Neutrality, Cultural Literacy, and Arts Funding

3.1. Public Goods and Neutrality

Public goods are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. A good is non-excludable if, once it exists for one person (at least, at some sufficient level), it exists for everyone. Clean air and national security are examples of non-excludable goods (Dworkin 1985: 222–26; Raz 1986: 198–99; Kramer 2015: 4–6). When one person lives in a country with an effective defence force, so does every person who lives there. Similarly, when I live in a region with low levels of air pollution, everyone else in the region benefits from that same good as well.

A good is non-rivalrous if individuals can enjoy it without reducing the ability of other individuals to enjoy it (Kramer 2015: 4). Clean air is non-rivalrous because, by breathing it, I don’t reduce my neighbour’s ability to breathe it (2015: 4–5). While putative public goods are rarely perfectly non-excludable/non-rivalrous, goods are typically classed as public if they possess these properties to a high degree (2015: 4). For reasons of scope, I will be focussed on the non-excludability criterion of public goods in this paper.

Public goods can create free-rider problems, which is part of what justifies the state’s role in helping secure them (Dworkin 1985; Rawls 1999: 236; Quong 2011: 88–89; Kramer 2015: 4). Everyone may have an interest in some pollution-reduction technology. But if no one can be excluded from the good this technology promotes, for example, cleaner air, then each person has an incentive to free-ride on other people’s investment in the technology. This can lead to a scenario in which goods that we all have an interest in attaining are under-supplied, or where their costs are disproportionately shouldered by a limited group. State action to supply such goods, using public funds, is one way to ensure the adequate supply of such goods, on relatively fair terms.

However, it’s not plausible to think that just because some good is non-rivalrous and non-excludable, the state has a neutral aim in support of it. A theocratic state might provide things which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, but which aren’t sincerely defendable without recourse to a religious doctrine, for example, public broadcasting devoted entirely to religious services. Public goods can therefore lack public value in the relevant sense. In addition, not all the means of promoting a public good that is publicly valuable—like clean air—will seem effective and efficient enough, relative to known alternatives, to be sincerely defensible. So, if the framework of public goods is to provide a strategy for squaring arts funding with neutrality, the success of this strategy will rely on identifying a relevant subclass of public goods-styled policies, by virtue of belonging to which, arts funding could pass the neutrality test.

3.2. Publicly Valuable, Non-Excludable Goods

My focus in the first instance is on classifying a set of goods, rather than policies/practices. The relevant subclass of public goods, for my purposes, have two features: they are publicly valuable and non-excludable.¹³ The connection between the requirements of neutrality and public value—given the latter’s link to public reasons—might seem straightforward, but the usefulness of showing that a policy makes a certain good publicly available is less obvious. We can imagine neutrally justifiable policies, such as those which aim at correcting health inequalities, that don’t explicitly aim at making a good available to everyone.¹⁴ Indeed, one way to establish the neutrality of arts funding, for political liberals, is to argue that it is required by justice, for example, that there is a basic right to culture that a reasonable citizenry would recognise as non-Perfectionist, and that arts funding answers to, or that arts funding is justified on grounds of fair equality of opportunity.¹⁵

Public availability is a useful condition for discharging the Neutrality Objection because of a suspicion that arts funding mainly delivers private resources and/or is an ineffective or Perfectionistic way to address justice. Brighouse, for instance, considers the case for arts funding aimed at enlivening a poverty-stricken city, only to say that such programs would be inegalitarian, because they’d favour arts lovers, and “what is required is wholesale redistribution of wealth that will then be at the disposal of the residents of the inner city to do with what they will” (1995: 45). He qualifies that even if arts programs “represent an improvement in the direction of justice for the egalitarian”, they don’t deliver something that’s required by justice, like health or housing: arts funding is instead “discretionary” (1995: 45; see also Carroll: 30; Tahzib 2022: 179–80; cf. Munoz-Dardé 2013).

But why might we want to say that discretionary spending, when it occurs, should aim at delivering something to the whole public? Consider what Scanlon says on the subject.

There are some benefits that governments can choose whether or not to provide. Public swimming pools, ice skating rinks, and golf courses might be examples. But if a government provides benefits of this kind it cannot make them legally available to only some citizens, and, I would say, it can be open to objection if it provides these facilities in a way that is accessible only to people in some neighborhoods. (Scanlon 2018: 17)

We can see how this sort of condition would apply to cultural goods, if we thought, like Carroll and Brighouse, that arts funding was discretionary. The worry would be that there are no public reasons to justify the goal of broadening arts access if some people don’t want it (Rawls 1999: 250).¹⁶

It’s worth mentioning a compromise position between rejecting arts funding for this reason, and providing it on a limited basis. Governments can help make any given discretionary good available just to the citizens who want it, if and to the extent they’re happy to pay for it. Rawls proposed something similar in his “exchange branch” of government.¹⁷ However, there are problems with this kind of divide-and-conquer approach which, I think, help illuminate the significance of Scanlon’s view.

