Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 00, No.

0, 2019

Educational Justice and the Value

of Knowledge

CHRISTOPHER MARTIN

How should a liberal democratic society value knowledge and

understanding, and does this valuation inform how we ought
to reason about the justice of our educational institutions? In
scholarly and public discourse, it is orthodox to argue that
because educational institutions bring about various
goods—goods of character such as wellbeing or economic
goods such as social mobility – they ought to be structured by
principles of political justice. In this paper, I argue that
knowledge and understanding valued for its own sake should
also inform judgements of educational justice.

INTRODUCTION
Justice and Knowledge
How should a liberal democratic society value knowledge and understand-
ing, and does this valuation inform how we ought to reason about the
justice of our educational institutions? There is a sense in which the claim
that knowledge has something to do with political justice in education is
obvious. Educational institutions are responsible for the management of
knowledge and understanding in advancing particular educational aims.
How a liberal society ought to structure opportunities for their citizens to
access these aims is a question of justice, involving familiar debates about
the fair distribution of resources, equality of opportunity, and so on. These
debates are predicated on the political values that define liberal states. On
a liberal political1 account, for example, schooling is a social right because
it contributes to personal autonomy or liberty, and liberty is a core liberal
value. Accordingly, knowledge is valuable in schools for the reason that
it promotes, or is a means to, autonomy. Yet, should our beliefs about the
value of knowledge and understanding, and their relationship to judgements
of justice, be exclusively grounded in political arguments of this kind? For
example, is knowledge important enough that opportunities for equal access
matter for justice even if such access did little or nothing to advance some
other political value?
There are two reasons why I believe that this question is worth pursuing.
First, a number of influential arguments for the value of knowledge have


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Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
2 C. Martin

been associated with the liberal tradition—liberal, not in the political sense
so much as in the idea that education requires an initiation into different
forms of knowledge and understanding (Hirst, 1965; Oakeshott, 1971; Pe-
ters, 1966). Part of the argument for a liberal education is that these forms
of knowledge and understanding are valuable for their own sake. That is
to say, their value is not contingent on their usefulness in bringing about
particular social or economic goods. However, the liberal educationalist’s
conception of knowledge’s value was often criticised on the grounds that
it was too apolitical to be applied to actual educational institutions or, if it
was political, it was politically elitist or inegalitarian (for examples of these
criticisms, see Adelstein, 1972; Harris, 1980; Sarup, 2013).
In this paper, I am not concerned with defending the liberal education
tradition against these criticisms. But I am interested in a key claim of this
tradition—that knowledge has educational value for reasons independent of
specific political purposes or goals. To be sure, for liberal educationalists
this key claim already has political implications built into it. Educational
institutions should focus on ‘education’ as opposed to ‘external’ political
or economic goals.2 The problem is that liberal states have political re-
sponsibilities to their citizens, both with respect to the fair distribution of
socioeconomic benefits and burdens that coincide with the provision of ed-
ucation, as well as with cultivating the (internal) conditions necessary for
life as a free and equal citizen. To claim that it is prima facie wrong for the
state to interfere in the provision of education seems more to rule against
the plausibility of a liberal education than against state interference.
But I do not think that this means that that the claim taken on its own—that
knowledge as an end in itself is educationally valuable—is irrelevant to what
justice in a liberal society should look like. It would be rash to assume that
the intrinsic value of knowledge has no relevance for educational justice.
We need a more detailed assessment, one that makes the best possible case
for the conditions, if any, under which knowledge as a final end should
inform the behaviour of just educational institutions.
Second, in scholarly and public discourse it is orthodox to argue that
educational institutions have an obligation to produce various goods—goods
of character such as wellbeing, or civic virtues such as reasonableness,
or economic goods such as social mobility. This view is nested within
a more basic assumption: that the political functions of education should
lead the debate on what is educationally worthwhile. Yet, the idea that
knowledge and understanding is valuable for its own sake continues to play
an influential role in how educational institutions conduct their affairs, and
this can lead to tensions at the policy level. A familiar example is the debate
over the political autonomy of universities. From the point of view of the
state, the university has an obligation to promote goods such as equality of
opportunity or employability in return for the substantial public funding it
receives. Yet, on some accounts, freedom from the obligation to promote
such goods is necessary in order for the university to effectively carry out a
more fundamental mission, which just is the promotion of knowledge and
understanding.


