aggregate them? If a particular motion picture, say, The Birth of a Nation (1915) possesses substantive artistic value yet abounds in ethical disvalue (not just the absence of value but negative value in the sense of being ethically flawed), how should we aggregate those values and offer an overall evaluation of the film? We suspect that the intractability of the problem of teaching The Birth of a Nation and films like it is that motion pictures can indeed possess a plurality of values that are neither reducible to a single value, nor comparable in a way that would allow us to aggregate them in a way that facilitates an overall evaluation. As Paisley Livingston puts it in Chapter 1, “In many cases, it may be very hard, or even impossible, to find a single overarching value or norm in relation to which a work’s plurality of valences could be compared and summed up” (32-33). Indeed, as Richard Allen’s discussion in Chapter 12 suggests, it may be central to a film’s aims or purposes to hold two competing values (e.g. religious value and entertainment value) in tension, and it is even plausible that the aesthetic value that inheres in some motion pictures derives from this sort of complex interaction of irreducible values.
Where does that leave us and our prospects for thinking about value in an overarching or global sense? In practical terms, one promising idea is to simply restrict the scope of our judgments or evaluations. Instead of global judgments, we might make do with pro tanto judgments—as Mette Hjort does (following Gaut 2007) in Chapter 7. On this view, a motion picture’s innovative use of editing might yield a pro tanto artistic merit—a merit insofar as it contributes to its art-historical value; yet the same bit of editing might yield a pro tanto ethical flaw—a flaw insofar as it, say, aligns viewers with the Ku Klux Klan, encouraging us to root for them. It might seem unsatisfactory to leave things at that, resisting the urge to say something more definitive about the film’s overall value. But we should take comfort in the fact that a number of philosophers have advanced compelling accounts of why we should not expect such neatness when it comes to our general norms and values (e.g., Nagel 1979; Stocker 1990). This idea might raise the specter of ethical or value relativism, but since we cannot address that question here, we will simply conclude by noting that the very idea of a common good—roughly what we today refer to as a public good—and the empirical fact that it is a common pursuit across historical epochs, societies, and cultures give us reason to suspect and hope that people often converge as well as diverge on the norms and values taken to be central to the good life.2
Public Value
The term “public value” acquired salience with the publication of Harvard professor Mark H. Moore’s now classic Creating Public Value (1995), which addressed itself to public managers in the field of public administration. Creating Public Value sought to offer guidance to those charged with spending public funds, for example in the sphere of education, housing, or public health. Based on insights regarding the successful management of commercial enterprises, Creating Public Value explored the extent to which principles from the commercial sector could be transferred to the public sector. In 2013 Moore pursued his arguments further, publishing Recognizing Public Value, an extended reflection on issues of evidence and accountability, on how public managers are able to demonstrate that their policies and actions actually have the effect of realizing public value. Revisiting the aims of the earlier book in the introduction to the companion volume from 2013, Moore highlights his contention that in devising “value-creating” strategies for public organizations, public managers must make reference to the external environment of their operations.” “Public managers,” he claims, had to learn “to look upward toward the political authorizing environment that both provided resources and judged the value of what they were producing and outward toward the task environment where their efforts to produce public value would find success or failure” (Moore 2013, 7).
An example of the influence of Moore’s concept of public value can be found in the BBC’s adoption of relevant principles in its 2004 “Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a digital world,” a document developed in connection with the organization’s bid for a renewal of its 10-year charter. Richard Collins finds evidence of the “mediation” of Moore’s ideas “to the UK” in the BBC’s adoption of public value as “a regulatory as well as a management doctrine” (Collins 2007, 164). Collins further contends that the concept of public value offered the BBC a means of responding to “critiques of the BBC’s divergence from public service principles in its broadcasting practice” (164). Matteo Maggiore describes the BBC’s mobilization of “the notion of public value to guide” public service broadcasting and “to assess its performance” as a clear and decisive “break with the traditional arguments developed by public service broadcasters in Europe.” A distinctive feature of the BBC’s “Building Public Value” document was its proposal, “for the first time” to make its “plans for new services directly accountable to the public, including the wider media industry” (Maggiore 2011, 229). To this end, the BBC proposed to introduce a “public values test,” assessments of market impact, and a “performance measurement framework” that would be designed to measure the “reach, quality, impact and value for money” of the broadcaster’s programmes (BBC 2004, 15).
Seeking to establish a boundary between the roles and obligations of commercial companies and public service organizations, the BBC’s “Building Public Value” asserts that whereas the former exist to “return value to their shareholders or owners” the latter exist to “create public value” (7). Broadcasting is referred to as a “civic art” that is “never a purely private transaction” (BBC 2004, 6). Described as infinitely shareable by an ever expanding public and as thereby qualifying for the status of a “public good” (7), public broadcasting is seen as offering a “shared experience [that] may itself represent a significant public value” (6). According to “Building Public Value,” the aim is to serve “audiences not just as consumers, but as members of a wider society, with programs and services which, while seeking to inform, educate and entertain audiences, also serve wider public purposes” (7–8). “Public value,” we are told, “is a measure of the BBC’s contribution to the quality of life in the UK” (8). The document goes on to identify five types of public value that the BBC is committed to creating: democratic value (which underpins civic life), cultural and creative value (through opportunities for creativity, the celebration of cultural heritage, and capacious national conversations), educational value (that contributes to a knowledge- and skills-based society), social and community value (that fosters social cohesion and tolerance by capturing commonalities and differences), and global value (“by being the world’s most trusted provider of international news and information, and by showcasing the best of British culture to a global audience”) (BBC 2004, 8).
While Moore’s interventions have inspired an especially influential discourse of public value, there are dissenting voices challenging aspects of the relevant theory and practice. A key figure in this regard is Barry Bozeman, who claims that the standard interpretation of “public value” represents a privatization of earlier notions of public interest and the common good. The problem, as he sees it, is that “market-based philosophies of human behaviour and public policy” (Bozeman 2007, 3) are made a basis for public agencies to adopt practices from the business sector and for private corporations to assume (previously or ideally) “public responsibilities” (Bozeman 2007, 6).
In his alternative approach to public value, articulated, for example, in Public Values and Public Interest (2007), Bozeman revives the notion of public interest, an ideal that he sees as being pursued through the more “tangible concept” (2007, 132) of public value and, more specifically, through the “specific, identifiable content” (2007, 12) of the public values that animate a given nation and its citizens. A key feature of Bozeman’s account of public values, which draws on the communitarian thinking of philosophers such as Michael Sandel, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor, and the pragmatism of John Dewey, is its emphasis on normative publicness (Bozeman 2007, 10):
