Hume, Jack;
(2025)
Liberalism, Partiality, and Cultural Goods.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Why should liberal states support arts and culture? This thesis develops a new answer to this question. I argue that existing debates about arts funding in the liberal tradition have failed to grasp its contribution to the collective good of cultural literacy. Diversity-based arts funding contributes to a shared package of socio-cognitive goods—a culturally literate society—such that citizens are better placed to understand themselves and each other. It does this by filling gaps in the materials we have for understanding the histories, experiences, and beliefs of ourselves and others. However, concerns of fairness arise with respect to how these benefits are promoted. Adopting a prioritarian view for responding to these concerns, I argue that one of the most praised cultural policies of contemporary liberal societies—the UK’s policy of free admissions to major museums—is a surprisingly bad way of distributing cultural opportunities to disadvantaged groups, because it sustains unfair geographical inequalities. It would be better to charge at major museums and harness that income for ‘levelling up’. I then consider the upshots of this prioritarian approach for a theory of cultural justice. Turning to case studies from Indigenous Australia, I argue that any plausible account of cultural justice will have to accommodate the importance of cultural agency. In an ideal society, I argue, cultural goods would continually help individuals and groups to understand and respect themselves and each other, given their cultural differences. This civic role requires autonomous participation in the production of the cultural goods that represent us. Finally, I argue that cultural literacy and cultural agency together provide a useful framework for considering whether and how to democratise cultural institutions. These contributions reframe existing debates, generate criticisms of many real-world arrangements, and introduce a range of new concepts to liberal theories of justice.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Liberalism, Partiality, and Cultural Goods |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214035 |
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