Engaging the reluctant taxpayer

Abstract

A commitment to political neutrality means that citizens have a legitimate complaint when the coercive power of the state is used to advance some particular conception of how it is good to live. In this paper I investigate how to address this complaint in the case of public funding for the arts. There are two promising ways to justify public arts spending. First, as Thomas Nagel argues, the arts are a source of intrinsic values and so command our respect. I reject this argument because intrinsic values are not automatically political values. Second, Ronald Dworkin argues that access to the arts is required to fully participate in social life. This argument draws a connection between the arts and citizenship and so fares better in establishing a political justification for the arts. However, Dworkin relies on the special value of high art relative to popular art, which undermines the neutrality of his argument. I show that a justification can be given that does not depend on the high value of the arts. I develop an account that shows how the arts can support just relations between citizens. This account is in keeping with a liberal commitment to neutrality.

Keywords:

• Arts-funding
• taxation
• public goods
• citizenship
• neutrality

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christine Korsgaard, T.M. Scanlon, and Arthur Ripstein for comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this volume for helpful comments.

Notes

1. This character is based off one of Feinberg’s examples. See Feinberg (1994).

2. For the purposes of this paper it does not matter whether one adopts a Kantian or Millian view of independence.

3. This is most obvious in the inverse: there are things that are intrinsically bad but this does not mean that it is permissible to ban or discourage them. Nagel himself defends a position similar to this in Nagel (1997).

4. Without knowledge of this convention we would not be able to distinguish these works from something that really is just noise or a pile of rubbish.

5. See Kymlicka (1996, Chapter 9).