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This example speaks to a broader tension that serves as a practical back-

drop motivating my analysis. On one view, the normative role of an in-
stitution just is to promote political goods in general, and political justice
more specifically. On another view, the normative role of an institution
is to generate goods intrinsic to its distinctive function (Miller, 2010). On
the first view, intrinsic goods are a problem for political justice when the
production of such goods does not serve, or sets back, the ends of justice. If
universities select in the interests of maximising talent instead of levelling
the socioeconomic playing field, for example, they are acting unjustly (see
Kotzee and Martin, 2013; White, 2016). On the second view, political jus-
tice is a problem for intrinsic goods when the demands of justice constrain
or distort their production. I aim to show why these two views can and
should strive for compatibility.
In this paper, I argue that the intrinsic value of knowledge and understand-
ing should inform judgements of educational justice. By ‘intrinsic value’ I
mean that it is valuable for its own sake, as opposed to its value depending on
its usefulness in bringing about other goods. In the first section I describe
how knowledge and understanding is valued on political grounds. In the
second section, I argue that these political grounds are unable to account for
the intuitive sense that knowledge is valuable for non-contingent reasons. In
the third section I show how this intuition is robust enough to impact on how
we should reason about the justice of educational institutions. In the fourth
section, I account for how claims about educational justice grounded in the
intuitions about the intrinsic value of knowledge can be justified. In the
fifth section, I offer examples of how including intuitions about the intrinsic
value of knowledge can play a motivational role in moving educational
institutions closer to justice.

THE POLITICAL ARGUMENT FOR KNOWLEDGE AND

UNDERSTANDING
Institutions, Justice and Roles
How should a liberal society value knowledge and understanding? One
way is to link its value to the normative roles or functions of our ed-
ucational institutions.3 Different institutions play distinctive roles within
liberal society. Further, these distinctive roles inform how we apply princi-
ples of justice. For example, basic education has the specific responsibility
of providing children with the opportunity to develop capacities deemed
necessary for leading a good life including, but not limited to, the capacity
to seek out rewarding occupations. However, this responsibility is further
shaped by considerations of justice. On some liberal political accounts, for
example, it would be unjust to hold children fully responsible for taking
advantage of educational opportunities. Children’s economic circumstances
and family background, which play a strong role in determining how well
positioned one is to take advantage of educational opportunity, is unchosen.
Accordingly, liberal societies have reasons of justice to mitigate the in-
equalities arising from unequal childhoods. Educational institutions should
carry out their distinctive role in a manner that compliments liberal justice

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i.e. their role is to not only provide opportunities, but to structure those
opportunities fairly. They should not only aim for educational opportunity,
rather, they should aim for equality of educational opportunity.
We can call this approach the political argument for knowledge and under-
standing. For example, if you know and understand society, you can make
better-informed judgements about your place within that society than if you
don’t. This has particular importance for a liberal political framework. Be-
ing better informed about society isn’t valuable qua being better informed,
rather, it enhances a person’s overall capacity to make self-determined, or
personally autonomous, decisions. Therefore, one reason why knowledge
is educationally valuable (from the political argument) is that it helps insti-
tutions to promote the political good of autonomy. Further, the state has an
obligation to provide for all citizens, regardless of wealth or background,
the minimal conditions necessary for an autonomous life. This obligation
informs how we ought to structure, in the interests of justice, the distribution
of opportunities to access knowledge.

The Political Argument and the Value of Knowledge

There are three features of the political argument for knowledge and un-
derstanding worth emphasising. First, the political argument proceeds from
a particular view about the source of knowledge’s value. For example,
knowledge and understanding is valuable for political reasons, and the po-
litical framework warrants what counts as a good political reason. Recall
the example above. The claim is not that knowing more about society just
is valuable on its own terms—that there is a pre-political intuition that it
is better to know than not to know—rather, knowing more about society is
valuable for the reason that it supports autonomy. But we wouldn’t assume
that non-liberal societies would make this a basis for judgements of political
justice.
Second, just as good reasons for valuing knowledge and understanding
are bounded by the political framework, it also determines the scope of what
counts as worthwhile knowledge and understanding. That is to say, different
interpretations of the liberal social vision suggest different judgements about
curriculum content. Consider debates over the scope of a common public
school curriculum. It is impermissible, on most liberal accounts, for the
state to justify its authority in terms of a particular conception of the good.
Therefore, the state should refrain from promoting a common curriculum
on the grounds that it supports some particular conception(s) and not others.
Accordingly, it may follow that a common curriculum led by activities that
promote an intellectualist’s perspective on the good life—a so-called ‘life
of the mind’—fall outside the scope of what is educationally justifiable.
But not necessarily. Some counter that the cultivation of autonomy requires
exposure to theoretical forms of knowledge and understanding that support,
among other capacities, the reflective assessment of one’s options in life.
This may include curricular activities that cultivate reflectiveness. If so,
we have good reasons for valuing such knowledge and understanding on