If some discretionary goods are non-excludable, they will be susceptible to free riding from those who have opted not to pay tax towards them (Klosko 1987; Quong 2011: 89; Pamuk 2019: 7). If, on the other hand, there are ways to restrict public access to goods political liberals tend to classify as discretionary—for example, by charging some people to enter ‘public’ parks unless they have, at an earlier time, paid to support their upkeep—we may have ethical reasons not to. Such arrangements may conflict with the inclusive goals of a policy/institution. If those goals, for instance, were linked to providing public spaces, or promoting democratic or cultural literacy for all citizens, then their aspirations would seem contradicted by a scheme of intentionally unequal, tiered access.¹⁸

It is the combination of the intuition that (a) arts funding doesn’t seem to be required by justice and is therefore discretionary, and (b) if governments are to provide discretionary goods, they should aspire to make them available to all, that makes a condition of non-excludability attractive. Writers like Carroll and Brighouse also indicate support for public goods policies without recourse to justice or perfection. If arts funding can be seen to contribute to a similarly non-excludable, publicly valuable good, then the force of the objection can be diffused by analogy.

4.1. Quong’s Excludability Objection

But while political liberals have expressed sympathy towards this kind of strategy for discretionary spending, Quong and Brighouse have both made strong objections to it in the case of arts funding. Quong’s objection occurs within a wider argument against liberal Perfectionists and isn’t explicitly motivating a Neutrality Objection. However, it entails a key claim about the nature of arts funding that applies to all public goods justifications, Perfectionist or otherwise.

The broader context is that Quong objects to policies associated with Perfectionism because they question the rationality of citizens/their ability to run their own lives.¹⁹ However, he argues that taxation for the provision of a Perfectionist public good—a non-excludable good valued for intrinsic reasons—may not have this quality.²⁰

It is not irrational or in any other way a mistake to free-ride on the provision of public goods when you lack assurance that others will do their share to contribute to the provision of the goods. (2011: 89)

Quong is conceding that the existence of a free-rider problem could dissolve the worries of paternalism he attaches to Perfectionist policies. If this is right, then a public good-styled justification for arts funding (even if it rested on Perfectionist grounds) may be acceptable to Quong, if it attracts enough democratic support. But he argues that public-goods-styled defences for “subsidies usually called for by perfectionists [e.g., arts funding]” don’t work, because they “almost never involve genuine public goods”. This is because the goods they promote

can be (and often are) offered in ways that require payment at the point of consumption, which means they lack the essential feature of non-excludability. Individuals can be required to pay to join libraries, enter art galleries . . . or go to the opera. (Quong 2011: 89)

In other words, most of the activities that public arts funding supports are in an important sense privately beneficial, in a way that things like national defence and clean air are not. The goods that arts funding provides are too exclusive to qualify as non-excludable.²¹ If this is right, then a public goods rationale for arts funding can’t work even if it rests of suitably neutral reasons.

Quong’s reasoning is unpersuasive, in part because it relies on an over-simplified understanding of the kind of goods generated in the cultural sphere, and the relation between individual activity and enjoyment, and collective benefit. Of course it is correct, on one level, that someone who pays to attend an art exhibition receives a good from this (enjoyment of the exhibition) that is exclusionary, in a way that disqualifies it from being a non-excludable good. But it is implausible to think of all the possible benefits achieved by an exhibition simply as the sum of the individualized benefits enjoyed by its attendees. Exhibitions help to comprise an artistic culture, and from that, a culture per se.

The mechanism in effect here isn’t just found in the cultural sphere. Policies securing the provision of publicly valuable, non-excludable goods often have a contributory structure, in which the specific activities that are being funded for the sake of a good indirectly contribute to it, rather than directly instantiating it.²² For example, the good of having cleaner air is promotable through activities which involve individuals paying for personal benefits. Consider public transport. Cars are a major contributor to urban air pollution. One way to reduce pollution involves subsidizing public transport to make it a more attractive option for commuters who would otherwise drive. Inevitably, the benefits of a better public transport system redound to specific individuals, for example, people who live near train stations, more than others. However, this fact doesn’t nullify the public value and non-exclusiveness of having cleaner air, which is brought about via a policy that results in certain people’s individualized enjoyment of convenient transport.²³ In short, activities whose proximate benefits are private, in some salient respect, may still ultimately contribute towards commonly valuable, non-excludable goods.

