J is for Justice

"A Theory of..." - Why did Rawls oppose public funding of the arts?

Many people reading this will be at least passingly familiar with some aspects of John Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism, but let me give a brief recap, and then go on to something which might stand as something of a puzzle: isn’t public funding for the arts a progressive thing? And if so, why is someone we refer to as egalitarian and liberal opposed to it? Agree with Rawls or not, he poses questions that people who advocate for arts funding ought to have considered. So here we go…

In his massively influential A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls defines justice as arising from fairness: what is a political and social arrangement that we would all agree to as a fair one, even if it were not an arrangement that gave us everything we wanted as individuals. I might like a very big slice of cake, but would agree it is fair that we all get equal slices. To arrive at what is fair, he gives the thought experiment of the original position: we are going to try to come to an agreement on what would be fair arrangements, but we are doing this without knowing beforehand who we will be in this society. Will we be born male or female (and we would ask these days, cis or trans), black or white, physically strong and agile or not so much, handsome or plain, very smart or a bit slow, with attentive or neglectful parents, and so on. We are going to try to agree to social structures from behind a “veil of ignorance.” Remember this is a thought experiment - he doesn’t think this is how societies actually evolved.

He argues that we would agree on the following:

I shall maintain instead that the persons in the initial situation would choose two rather different principles: the first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example inequalities of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular the least advantaged members of society. …

The basic liberties of citizens are, roughly speaking, political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. These liberties are all required to be equal by the first principle, since citizens of a just society are to have the same basic rights.

The second principle applies, in the first approximation, to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility, or chains of command. While the distribution of wealth and income need not be equal, it must be to everyone’s advantage, and at the same time, positions of authority and command must be accessible to all.

And with this you can see why “egalitarian liberalism” is a reasonable description of Rawlsian political philosophy.

So, in this framework what’s wrong with the government using tax revenues to lend support to the arts? Two things.

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Rawls says we ought to aim for equality in income and wealth, and, where that is not realistic (and I don’t think it is) it should be the case that any inequalities must work to the benefit of the least advantaged. So, an economy where people choose careers and start businesses according to their own preferences (which might not be purely materialistic) will lead eventually to inequalities even if we started with a level playing field (and we don’t really, since some people are going to have greater strengths than others at this sort of success). But this is all right so long as the worst off think this is a better arrangement, say with some progressive taxation, than trying to enforce a very strict equality of outcomes, leaving absolutely everybody impoverished.

Should there be rules in place to help the people who are disadvantaged in earning income? Yes, that is consistent with his principles. Should there be rules in place to help those who encounter unforeseen disasters, like earthquakes? Yes, that would also be consistent. Should there be policies in place to provide certain goods to people who, although they have equal incomes with others, have tastes for goods and services that are on the expensive side? No. From the original position we would not say “Opera is an expensive thing to produce (though maybe not as expensive as it needs to be), and so opera lovers deserve everyone’s support.” Why restrict it to opera? What about people who love quail’s eggs, caviar, real champagne? Rawls:

As moral persons citizens have some part in forming and cultivating their final ends and preferences. It is not by itself an objection to the use of primary goods that it does not accommodate those with expensive tastes. One must argue in addition that it is unreasonable, if not unjust, to hold such persons responsible for their preferences and to require them to make out as best they can. But to argue this seems to presuppose that citizens' preferences are beyond their control as propensities or cravings which simply happen. Citizens seem to be regarded as passive carriers of desires. The use of primary goods ... relies on a capacity to assume responsibility for our ends.

In the 1980s and 1990s there was a grand debate about how we ought to define equality or inequality between people, in the sense of asking “what are the inequalities that are serious and in need of mitigating from a moral standpoint?” The polar positions (and we don’t need to, and don’t in practice, adopt strictly polar positions) were to look at “(in)equality of resources” and “(in)equality of welfare”: how it started versus how it’s going, so to speak. The “capabilities approach” of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum asked the slightly different question of “(in)equality in the sort of life you are able to lead”, which isn’t quite the same as equality of resources (some people might need extra resources to be able to have the same opportunities as others) or equality of welfare (some people might have equal capabilities for a good life but are just sort of miserable regardless).

Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin with him (who I wrote about on “future generations”), were on the side of “equality of resources” as the thing that matters. There’s not much we can do about equality of welfare, since that varies a lot even across people who have equal wealth, and if people have low welfare because they simply squandered the resources they had as they entered adulthood, well, that’s on them (although we ought to compensate people who simply had unavoidable bad luck). And that means people who happen to like expensive things are not entitled to extra support - it would not be fair.

Canadian-at-Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen didn’t see it this way. Here is a passage from his “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice”, in which is he responding to Dworkin’s claim that “equality of resources” is what matters:

Paul loves photography, while Fred loves fishing. Prices are such that Fred pursues his pastime with ease while Paul cannot afford to. Paul's life is a lot less pleasant as a result: it might even be true that it has less meaning than Fred's does. I think the egalitarian thing to do is to subsidize Paul's photography. But Dworkin cannot think that. His envy test for equality of resources is satisfied: Paul can afford to go fishing as readily as Fred can. Paul's problem is that he hates fishing and, so I am permissibly assuming, could not have helped hating it - it does not suit his natural inclinations. He has a genuinely involuntary expensive taste, and I think that a commitment to equality implies that he should be helped in the way that people like Paul are indeed helped by subsidized community leisure facilities. As this example suggests, there is between Dworkin's account of egalitarian justice and mine the difference that my account mandates less market pricing than his does.