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liberal political grounds, as well as for promoting it through a common

public-school curriculum.4
Third, because reasons for valuing knowledge and understanding are
sourced from, and its scope determined by, a prior set of political values,
we can also make a claim about the status of knowledge’s value within the
political argument. Specifically, the value of knowledge is contingent. By
‘contingent’ I mean that it is the fact that features or conditions related to
knowledge, broadly speaking, happen to have consequences for a liberal
society that makes it desirable (or undesirable). That is to say, the value of
knowledge makes no (necessary) appeal to general conditions under which
an agent could be said to ‘know’ something. For example, perhaps it is
the effort I have to put into learning a body of knowledge and the habits
I develop through such effort that contributes to my autonomy, not the
content of what I learn.

THE POLITICAL ARGUMENT’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL SHORTFALL

The political argument assigns knowledge and understanding a particular
source, scope and status. When we tie these three features together it re-
veals a particular conception of the value of knowledge and understanding,
one that follows from the norms and values that define a liberal political
framework. But before I go on to say why this conception is insufficient
for theorising the justice of educational institutions, I want to address some
potential objections to my description of this conception.
First, I have claimed that the reasons an educational institution has for
valuing knowledge are determined by the political framework. Knowing
the minutiae of model train-building is valuable to some, but we would
not structure our educational institutions around it. Yet, liberal citizens
are free to value knowledge and understanding for diverse, often apolit-
ical, reasons. They may value knowledge intrinsically or instrumentally.
They may use it to serve self-interested, or pro-social, goals. These reasons
may have nothing directly to do with, say, advancing liberal values of
equality or liberty. Therefore, the claim that liberal society and its institu-
tions only value knowledge and understanding for fundamentally political
reasons is simply wrong.
However, this objection conflates the particular reasons that liberal citi-
zens have for valuing knowledge as part of their free pursuit of a good life
and the political reasons a liberal society has for supporting the right of any
citizen to pursue knowledge and understanding for their own reasons. That
is to say, one liberal political reason why knowledge is valuable is because
it enables citizens to freely pursue different short- and long-term goals, and
this involves being free to value knowledge for a variety of subjective, and
not necessarily political, reasons.
Second, I have claimed that the political argument values knowledge for
the political goods it can bring about. But we can and do include epistemic
goods among those that constitute a liberal society, and we do so be-
cause we think that epistemic achievements are independently worthwhile.
For example, epistemic practices that liberal societies value, such as free

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expression and rational inquiry, are valuable in part because they orient
inquirers toward truth as a final end, not only for the goods they also serve
(such as better government, improved public policy or innovation). If liberal
society values truth as a final end, and knowledge and understanding get us
to the truth, we have an epistemic justification for the value of knowledge
within the liberal political framework. My claim that liberal arguments for
the value of knowledge and understanding are fundamentally political is,
again, mistaken.
However, this objection elides a problem familiar to epistemologists. If
knowledge and understanding is valuable just because it is a reliable means
of getting us to truth, it follows that knowledge and understanding isn’t
distinctively valuable at all. This is because it is the method that gets us to
truth that really matters, not knowledge itself. Ward Jones refers to this as
‘epistemic instrumentalism’ (1997). Imagine, for example, two approaches
to institutionalising the dissemination of knowledge. Both approaches value
the truth as a final end. The first approach works by disseminating true
beliefs without requiring citizens to grasp the reasons underlying those
beliefs. Imagine an administrative body, populated by a diverse group of
highly qualified experts, that seeks out important truths and shares them
as far and as widely as possible. Further, this administrative body finds
and disseminates these true beliefs more reliably than the second approach,
which requires citizens to engage in the hard work of coming to know
and understand true beliefs as a condition of its dissemination. On the
epistemic instrumentalist view the latter approach is superior.5 When truth is
paramount, knowledge and understanding is part of the range of contingent
conditions that can help to get to truth. But it has no special or independent
value. So, while it is true that a political framework may hold truth as a final
epistemic value, it does not necessarily follow that the framework should
see knowledge and understanding as anything more than a means to that
final value.
There is a more serious objection to be considered. I have claimed that the
political argument values conditions, practices and effects associated with
knowledge and understanding that impact on desirable political values—
knowledge understood broadly and contingently - but not knowledge sim-
pliciter. But one might argue that my claim assumes that there is only
one true account of the value of knowledge. My reference to epistemic
instrumentalism, which poses a problem for epistemology just because it
frustrates our attempts to identify the value of knowledge, is evidence of
this assumption. Yet, educational institutions can and should aim for a va-
riety of epistemic goods. A child’s epistemic needs are different than a
biochemist’s. The value of knowledge is plural and therefore some condi-
tions, such as justified true belief, are valuable in certain contexts, while
truth sufficient in others.6 The political argument simply recognises this
pluralism.
However, this objection turns on a misunderstanding of the sense in which
I think that the political argument’s conception of knowledge is contingent.
The value of knowledge is contingent for the reason that claims about its
value depend on certain political values being held in place. This is the