4.2. Brighouse’s Manifestness Objection

Suppose that public arts funding contributes to a publicly valuable, non-excludable good. Brighouse argues that even if this is so, it is still presumptively unjust because it creates suspicions of state favouritism or partiality. For the sake of argument, I will grant Brighouse’s claim that public arts funding creates suspicions of partiality, even if it has an appropriately neutral aim.²⁴ My criticism focuses on his argument’s other key premise, namely,

Manifest Neutrality: It must be manifest to reasonable citizens [i.e., beyond reasonable doubt] that the justifications of discretionary state policies . . . are neutrally justified.²⁵ (Brighouse 1995: 43)

Manifest Neutrality combines Neutrality of Aim with the following constraint.

Publicity: The actual reasons for government action must be understandable to, and available for scrutiny by, reasonable citizens, and . . . it must be manifest that the requirements of justice are met. (1995: 41)

It is easy to grasp the requirements stated in the first clause. People must be able to understand and scrutinize the reasons behind government action. Insight into these reasons cannot be the exclusive preserve of technocrats, politicians, and business elites. The second clause’s requirements are harder to pin down. Brighouse distinguishes two readings of it. On a weaker reading, it only needs to be “possible, on the available evidence, for reasonable people to believe that the requirements of justice are fulfilled” (1995: 42, my emphasis). But Brighouse regards this as under-demanding, and opts for a stronger reading, on which manifestness requires not just that it is possible for people to accept the neutral rationale of some policy, but that most citizens can be expected to accept it. He says

There should be little room for reasonable suspicion that the reasons advanced in public for an action are not the real reasons for the action. (1995: 42)

It is unclear, however, what justifies Brighouse’s claim that, for discretionary state policies, state actions cannot leave room for doubt that the conditions of neutrality are met. Notice how demanding this is. It is not enough for the liberal state to make the neutral aims of its actions and policies easy to see and understand. It must, in addition, make the neutrality of its aims readily recognizable in the specific, chosen means that it adopts in the pursuit of its aims.²⁶ Why should this be accepted as a strict requirement? Brighouse’s defence of Publicity suggests a deeper motivation behind these demands. He says that the appeal of Publicity lies in “the desirability of enabling all citizens to engage effectively in political action by making the workings of public politics equally transparent to all parties” (1995: 42). In other words, the appeal of manifestness, as an aspect of Publicity, owes to the plausible idea that governments must respect and accommodate people’s capacity to participate in political life, for example, by them joining in policy debates, in a reasonably informed and transparent way.²⁷

The desirability of political engagement, thus construed, is an entirely reasonable commitment, in a liberal theory of justice. And there is a grain of truth in Brighouse’s argument. If people suspect they are being given bogus reasons for state action, they may stop paying attention to politics. Conversely, if citizens can understand the reasons for state policies, they are less likely to believe political decision-making is a power wielded by a class they don’t belong to, or that when governments provide reasons for their actions, they are simply taking the public for a ride.

But Brighouse exaggerates the demandingness of this ideal in his defence of Publicity. He seems to suggest that a manifest Neutrality of Aim in state action positively enables individuals to participate effectively in politics. He speaks of “the desirability of enabling all citizens to engage effectively in political action”. This overstates the extent to which suspicions of partiality interfere with participation. People can enter policy debates, form pressure groups, run for office, and engage in activism, even while harbouring suspicions about the hidden, non-neutral aims lurking behind superficially neutral justifications for state action. Indeed, if I suspect that I am being given bogus reasons, this might even inspire my political engagement. So while it is true that being better-equipped to see the reasons behind government actions supports our interest in political engagement, it is not true that political engagement requires this. The manifest fulfilment of Neutrality of Aim therefore isn’t, contrary to Brighouse’s suggestion, a transformative precondition for people’s political participation.

The more fundamental problem with Brighouse’s appeal to Manifest Neutrality is that this sets a justificatory hurdle for public arts funding that cannot easily be met, but which there is no good justification for applying to public arts funding selectively, and not to other kinds of relatively uncontroversial forms of state action which deliver non-excludable goods. Our reasons for tolerating suspicions of partiality that arise from government spending that contributes to publicly valuable, non-excludable goods, for example, public roads infrastructure, should also suffice in relation to arts funding, even if we take the latter to be a discretionary policy.

Consider the suspicions of non-neutral aims that we might have in the case of roads. Roads can contribute to a publicly valuable, non-excludable good, through the increased mobility they provide apply to all (or nearly all) residents (Miller 2004: 129). There will thus be suitably neutral reasons available to defend such policies, even if they’re not always required by justice.

