Yesterday Rebecca Lowe mentioned in a note how much she enjoys reading the philosopher G.A. Cohen. I do too, and it reminded me of his part in an interesting, and I don’t think ever resolved, debate in arts policy. I’ll get to Cohen later, but first some background.
Most people (I know not all people) care about equality between individuals. But equality of what? When we compare the situations of different people, which differences between them matter to us as an issue of moral concern, as something society ought to try to do something about?
There are some obvious things: equal rights to political participation and to hold various offices; equal rights before the law. But what else?
Equality of well-being and happiness is going to be difficult to pull off, because these things are not measurable, and present something of a problem if you have some people who are very wealthy but unwaveringly miserable, and others who are poor in income and wealth but maintain a sunny disposition. Are we to actually try to help the despondent millionaire?
Equality of resources is a more practical option: ensure people do not fall below a basic income threshold, make sure all children have access to good schools and health care and activities that will help them flourish in adulthood. But questions would remain. In such a world, some people are going to get very rich, through some combination of natural assets, drive, and good luck, while others will fail to succeed, through not being terribly gifted, not very driven, prone to making bad choices, and bad luck. It seems wrong to let inequality in living standards prevail on the basis of luck. Should we help people who have had bad luck, but not so much people who have made some dumb choices?
Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum advanced the idea of striving for greater equality in capabilities: what kinds of lives are people able to live (respecting their right to choose what things they think matter). This is appealing – it doesn’t strive for equal happiness, and in terms of resources it allows scope for different people perhaps needing different things.
Now to a more specific question. We know people differ in what sorts of things they most value in terms of leading a fulfilling life. What if for some people, a highly valued thing is rather expensive. They don’t value it because it is expensive – I don’t have much moral concern for someone who desires to have expensive things simply because they are expensive. They value it for its own sake but, unfortunately, it is costly. Let’s take as our example live performances by professional artists of theatre, opera, and orchestral music. Many people don’t care – they are happy with recorded music and television, which, in this age, are abundant and cheaply obtained. Should the situation of those with expensive tastes be a moral concern?
One approach to this is to say that, in a free and liberal society, we are personably responsible for what we value, and if it happens to be expensive, well that’s not a problem for society to solve. Here is John Rawls (in Political Liberalism):
That we can take responsibility for our ends is part of what free citizens may expect of one another. Taking responsibility for our tastes and preferences, whether or not they have arisen from actual choices, is a special case of that responsibility. As citizens with realized moral powers, this is something we must learn to deal with.
So Rawls is saying our tastes, simple or expensive, are for us to handle on our own, regardless of how those tastes were formed. It’s on us.
G.A. Cohen got into a debate with Ronald Dworkin (a scholar strongly influenced by Rawls), on the question of whether we have a moral obligation to give some sort of subsidy to people with expensive tastes. You can read this back-and-forth in Cohen’s On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Dworkin’s Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cohen thinks expensive tastes deserve our moral sympathy, if the subject did not go out of his way to deliberately cultivate the expensive taste.
Here is Cohen:
Paul loves photography, while Fred loves fishing. Prices are such that Fred pursues his pastime with ease while Paul cannot afford to [note this essay was first published in 1989 – there have been changes in relative prices! MR]. 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.
How our tastes are shaped is tremendously complex. I put this anecdote in my book:
My father enjoyed opera and would play records at home when I was a boy, and I came to recognize some of the more famous arias and overtures. He took me to my first live opera when I was sixteen years old. When I first left home to set out on my own I didn’t listen to much opera. But in my thirties I regained an interest, and started buying records (and “borrowing” records from home) and occasionally attending performances. I tried out new works, and became a committed fan, even for the Wagner of which my father was decidedly not a fan – the last performance of any type I saw before the COVID pandemic shut the arts world down was Parsifal. Live opera is an expensive taste. Did I choose it? I could not really say, I don’t have enough faith in my own memories or self-understanding. If I cannot answer this question about myself, I could hardly do so for others.
I believe it is a dead end trying to ask about responsibility for tastes, but there they are. And note that typically people do not regret their tastes – “how I wish I didn’t love going to the concert hall to hear the orchestra” is not something I would expect to hear from anybody.
I had a working paper circulating where I tried to claim that we could think of a lot of subsidies for the arts as, in a practical sense, even if not formally stated, the accommodation of expensive tastes: we subsidize arts that are in their nature expensive, so that we can make it easier for people who really enjoy those genres to get a chance to do so, and those arts that are already cheaply available can be left to the market. The subsidized arts are usually nonprofit, so people can personally help enable others to enjoy it. I’m not saying this is necessarily a good reason to subsidize the arts, though one could argue, like Cohen, that it is not a bad reason (this paper set a personal record for me in terms of journals that expressed no interest, so maybe take this argument with a grain of salt).
In the larger world of inequality, whether the local philharmonic gets a subsidy is on the order of loose change. But I think the expensive tastes debate does matter for how we think about people and their choices and their welfare, even if the monetary stakes are small.
Finally, I wrote this in my book, of course not realizing at the time that soon after all hell would break loose:
The literature on expensive tastes relies on some stock examples – opera, plover’s eggs and pre-phylloxera claret – and this serves to give a sense of rather spoiled individuals demanding compensation that would enable them to continue living in the style to which they have become accustomed. But this is a misleading picture. In the state of Minnesota, there is a Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul, and in its twin city of Minneapolis, a Somali Museum, Hmong and Somali people being small immigrant communities in the United States, but relatively concentrated there. For these immigrant communities, a cultural center, in a place geographically and culturally very distant from their homelands of Laos and Somalia, means a great deal to those two groups of people. Because they are small in number, and, generally, of low income, maintaining such cultural gathering places could be fairly considered an “expensive taste” – after all, there is all manner of American popular culture that is cheaply obtained for anyone who wants it. What does it mean to say a migrant from Somalia is “responsible” for her tastes? Again, the idea is not to confer some sort of extra privilege on these immigrant communities, but rather to help their members have a chance for a level of well-being equal to the well-being of those who can satisfy their own cultural needs at relatively low expense.
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