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case whether the theory of knowledge in play is plural or monistic about

value. In order to see how, it is worth attending closely to what I take to
be a serious epistemological shortcoming of the political argument: that it
cannot account for the intuitive sense that knowledge is valuable for its own
sake.
First, one way to understand the political argument is that the value of
knowledge turns on its efficacy in bringing about other goods. But what is
ultimately valuable here are these other goods, not knowledge. For example,
imagine that we had a consensus view that knowledge is valuable because
to ‘know’ means having reliable or stable beliefs. From a political point
of view, reliable beliefs are not a sufficient reason for valuing knowledge.
We have to link this account to some other political good, something like,
‘stable beliefs are valuable because they do a better job of helping citizens
achieve their autonomously determined goals, than unreliable ones’. Yet,
if we could support autonomy without knowledge of this kind there would,
at least on the autonomy account, be no compelling reason for the state
to support the acquisition of reliable beliefs. Imagine, for example, if it
turned out that, empirically speaking, what really matters for autonomy-
formation are non-cognitive character traits as opposed to stable beliefs.
It would mean that one justification for knowledge’s educational value in
a liberal society would fall apart. Yet, there remains an intuitive sense
that the knowledge is educationally valuable even if it were not the case
that knowledge supported autonomy (or any other salient political value).
Yet, without some corresponding political value that accounts for such an
intuition the political argument cannot capture this intuition. This seems to
be the case if one is a pluralist or a monist about the value of knowledge,
for even if we have a number of equal but independent arguments for why
knowledge is valuable, their cogency, from the political argument, would
each depend on an additional claim about the political goods that such a
value (or values) help to bring about. In sum, the political argument has
a problem akin to epistemic instrumentalism: we have an intuitive sense
that knowledge is educationally valuable in its own right, but what political
significance should we ascribe to this intuitive sense when all our political
arguments for the educational value of knowledge are instrumental?
Second, another way to understand the political argument is that the value
of knowledge turns on it being a constitutive feature of other goods. The
problem here is that many of the goods seen to be central to the political
role of educational institutions are not like this, for we can think of cases
in which it is possible for a person to attend an educational institution,
realise such a good, and not have knowledge. For example, one plausible
educational aim in a liberal society is wellbeing (Raz, 1986; White, 1991).
On this view, one reason for why knowledge is educationally valuable could
be because it makes people less prone to error in judgement and so more
likely to make choices that facilitate their wellbeing. But from a political
point of view knowing may be neither necessary nor sufficient for wellbeing,
for it may not be knowledge and understanding doing this work so much
as an inclination to apply effort, the signal its sends to employers about
one’s willingness to conform (Caplan, 2018, see Martin, forthcoming), or

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the acquisition of valuable social connections. Individuals who succeed on

these latter terms may be less prone to error in making judgements about
their wellbeing, not because of what they know, but because they have
worked their way into privileged, and by extension epistemically forgiving,
socioeconomic environments filled with opportunity and where it is hard to
make an obviously bad choice about what is good or prudent to do.
Yet, even if the positive effects of educational institutions on people’s
ability to make judgements about the good were only contingent, it nonethe-
less seems better that people experience success in making judgements about
the good life for reasons that are (partly) attributable to what they know as
opposed to being merely lucky.7 However, it is not immediately clear what
liberal political grounds one could proffer in order to account for this intrin-
sic value because what matters in this case, fundamentally, is that education
leads to greater wellbeing. To put the problem differently: if it turned about
that the benefits experienced by those attending educational institutions had
nothing to do with knowledge per se, it would mean that there would no
longer be a justification for the educational value of knowledge. That is to
say, knowledge would still seem to be an intuitively valuable feature of
education, yet the political argument cannot account for this sense.