But construction of new roads obviously benefits some citizens more than others, and their construction disrupts the lives of some more than others, for example, in terms of commuter delays, or increased noise. Moreover, road projects can cause certain neighbourhoods to become less aesthetically pleasing, and in some cases, they may necessitate the compulsory acquisition of property. For all these reasons, it is easy for some citizens to doubt whether ‘official’ justifications for road projects satisfy Neutrality of Aim. People can say: “What public interest? I’m not interested in using this new road. These projects never run through the neighbourhoods where the politicians and their wealthy friends live. They say it’s for everyone’s good, but they don’t care about our needs around here”.

In short, suspicions of partiality often surround such projects in a way that will prevent those projects from satisfying the Publicity constraint that is embedded in Manifest Neutrality. However, we don’t ordinarily see roads as belonging to a class of goods governments shouldn’t fund, on pain of non-neutrality. Brighouse suggests that there is a principled basis for the double-standard in how our suspicions of partiality affect the legitimacy of state action.

We talk of Christian art, Muslim art, existentialist art, even Communist art. . . . By contrast we do not associate highways . . . with particular ways of life, because they are, in some important sense, not closely attached to the particularistic interests of those who believe in some and not other ways of life. (Brighouse 1995: 56–57)

We can grant Brighouse’s claim that arts funding is particularly susceptible to suspicions of partiality. But why shouldn’t the needs fulfilled by roads and similar infrastructure not also be constrained in some way by considerations of manifest impartiality and public trust? To say that roads are in some important sense, not closely attached to the interests of particular individuals or groups, is just to insert an argumentative placeholder, instead of the principled explanation that we need. People who don’t like going to art galleries feel ripped off when the state spends public funds on galleries. People who live in middle-ring suburbs and prefer to ride public transport feel ripped off when the state spends public funds building mega-highways near their homes. If one set of suspicions is problematizing, then the other is too. There are risks of partiality to mitigate in the delivery of public goods, and perceptions of favouritism are not in themselves unimportant. But an acceptable and legitimate way to justify a policy, in the face of such risks/suspicions, is to present a credible account of the non-excludable good it advances, and of how it does so particularly effectively.

So even if we grant that suspicions of partiality can generate potential deficits of legitimacy, discretionary state policies will only be disallowed by these deficits if we have presupposed that these policies cannot effectively contribute to publicly valuable, non-excludable goods. Unless we just presuppose that public arts funding doesn’t make such a contribution, Brighouse’s manifestness objection is unconvincing.

5.1. Hermeneutical Resources for Cultural Literacy

In developing my account of the non-excludable good served by arts funding, it is useful to borrow Miranda Fricker’s (2007) language of hermeneutical resources, which she uses in presenting her account of hermeneutical injustice, that is, suffering caused by an unfair deficit in hermeneutical resources, due to identity-prejudice. Hermeneutical resources are things—including, crucially, for Fricker, the repertoire of concepts available in vernacular language—that help us to interpret the world and our experiences. Someone living with a deficit in hermeneutical resources is (i) less likely to confidently understand their own experiences, beliefs, and lifestyle, (ii) more likely to feel alienated or threatened by the diversity of lifestyles and worldviews they encounter in the world, and (iii) more likely to have their beliefs, actions, and expressions misunderstood by others. The rectification of systematic inequalities in hermeneutical resources is an important ethical-political project. But the importance of hermeneutical justice is also indicative of the broader value that there is for all of us, in having a rich and complex stock of hermeneutical resources, for purposes of making sense of ourselves, and others, and the various group identities with which we associate.

One key premise of my account, similar to Dworkin, is that artistic expressions contribute to a society’s hermeneutic resources. By supporting the arts sector, the state makes a distinctive contribution to the overall project of maintaining and distributing these resources. There are of course many ways in which arts might contribute to our capacity to interpret and make sense of the world, and hence, plural ways to spell out the role arts can play in contributing to our shared hermeneutic resources. The specific role that I am focussed on, though, concerns the power of art to help us to make sense of life lived among people who are different to us.

Art can give us powerful reference-points for interpreting the cultural world, that is, the overlapping histories, worldviews, lifestyles, customs, and traditions that we find among different groups of people living in contemporary liberal societies. Two features of the arts make them particularly helpful for interpreting the cultural world. The first is the symbolic character of (much) artistic expression. Raz alludes to the significance of this in his writing on free speech.