I distinguish among expensive tastes according to whether or not their bearer can reasonably be held responsible for them. There are those which he could not have helped forming and/or could not now unform, and then there are those for which, by contrast, he can be held responsible, because he could have forestalled them and/or because he could now unlearn them. Notice that I do not say that a person who deliberately develops an expensive taste deserves criticism. I say no such severe thing because there are all kinds of reasons why a person might want to develop an expensive taste, and it is each person's business whether he does so or not. But it is also nobody else's business to pick up the tab for him if he does. Egalitarians have good reason not to minister to deliberately cultivated expensive tastes, and equality of welfare must, therefore, be rejected. But we should not embrace equality of resources instead, since that doctrine wrongly refuses compensation for involuntary expensive tastes, and it does not refuse compensation for voluntary ones for the right reason.

To clarify: by “expensive tastes” Cohen means “a taste for things that happen to be expensive, but the person would like them just as much if they were suddenly, by good luck, not so expensive” and not “a taste for expensive things because they are expensive.”

Cohen thinks society, in fairness, ought to lend Paul-who-loves-photography-but-not-cheap-things-like-fishing support¹, though with the proviso that Paul did not go out to intentionally cultivate this taste.

From an arts policy perspective, this raises some problems: after all, our opera companies go out of their way to try to encourage the youngs: “come to our operas and learn to love them!”.

In other words, “please cultivate this expensive taste.” And I think that it is a good thing they do this - people should learn to like great, but somewhat challenging, art! But it does raise the question of how it fits into a society committed to fairness to have the general public support the tastes of the few who have cultivated it (I’ll come back to this at letter L).

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So, Rawls says that the facts that (some) arts are expensive and that (some) people really like these expensive arts do not constitute sound reasons for public funding of the arts. What is the other reason he opposes public funding?

Rawls holds that from the original position, we would be wary of allowing the government to determine on our behalf what constitutes the good life, the goals that we ought to pursue. That is for us to decide for ourselves, or else we are giving away a vital freedom. This is what I see as the key principle of liberalism:

For while the persons in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. To acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty, if not to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfection. Thus it seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by a teleological principle of justice.

And that means…

… [T]he principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in an appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged.

So the criteria for funding of the arts, and university research as well, are pretty stringent: they must be contributing to his primary goals of equal liberties, and the interests of the least advantaged. Rawls is opposed to perfectionism, which in this context means society determining for individuals how they can best fulfil their potential as humans.

(The Army promotes Aristotelian perfectionism).

In Rawls’s Justice as Fairness (2001), where he returns thirty years later to the ideas in A Theory of Justice, he has not changed his mind:

The perfectionist idea is that some persons have special claims because their greater gifts enable them to engage in the higher activities that realize perfectionist values. … there should be a good-faith commitment not to appeal to them to settle the constitutional essentials and the basic matters of justice. Fundamental justice must be achieved first.

If for some people the arts are not a part of what they themselves see as a full life, then so be it - it’s not for the state to decide otherwise on their behalf, and not for the state to financially support those who have cultivated the higher arts.

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I really admire Rawls. He puts forth a serious argument, one that I don’t think can be ignored. The concept of evaluating our social and political arrangements as if from an original position is really insightful, albeit difficult to achieve. He was committed to his pursuit of equality: Katrina Forrester, in her book about Rawls, In the Shadow of Justice (2021) recounts how in 1966, whilst teaching at Harvard, Rawls led a faculty motion opposing the draft deferment for students, on the grounds that it was fundamentally unequal (it was), and that if the state was going to undertake the extreme removal of people’s liberties by conscripting them into the armed forces, they had better do it fairly. That is a profile in faculty courage.

But I am not convinced by what he says we would agree to as fair - a sharper criticism of him would be that he seems to think that in the original position we would all think about fairness the way John Rawls thinks about fairness, which is not how the world works. “No inequalities except as they benefit the least well-off” is much more risk-averse than I think people are in practice - why not fairness as “here is a basic decent living standard below which no one should fall”, and let people try to do the best they can with that safety net?

And from that original position, would we actually say the state has no role in trying to nudge us towards things that could make our lives more fulfilling, even if some of us as individuals didn’t know it? Here’s Thomas Nagel in Equality and Partiality (1995):

That there are things good in themselves … seems to me a position on which reasonable persons can be expected to agree, even if they do not agree about what those things are. And acceptance of that position is enough to justify ordinary tax support for a society’s effort to identify and promote such goods, if it can effectively do so - provided it does not engage in repression or intolerance of those who would have chosen different candidates.

The effort is legitimate even if mistakes are made, because the promotion of what is excellent is, under that description, a valid collective goal even for an involuntary association like a state. This does not mean that the majority has a right to take over the power of the state for its private purchases; rather, everyone has a reason to want the state to identify and encourage excellence, and this will require a method of selection which will inevitably leave some people unsatisfied with the result, even though they can accept the aim.

Trying not to be biased, trying to see all this from behind a veil of ignorance as to who I am in this world, I think Nagel is right. A state that encourages people to appreciate what is best in our world, in culture and nature and learning, is doing right, and does not violate what I would see as the core values of liberal society - if some people don’t want to take up what is being encouraged, so be it, they remain free to do as they choose.

1. I could be mistaken, but since Cohen published this in 1989 I would venture that fishing, not photography, has become the “expensive taste.”