THE INTUITIVE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE AND

EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE
I have argued that political argument does not capture the intuitive sense
that the value of knowledge is not always contingent on, and not always
an instrument to, another political good. But I’m not assuming that the
fact of such an intuition entails anything about justice. My point is that we
should account for this intuition, explaining why it is politically relevant (or
irrelevant) for questions of educational justice. But how, exactly, can one
do this? The problem seems to be, in part, that it’s hard to think of a widely
held political value—one that overlaps with different conceptions of the
good life in liberal society—that would strongly endorse the promotion of
knowledge for its own sake, especially in contrast to more pressing political
concerns such as income inequality and low civic engagement. We tend to
associate valuing knowledge for its own sake with a particular view of the
good life—the life of a scholar, for example—as opposed to something that
is in the equal interest of all citizens. Some of the more recent criticisms of
liberal education, for example, take this line (see Strike, 2004).
However, I believe that an argument that starts from intuition holds
potential.8 The approach that I take is similar to a reflective equilibrium
argument: I start with the idea that we have a pre-political, intuitive sense
that knowledge is valuable for reasons that are not necessarily dependent
on some other political good. Then I see if we can capture this intuition in
politically meaningful terms. By this I mean that I try to identify when these
intuitions might be operative in our political reasoning, and then assess how
sensitive they are to issues of educational justice.
To be clear, an argument that takes us from intuitions about the inde-
pendent value of knowledge to political justice is (initially) going to be

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shaky in contrast to claims of justice in which the goods in question, such

as academic achievement, qualifications, or competences, have been well-
articulated. But my wager is that such intuitions are not inherently shaky,
rather, they only appear this way. Therefore, in what follows I use ex-
amples in order to identify when these intuitions are operative and weigh
how strong they are when pitted against political goods such as relational
equality, equality of opportunity and personal autonomy.

Example One: Knowledge and Relational Equality

Equality of citizenship suffers when educational institutions allow for un-
equal opportunities to access knowledge to arise between wealthy elites and
the less well-off (Galston, 2001). The corollary is that we can support equal-
ity of citizenship by managing opportunities to access knowledge in a more
egalitarian way. Most would assume that egalitarian support means that the
least well-off should have better opportunities to access knowledge. We
improve conditions at the bottom of the distribution. However, one could
curtail elite opportunities at the top of the distribution, instead, and get the
same outcome because equality of citizenship is about the relationship be-
tween different groups or individuals. If equality of citizenship is achieved
through either approach and equality is the only reason why knowledge is
valuable in this scenario, we shouldn’t really care that much one way or the
other. But we do. In fact, I believe that it is typical to assume the former
approach, as opposed to the latter, because it is intuitively better that we
increase, rather than restrict, knowledge in order to achieve equality. That is
to say, it is undesirable to achieve justice by decreasing knowledge instead
of increasing it.9 And it is undesirable because knowledge is valuable for
its own sake, and not necessarily because of its role in bringing about other
goods.

Example Two: Knowledge and Levelling Down

A potential objection to the analysis proffered in Example One is that,
while I have identified an intuition operative in political reasoning, this
intuition is motivated by considerations of adequacy, not the intrinsic value
of knowledge. For example, one could argue that in order to be a citizen
one needs adequate, not equal, knowledge. If so, the reason why we prefer
to increase knowledge at the bottom rather than restricting it at the top is
because in an unjust society many people have inadequate knowledge. All
that pulling down does is create a society in which knowledge is equally
distributed but inadequate. So, perhaps we can explain the intuition on the
grounds that the political good of having adequate civic agency, not equal
agency, is valuable. If so, what I have identified in Example One is a conflict
between general intuitions about adequacy and equality, not the value of
knowledge.
Yet, the knowledge intuition holds in this adequacy case, as well. Imagine
that one could identify everyone in the population who is above adequacy
and shift educational resources away from these citizens to those below
adequacy in order to improve the latter’s access to knowledge. Imagine