Much public expression, in books, newspapers, television, cinema, etc., portrays and expresses aspects of styles or forms of life. Views and opinions, activities, emotions, etc., expressed or portrayed, are an aspect of a wider net of opinions, sensibilities, habits of action or dressing, attitudes, etc., which, taken together, form a distinctive style or form of life. (Raz 1995: 153)

These remarks do not apply solely to art, but many artistic expressions epitomize what Raz is characterizing. The second feature is one that is emphasized in a range of contemporary work on the value of the arts (e.g., Nussbaum 1997; Kieran 2004; Gaut 2007), namely, the power of art to enlist our imaginative and affective faculties, in understanding others. By inviting us to reflect on what it would be like to walk in other people’s shoes, artistic works can help attune us to experiences that may be unfamiliar, through forms of reflection we may not otherwise have engaged in (or not in such an affecting way). By vividly depicting other types of experiences and ways of life, artistic expression helps to make these experiences and ways of life more familiar and legible to us. Countless examples could be given. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man helps readers, especially white readers, get some feeling of what it might have been like to be a black American man during the Jim Crow era (Nussbaum 1997: 85–113; Mills 2007). Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs offer audiences, especially straight audiences, some feeling for the erotic lives of gay men during the AIDS epidemic. These kinds of lives become easier to imagine, through their symbolic depiction, so that they stop seeming (to certain audiences) like such alien deviations from the norm.

Of course not all artworks have the empathic or affective powers we appreciate in Ellison’s or Mapplethorpe’s works. But I take these works to provide helpful indications of the ways that art can expand our sense of the imaginable and familiar. This can take place in less representational ways, too, when exposure to relatively abstract musical or visual culture brings us in contact with aspects of the cultural world in an affecting way. Instrumental music and abstract visual art may not aim to portray/represent experiences and ways of life. But all artistic expression emerges from human beings at a certain time and place. In this sense, nonrepresentational art can still reflect salient features of different social histories, and the regions and traditions its makers and appreciators belong to or connect with. To draw an example: Subgenres of electronic music (e.g., house, dubstep) may reflect cultural developments in the 1980s and 90s, and aspects of the African diaspora: facts which public radio and galleries can help communicate through contextualising works. Nonfigurative visual media can also bear an important relation to the cultures, histories and experiences of citizens (Hebdidge 2002). Textile patterns and graphic design elements can also reflect certain regions and cultural histories, as can relatively abstract painting methods, for example, Indigenous Australian art.

5.2. Arts Funding as a Suitably Neutral Means of Cultural Literacy

But these observations, even if well placed, can only establish that artistic activities are among a family of practices which help cultivate cultural literacy. Perhaps the goods of cultural literacy can be satisfactorily promoted without arts funding. After all, opportunities for travel and interaction with foreign cultures can conduce to cultural literacy. Cultural literacy can also be efficiently promoted via educational policies, like language education, or things like anti-racist pedagogy. In fact, educational policies may be much more effective at transmitting cultural literacy, compared with arts funding, in some respects: most citizens can pass through them, whereas not everybody will visit art galleries, the theatre, and read novels. Furthermore, certain kinds of income redistribution policies may also help to address deficits in cultural literacy, for example, when impoverishment interferes with attaining basic levels of education and cultural awareness.²⁹

I am not in any way resisting these insights. I am just claiming that among these available means, arts funding is an efficient and effective way of promoting an important subset of cultural literacy. This is partly because it is a more cost-effective way, than these alternatives, of marshalling our affective capacities in the service of cultural literacy. Not all of us want to, or can, travel widely. And due to facts of geography, culture and lifestyle, we may lack exposure to citizens and ways of life present in our political community. Inversely, our fellow citizens can lack familiarity with us.

Moreover, the arts are often connected with some of the most affecting features of school curricula. While cultural literacy can be promoted through a national curriculum, some of the most affectively and imaginatively engaging aspects of that curriculum, to this end, seem likely to be found in the arts and humanities, whose contents (in terms of novels, visual artworks, music, dance) are nurtured over time through arts funding. The distinctive aspects of artworks, here, are not simply that they communicate about culture, history and experience. History, philosophy, sociology and legal studies can do that, too, and in a very stimulating way. It’s that the arts appear to engage with our imagination and affect (Kieran 2004; Gaut 2007) more directly and consistently than other areas of education. Indeed, they are characteristically celebrated for this reason.

Why should this matter? Well, people are more likely to attain cultural literacy if they feel some attraction or compulsion towards understanding other cultures. If understanding other cultures is just a kind of civic chore, people will naturally be averse to pursuing it. Arts access can turn the process of understanding other cultures into a moving, recreational—potentially thrilling—adventure.

