was often treated as a matter of quantity rather than justification. How much information could safely be shared? How much uncertainty could the public tolerate? How much complexity about the virus or public health responses could people handle without becoming confused or anxious?

That framing missed the point.

Transparency is not about flooding people with data or publishing lengthy technical reports that few will read. Nor does it require disclosing every internal discussion, disagreement, or preliminary idea. Transparency is about making visible the reasoning behind decisions that directly affect people’s lives. It means explaining why particular measures are adopted, what values are being prioritised, which trade-offs are being accepted, and where uncertainty remains. In short, transparency is a form of respect.

What troubled me throughout the pandemic was not that recommendations changed — they had to. Evidence evolved, circumstances shifted, and responsible decision-makers adapted. Public health authorities initially discouraged mask use by the general public, citing uncertain evidence about the effectiveness of cloth masks while also emphasizing the need to preserve scarce N95 medical masks for healthcare workers. When recommendations later changed as evidence on asymptomatic transmission accumulated, the shift was often presented without clearly distinguishing these different justifications. What undermined trust was the frequent failure to explain why such changes occurred or to acknowledge openly the uncertainty under which decisions were made.

Public communication inevitably requires simplification. Experts cannot reproduce every technical debate, and citizens should not have to master epidemiology before understanding why a policy affects them. But simplification is not the same as concealment. Complexity can be made accessible without pretending that uncertainty, disagreement, and trade-offs do not exist.

Too often, however, opacity was justified as a form of protection. The public, it was assumed, would not understand probabilistic evidence, appreciate difficult trade-offs, or tolerate uncertainty. Better, then, to simplify the message, project confidence, and conceal disagreement among experts.

This assumption is not only empirically questionable; it is ethically problematic.

Decades of research in science communication — and my own experience teaching bioethics to students and professionals from diverse backgrounds — suggest something quite different. When complex information is communicated honestly, uncertainty is acknowledged, and ideas are made accessible through concrete examples, people are far more capable of understanding risk and weighing competing values than experts often assume.

The persistent fear that the public cannot handle uncertainty reveals a deeply paternalistic view of both expertise and citizenship. This fear assumes not only that scientific knowledge cannot be translated effectively for different audiences, but that experts possess the moral authority to decide what others should know, how much they should know, and when.

This stance may be well intentioned, but it carries significant ethical costs.

When people suspect that information is being withheld “for their own good,” trust begins to erode. When guidance changes without explanation, confidence weakens. And when decisions are presented as faits accomplis rather than as reasoned judgments made in the face of scientific uncertainty, people disengage — not because they are irrational, but because they have been prevented from understanding the reasoning process.

Ironically, attempts to preserve public trust by limiting transparency often produce precisely the opposite effect.

When institutions ask how they can restore public trust, the conversation often turns to communication strategies: better messaging, stronger public relations, more effective campaigns against misinformation. These all have a place, but they cannot compensate for ethical shortcomings in how decisions are made and publicly justified.

More important is whether institutions have behaved in ways that deserve trust.

From an ethical perspective, transparency should be understood as an expression of respect for people as moral agents capable of understanding reasons, grappling with uncertainty, and living with difficult collective choices.

Institutions that ask for trust owe the public more than reassurance. They owe honest justification for the decisions they make in the public’s name.

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Bryn Williams-Jones is a professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, School of Public Health, Université de Montréal. He also writes about bioethics, academic life, and leadership at BrynStorming.