and, thus, also afford the various sorts of goods outlined by the sections of this book.
It is these sorts of practices, in the domains of the aesthetic, the ethical, the spiritual, the social, the prudential, and so forth, that sustain value, and it is to these practices that we need to look to glean a better understanding of the concept. As philosopher Joseph Raz puts it, “As art forms, social relations and political structures are created by social practices—or, at any rate, as their existence depends on such practices—so must their distinctive virtues and forms of excellence depend on social practices that create and sustain them” (2008, 33). These standards or criteria for excellence are therefore relative to the norms of particular social practices. And, of course, such standards and criteria are fluid for they are also contingent on our social practices, which themselves are fluid.
Nevertheless, it should be noted here that this take on value as essentially socially sustained raises one more difficult question that we should briefly address. As we pointed out in objecting to desire accounts of value, one challenge for explicating value is to accurately account for the fact that, in the sorts of practices described above, we speak and act as if people can be mistaken or misguided about value. In this sense, value is an essentially normative concept. It is worth saying a bit about what this means and does not mean in the present context.
We may not necessarily agree on what an ideal vacation would be, but we have a shared understanding of the criteria for something to count as a vacation as well as the sorts of qualities that make a vacation good (relaxation, fun, a change of scenery, etc.) and those that make a vacation bad (stress, illness, logistical problems, lousy weather). In our social practice of vacationing, value is relativized to the kinds of things vacations are, but is nevertheless objective because the criteria for kind-membership and being good of a kind are intersubjectively shared. It is in this sense that value is an essentially normative concept in virtue of the way it is socially sustained. The example of vacations is our own, but it falls under a broader category of what Raz calls “genre- or of kind-constituting values;” for Raz, “a genre or a kind of value combines two features: it defines which objects belong to it, and in doing so it determines that the value of the object is to be assessed (inter alia) by its relations to the defining standards of the genre” (2008, 39). The defining standards of a genre or kind, while socially dependent and contingent, have an objective existence; they are intersubjectively available to members of a given society, sustained and taught in the relevant social practice.
This sort of argument naturally leads Raz to discuss various art forms and art genres at some length—but it is interesting to note that similar arguments have been run independently by a number of philosophers of art (including by one of the contributors to the present volume, Glenn Parsons; see Parsons and Carlson 2008). For example, Noël Carroll (2001) and Nicholas Wolterstorff (2015) have, respectively, argued for accounts of art as a network of interrelated cultural practices and social practices. Carroll describes a cultural practice as “a complex body of interrelated human activities governed by reasons internal to those forms of activity and to their coordination” (2001, 66). Moreover, and, of signal importance in the present context, he claims, “Practices are aimed at achieving goods that are appropriate to the forms of activity that comprise them, and these reasons and goods, in part, situate the place of the practice in the life of the culture” (2001, 66). Partly in virtue of this fact, “art is a public practice” in the sense that the norms of the practice and its goods are shared by members of the culture in which it is situated (Carroll 2001, 66). Likewise, Wolterstorff emphasizes the public and social nature of our creative and appreciative art practices; a key point for him and for us is that there is a wide variety of different ways of engaging art (2015, 86).1
The points made by Carroll and Wolterstoff can be put together in a way that bears upon our discussion of the objectivity of value and the plurality of values afforded by social practices. Another way of putting Wolterstorff’s point about the diverse ways of engaging art is to say that art fulfills a variety of functions and offers us a variety of different goods. It is not implausible to think that particular artifact kinds, including art and motion pictures more specifically, might have multiple functions or purposes and afford multiple sorts of value (see, e.g., Stecker 1997). Wolterstorff (2015) persuasively argues that art can have the functions of memorializing, of venerating, of protesting, of pursuing justice. It can also have the purposes of persuading, educating, and strengthening community relationships. The list goes on, and the point applies, mutatis mutandis, to motion pictures.
There is an important connection here between function and value: it is plausible to think of kinds that have primary or “proper” functions as good of their kind insofar as they fulfill that function (see Stecker 1997; Parsons and Carlson 2008). Furthermore, it is also plausible that whether a particular kind has a primary or “proper” function is an objective matter. This is perhaps obviously true of biological kinds—a good liver is one that rids the body of toxins and a bad liver is one that does not fulfill that function—but it is also true of many artifact kinds. Both Raz and Carroll discuss movies at length to make this point. One of Carroll’s examples is slapstick comedy: “given the point or purpose of [slapstick] comedy—its function, if you will—pratfalls contribute to the goodness of a slapstick comedy and the lack of them, all things being equal, would be detrimental” (2009, 164). There is a missing premise here, but it is fairly uncontroversial (and Carroll supplies it later on)—i.e., that the aim or purpose of slapstick comedy is “the provocation of laughter through physical business, often of an apparently accidental sort” (2009, 168). Whether all artifact kinds, let alone art, have such determinate purposes or proper functions is a matter of debate. Yet whether a particular kind has such functions is an objective matter (albeit a socially-established, contingent one), as is whether a candidate kind has the right sorts of features and fulfills the relevant function to be good of its kind. Clearly enough, some genres or kinds of motion pictures do, and this secures the objectivity of their value.
That said, the argument does not establish that something is valuable simpliciter or that a particular kind or genre is itself valuable. Christine Korsgaard raises the possibility of “the bad genre” as an objection to Raz’s argument. According to Korsgaard, “one obvious problem is that there are standards of excellence for very bad things: a good assassin is cool, methodical, careful, and ruthless, but we are not going to say ‘the assassin is good because he is a good assassin’” (2008, 69). Korsgaard is right, of course, that being a good assassin isn’t a good thing and does not make one a good person; but that is not what the argument asserts. And there doesn’t seem to be anything erroneous or counterintuitive about saying that a Nazi propaganda film is good as propaganda (i.e., effective, persuasive, etc.) yet not valuable as a film or in general. In relation to this point, it is worth noting that the sort of value we are discussing here is not intrinsic—either in the sense of having its source solely in the intrinsic properties of a motion picture or other artwork or in the sense of it being good for its own sake or an end in itself; rather, this sort of value is instrumental in a way Paisley Livingston explores in Chapter 1. Following Aristotle, Livingston argues that such instrumental value is only finally valuable if it serves ends that are valuable in their own right. We think this is compatible with the argument sketched above, the force of which is that there is an important sense in which the instrumental value of artifacts is objective despite the fact that the final value of such artifacts depends on the ends served.
What sorts of intrinsic value might secure the final value of such artifacts? The sections of A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value constitute a plausible (if not universally accepted) list. The book is divided into sections that individually focus on values that are plausibly intrinsic (or final) in the sense of being good for their own sake—aesthetic, ethical, spiritual, cognitive, prudential, environmental, and so forth—and that motion pictures can afford. These values are public in a number of senses, including that of being essentially socially embedded in practices that are shared amongst a public.
In conclusion, it is necessary to speak to an important