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further that it turns out that most everyone above adequacy is wealthy.
We could institute a policy based on these findings and ban high-income
families from allowing their children to go to university on the grounds that
their children have acquired enough social capital and political connections
for adequate civic flourishing: these children will do just fine in terms
of civic engagement, perhaps even better than their less well-off peers,
without a higher education. But this policy seems wrong. It seems unfair to
deny citizens access to knowledge on grounds of how much or how little
they have in other spheres of life, such as wealth and health.10 If it turned
out that materially less well-off citizens happened to have better access
to opportunities to acquire knowledge and understanding than materially
better off citizens it is plausible to think that this is an unjust arrangement
for those citizens that happen to be materially well off, even if they enjoy lots
of other goods due to unjust arrangements in other spheres of life. Teachers
intuitively understand, I think, that it would be wrong to allocate less time to
a student simply because he or she is from a well-off family, just as it would
be wrong to deny allocating time to a student simply because he or she is
poor. My point is not that we should allocate educational resources without
concern for other goods, rather, the example shows that the fair distribution
of knowledge matters for reasons independent of its role in enabling the fair
distribution of other political goods.

Example Three: Knowledge and Positional Goods

A further objection is that even if intuitions about the value of knowledge
have an effect on political reasoning, this effect is weak relative to other val-
ues. Knowledge may have value independent of other goods and, if treated
in the abstract, one can see how the fair distribution of access to knowledge
matters for justice. Yet, when applied to the real world, these intuitions do
very little. For example, the distribution by institutions of opportunities to
access knowledge at the same time distributes positional socioeconomic
opportunities, such as rewarding jobs, and these opportunities are often
distributed unfairly. Accordingly, increasing access to knowledge among
the least well off, without also constraining access for the most well off,
may increase socioeconomic inequality.11 This would be unjust and ar-
guably trumps any intuitions we might hold about the value of knowledge.
It would be better, all things considered, to have a society in which we
achieved rough equality at the cost of a slight restriction on some person’s
freedom as a knower, than a society that is materially unequal but people
are relatively freer (in principle) to acquire knowledge.
I concede the point. The intuitive value of knowledge does not, as a jus-
tice issue, always trump other goods. Yet, we know from the above that the
intuitive value of knowledge has some purchase on how we reason about
justice. We therefore cannot say that socioeconomic equality trumps knowl-
edge on the grounds that knowledge has no bearing on justice at all. I think
it more accurate to say that our concerns about socioeconomic opportunity
are stronger than our concerns about opportunities to access knowledge
in general. And I also concede that concerns about opportunities to access

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knowledge may not may not figure very much in particular institutions, such
as hospitals. For example, we may have autonomy reasons for making sure
that patients know and understand the medical procedures they are under-
going. But it wouldn’t be unjust to refuse to allocate health care resources
to a patient who wishes to explore their intrinsic interest in the anatomy of
the gall bladder they are about to have removed.
But educational institutions, where promoting knowledge and under-
standing is, if not fundamental, a core responsibility, is a different matter. If
promoting knowledge and understanding is a core responsibility of educa-
tional institutions, and if our intuitions about the intrinsic value of knowl-
edge have purchase on our reasoning about justice at all, it would seem to
follow that these intuitions will motivate more strongly in this institutional
context than others. That is to say, educational institutions do not merely aim
for the promotion of knowledge and understanding, rather, this aim, in and
of itself, is a reason for structuring educational institutions justly. If so, we
should be able to make claims about educational justice that are plausibly
informed by, or even led by, the value of knowledge and understanding as
an intrinsic good. Yet, in practice we don’t usually do this. We usually argue
for fair access to educational institutions by way of other goods, making
claims that take the following form: ‘we should increase access to higher
education because it increases average income and employability’. But it
seems to me that the claim that we should widen access to and participation
in higher education because knowledge is valuable should count in favour
of fair access.