Given the scope of the current project, I can’t offer a comprehensive, case-by-case comparative analysis of the relative efficacy with which arts funding promotes cultural literacy compared to all the other conceivable policy options—based on education, language acquisition, travel, wealth retribution, etc. All I mean to claim here, is that among the set of available means, arts engagement offers an attractive combination of distinctiveness (in respect of how it engages people’s affective and imaginative capacities) and affordability (in respect of how benefits can be delivered en masse), in promoting cultural literacy. This is the kind of contribution that seems to grant a certain policy, P, membership in a family of relatively distinctive and effective practices, by virtue of belonging to which, P earns a neutral rationale in service of a publicly valuable, non-excludable good.

5.3. Cultural Literacy as a Suitably Neutral Aim/Political Ideal

A natural question to ask about my proposal is: How does the ideal of cultural literacy sit within political liberalism? Is it right to say that cultural literacy, as I’m describing it, avoids commitments to any controversial ethical, aesthetic or epistemic doctrine? To answer this: an ideal of cultural literacy can be understood in a thicker or thinner fashion. A thicker understanding might emphasise cultural literacy’s value outside the domain of citizenship or say that cultural literacy is a value in itself, that isn’t to be explained by recourse to equality or freedom. But given the anti-Perfectionistic aspirations of the account I’m developing, I mean to be invoking a thinner conception, on which cultural literacy’s value is limited to its role in furthering our interests and capacities as citizens. My claims about cultural literacy’s value don’t assume any thesis about “the ultimate nature of human good” (Larmore 1996: 122). Rather, in a way that resembles Nussbaum’s view on the value of civic education, I am suggesting that our interests in cultural literacy derive from our interests in fulfilling our civic responsibilities and living in a society in which other people are aiming to fulfill theirs, too.

Seeing as modern liberal democracies are (often) multicultural, cultural literacy helps us to grasp the nature of the political world, and in doing so, helps us to lead effective and responsive lives as modern citizens. It can support us to gain a deeper understanding of social differences that politics implicates—of gender, sexuality, religion, migration and asylum-seeking, and so on. Understood in this purely political way, cultural literacy is an ideal that also assists us in recognising one another as equals, by helping us to understand each other’s interests and to take them seriously.

Because the value of cultural literacy, as I’m understanding it, derives from these kinds of applications, its application is aimed at advancing our interests as citizens. Cultural literacy’s value, thus construed, can justify arts funding without presupposing a doctrine like Aesthetic Cognitivism, that is, the view that aesthetic value is primarily a matter of imparting understanding, or knowledge. In short, I’m not equating art’s aesthetic value with its power to impart cultural understanding, or denying the value of forms of art that lack a salient relation to cultural literacy as I’m understanding it. All I’m claiming is that art helps to cultivate cultural literacy in certain respects that help citizens to fulfil their civic duties, or simply to understand the nature of the political community they live in.

5.4. A Publicly Valuable, Non-Excludable Good

Obviously someone could question this view about the special utility of the arts in providing these kinds of hermeneutical resources. But for present purposes, the more pressing objection is one that still applies even if one accepts this view, in principle. The worry is: how can public arts funding impart these resources to people who don’t want to engage with the arts? And doesn’t that lack of desire reveal that such people get no real benefit from these resources?

I don’t think that these are the sort of questions that political liberals tend to raise about other public goods policies. But engaging with this sort of suspicion helps to clarify and defend my view. To this end, it is useful to distinguish between two groups who do not engage with the activities that public arts funding typically sponsors. The first group, who I will call Outsiders, are people who don’t engage with the arts, but whose cultures are likely to receive greater public representation due to diversity-oriented arts funding. The second group, who I will call Insiders, are people who don’t engage with the arts, and whose cultures receive no additional representation as a result of diversity-oriented arts funding.

It is relatively easy to tell a story about how Outsiders benefit, at least indirectly, from the cultural literacy that is nurtured through diversity-oriented arts funding. Works that reflect aspects of our experiences provide our peers with hermeneutical resources that help them recognise what is significant about them. When sexual harassment is more widely acknowledged in public discourse, women are likely to receive more support in discussing their experiences of sexual harassment. Audiences are better equipped to take their accounts at face value, even if they have not experienced anything like it. Novels and films can do a great deal to nurture these sensibilities across a society.

This point also applies to experiences more closely linked to cultural heritage and religion. The value of cultural expressions, religious beliefs, and traditions do not derive from their common legibility.³⁰ Still, more accurate, mainstream representation of Outsider cultural practices eases the pressure on people in those cultures to distance themselves from their practices. For example, Muslims living in a Christian society can feel this sort of pressure, as can Christians living in a predominantly Muslim society. But different religious and cultural expressions are less likely to be met with uncomprehending responses when the general public has some familiarity with them. This sort of basic recognition can help Outsiders to feel more assured of their heritage and social standing.³¹

But what about Insiders? The worldviews and lifestyles common to the cultural mainstream are already better expressed and portrayed in public culture, in relative terms, and hence they aren’t prioritized in public programs aimed at cultivating cross-cultural literacy. The social benefits of cultural literacy, brought about via diversity-based arts funding, will therefore not redound to Insiders, in the way they redound to Outsiders. Given that Insiders are also, by definition, not art-lovers/consumers, it is not clear why living in a culturally literate society benefits them or advances some interest that they have.

But I think there is a benefit, in how the hermeneutic resources available in the culturally literate society leave Insiders more likely to find their neighbours’ worldviews and lifestyles intelligible. This in turn makes Insiders less likely to be seriously confused or alienated, due to their inability to make sense of the society they live in and their own position in it. Here is an example to illustrate.

Sally: Sally lives happily immersed in a religious community. Her community provides her with such meaning that she feels little need to challenge or step outside it. Most of Sally’s time is spent interacting with people who share her religious beliefs, and her experiences and goals are largely formed in connection to these beliefs. Among the beliefs nurtured by her community are those related to marriage and sexuality, e.g. that marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman, that heterosexuality is natural, and that homosexuality is a disorder. Her environment nurtures these beliefs in myriad ways. The social media and online media that she consumes don’t portray gay relationships as normal or legitimate. Her community only celebrates heterosexual marriages, and to her knowledge she has never interacted with a gay person.

Consider how Sally is placed to interpret gay culture with such minimal exposure to it, in a region in which arts funding is very limited or doesn’t even exist. Perhaps she wanders into a new store on her strip of shops, only to find gay, queer, trans and nonbinary people in conversation about a new book. This is not Sally’s corner of the world, and she doesn’t need to feel at home. However, the mere existence of the store grates with her belief that homosexuality is rare and aberrant. She feels baffled that people would want to work and meet there and can’t understand the way they dress and express their sexuality.

Arts funding helps alleviate the confusion and alienation Sally is predisposed to feel in this kind of setting. As the aesthetic features of public spaces and infrastructure become more diverse for those who consume arts, they also become more diverse for Sally. I am here referring to shopfront displays, street advertising, and the kinds of things Carroll (1987) refers to as legitimate objects of arts funding, like the designs of stamps, public buildings and monuments. Because our beliefs, biases and cultural shock are shaped by what we are exposed to, these adjustments affect how we interpret and respond to social difference.

Suppose Sally’s local government provides a series of grants in support of gay artists and culture. One scheme supports local shops by underwriting the expenses of marginalised literature. Another scheme commissions artists to develop works exploring the experiences of LGBTQ people, to be exhibited in public buildings. Even though she doesn’t visit galleries or museums, over time, Sally passively encounters queer literature advertised in shopfronts and sees commissioned photographs in buildings. These provide reference-points and points of exposure to experiences and cultures she feels distant from.

On top of this, arts funding, alongside other cultural literacy efforts, nurtures cultural-literacy-enhancing communicative practices in Sally’s community. As her neighbours begin to find gay people more intelligible because of the kinds of films, books, exhibitions, and theatre that public arts funding distributes, this takes expression in the kinds of behaviour and conversation around her. She finds that others are less confused by gay culture and homosexuality than she expected. When she asks others, “What’s with that weird shop down the road?”, she’s less likely to hear perspectives that echo and reinforce her view that being gay is rare and aberrant.³²

There are of course difficulties in determining how much Sally might gain from specific investments in the arts. But the extent that specific investments in national defence infrastructure deter invasion, and when they do so, is also difficult to determine. The way to conceive of the day-to-day contributions that arts funding makes to Insiders, is as part of a coordinated, ongoing investment in the socio-cultural infrastructure that enables universal cultural literacy. How much arts funding accounts for the benefits of a culturally literate society depends on factors like how much of it there is, how long it has been around for and how many people engage with the arts. The point is that Insiders, along with Outsiders and arts-lovers, benefit from living in a society with the characteristics that diversity-based arts funding programs generate and maintain.

5.5. Objections

Perhaps some liberals will dislike the way I’ve framed this conversation. They might think that a proper response to the objection will show that there is a right to arts funding or cultural literacy, rather than a mere interest in it (cf. Raz 1986: 202–3). But it overstates the objection to suggest that arts funding is (unacceptably) non-neutral simply because cross-cultural literacy is something people can live without. The Neutrality Objection need not travel hand in hand with such a thin account of the state, in which inessential government activity is prohibited.

However, it is notable that our interests in cultural literacy could be pitched at a more fundamental level than I’ve implied. We could say, for example, that we cannot fulfill our basic democratic duties, or should not be competitive for positions of public office, if we are profoundly culturally illiterate. An irony of my account, then, is that the more fundamentally these interests are pitched, the less discretionary cultural literacy policies, or efforts which conduce to cultural literacy indirectly, appear to be. However, I take this not to show that cultural literacy policies can’t be justified on a public goods basis, but rather that they may also be able to be justified, within a certain range, by appeal to something like the right to political participation, the right to educational resources, or some understanding of fair equality of opportunity. It is not inconsistent with my argument that there may also be (suitably neutral) justice-based reasons for cultural literacy-based policies, so long as they haven’t been presupposed. All this would suggest is that cultural literacy policies are neutrally justifiable in a variety of ways. And I take it that this is, after all, how we tend to understand the characteristics of many ‘essential’ non-excludable goods, such as those related to national defence: within some limits, their protection is required by justice. Beyond that range, we may still have interests in them, but spending is discretionary and ought to be subject to democratic decisions.

A second objection might be that cultural literacy-style justifications for arts funding fail to accommodate a diversity of aesthetic values. Perhaps we think that some of what is (or ought to be) funded under the banner of arts funding today—for example acquisitions and exhibitions of expensive Renaissance paintings—is not best defended by appeal to cultural literacy, but rather by appeal to some conception of intrinsic value (Barry 2002: 198; Tahzib 2022: 189–94).

In response, the first thing to stress is that there plausibly are values of cultural literacy that Donatello and Michelangelo’s works promote, and it is not clear how highlighting these cultural-literacy related benefits conflicts with ascribing intrinsic value to such works as well. If the public are relatively unfamiliar with the cultural history of the Renaissance, and this is a heritage that some modern citizens connect with, then cultural literacy provides one basis for funding Renaissance acquisitions.

But because I’m interested in the role that cultural literacy can play in our lives as citizens, my justification will not lend itself well to art that doesn’t connect in some distinctive way with aspects of modern life.³³ This means that some works are prima facie less likely to receive government funding on the basis of cultural literacy. While arts lovers may take this as a defective feature of my account, a sincere public goods rationale does not place their interests at its core.

To consider one example of exclusion: Cubist art, though it reflects and expresses certain aspects of early twentieth century Parisian culture, and in that way may help us to interpret related areas of cultural history, would not seem to qualify for support on that basis, just because the link between early twentieth century Parisian culture and democratic life in modern, multicultural democracies is tenuous. Political liberals who only endorse narrow neutrality (e.g., Rawls, Barry), and are thus open to including some Perfectionist reasoning in non-justice-based, democratically-endorsed policies, could accommodate a thicker notion of cultural literacy than the one I’ve articulated, and which mightn’t discredit cubist art in the same way.

While cultural literacy will leave some areas of the arts without good standing for public support, some of this art may already enjoy market viability: there are, for instance, private collections of cubist art in many major Western cities. But there will be art, inevitably, which falls through the cracks of market viability and cultural literacy policies.³⁴ However, the neutral rationale outlined here still appears to accommodate a large portion of current spending on the arts in liberal democracies, and much more than Carroll, Brighouse and Quong have implied was possible.

If the objection is rather that cultural literacy isn’t the most persuasive rationale for all spending on the arts today, this is true. My account entails that if works are already recognisable to a broad public, the case for their public support is lessened. This provides a market-sensitive, democratically informed heuristic for decision-making around the goals that publicly funded arts institutions might embrace. However, I don’t think this rationale is always manifest in funding decisions. I’m not claiming that all current spending on the arts is accommodated by appeal to cultural literacy: I’m saying that it provides a good rationale for diversity-oriented spending. Even for the areas of spending it does have explanatory purchase over, though, notions of artistic merit are also doing work. But notions of merit are at work in the provision of essential non-excludable goods too. When we decide to improve national defence or public health, we deploy various notions of merit to this end (Brighouse 1995: 56). In the case of arts funding, evaluative standards can be deployed in a comparable manner, to help fill gaps in public resources for cultural literacy, on the basis of how we might expect certain artistic projects to help promote cultural literacy in some way or another.³⁵

Nevertheless, we may have to accept that in cases where a neutral aim like cultural literacy cannot do equal work with notions of merit, the Neutrality Objection regains force and a neutral justification for funding recedes, particularly for political liberals committed to broad neutrality like Quong (and seemingly Brighouse 1995). But while the neutral reasons I have articulated cannot apply to all variations and moment-to-moment decisions of public arts funding, they offer a rationale for the (increasingly diversity-oriented) public arts funding policies that have emerged in liberal democracies over the last three decades, and present a method for communicating the value of arts funding to a broad public.