Example Four: Knowledge and Qualifications

What’s going on, I think, is that the political argument dampens down our
intuitions about the value of knowledge by highlighting its contingent value,
making the possibility that educational institutions have a responsibility to
secure knowledge as an end in itself difficult to conceive. A closer look at the
relationship between knowledge and qualifications can show how. Consider:
why should we value equality of social and economic opportunity achieved
through fair access to knowledge and understanding, as opposed to some
other process? One answer could be that knowledge and understanding has
a logical connection to what it means to qualify for an occupation. Further,
fair and open access to qualifications is a matter of justice. Therefore, we
should value fair access to the knowledge and understanding required for
obtaining such qualifications.
But this won’t do. Knowledge and understanding are logically connected
to qualification. Qualification is logically connected to equality of opportu-
nity. But knowledge has no logical connection to equality of opportunity.12
For example, imagine a medical school admissions policy in which access
to all the knowledge and understanding necessary for being a physician was
made available after one has been selected to become a doctor. To be clear,
I don’t only mean knowledge specific to being a qualified physician, which
medical schools do offer post-admission, but also any and all of the prereq-
uisite or preparatory knowledge we normally associate with being a viable

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applicant to a medical school. Further, imagine that the school replaces

educational attainment as an admission requirement altogether, basing se-
lection on factors that have nothing to do with any previous cognitive
achievements. Perhaps they test applicants for the requisite talents, abilities
and dispositions, including evidence of effort in non-cognitive domains,
and weight the results of those tests in order to account for differences in
family circumstance. In this scenario, the medical school has ensured that
those who are selected will receive all the knowledge necessary for com-
petent physicianship, and that the opportunity to be selected is distributed
under conditions of fair equality of educational opportunity. My point is
that while we often use educational processes as a sorting mechanism for
qualified positions, we are not required to do so on logical grounds. We
could just as well assign knowledge a role exclusive to the pre-admission
stage, where everyone must acquire all the necessary medical knowledge
before applying, or to the post-admission stage, where only those selected
can access medical knowledge, or a mixture of both as is the practice, now.
While knowledge is necessary for being a physician, it is an arbitrary feature
in deciding on just arrangements.
What the example shows is that the political argument dampens our
intuitions about the value of knowledge by placing all the normative weight
on its contingent and instrumental value as opposed to the intrinsic. But
important to note is that the intuitions are still there, working on our sense
of what is just and unjust. Imagine, for example, that within the above
configuration we had two major schools of medicine. In the first, True
Belief Medical School, students become doctors by acquiring all the true
beliefs, as well as the skills, they need in order to become proficient. So,
while they have all the true beliefs they need in order to carry out their
work they don’t know the reason why those beliefs are true. In the second,
Justified True Belief Medical School, they become doctors by knowing and
understanding all the true beliefs they need in order to be proficient. Both
systems abide by equality of opportunity, and graduates from either system
are equally effective. The only other difference between the two is that some
randomly selected applicants attend True Belief Medical School while the
rest attend Justified True Belief Medical School.
Many would see random assignment to True Belief Medical School as
unfair. Yet, the instrumental value of each option is exactly the same. One
explanation for this view is that recognising people’s instrumental interests
in knowledge, in some contexts, is necessary but insufficient for justice. One
could object that TB Medical School has lesser value for an individual’s
personal autonomy compared to JTB Medical School. Personal autonomy
is plausibly seen as a political value, and so we have political argument
for this intuition. But this explanation does not work. There are many
true beliefs that experts hold without knowing why they are true, many of
which are taken on the good epistemic authority of other experts. Further,
we can assume that those admitted to either True Belief or Justified True
Belief Medical School have already satisfied the conditions necessary for a
personally autonomous life, including the capacity to freely determine that
they should become doctors.

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 Educational Justice and the Value of Knowledge 13

Perhaps the autonomy argument works from a different angle. What is

intuitively unjust is not the particular medical school to which one has been
assigned, but the fact that is was randomly assigned and as such disrespects
the personal autonomy of the applicants by not respecting what they would
have chosen, otherwise. But this explanation does not work either. Note
that the intuition was that it seems unjust that some of the applicants have
been randomly chosen to attend True Belief as opposed to Justified True
Belief Medical School, not the other way around. Random assignment
disrespects autonomy, but it disrespects autonomy by randomly assigning
some students away from what is intuitively preferable—an education in the
medical profession defined by professional knowledge and not true belief
alone.
Finally, perhaps we should cast doubt on the very notion that intuitions
about knowledge reflect values that all citizens have an interest in and to
which justice therefore applies. One could do this by observing that some in-
dividual students would much prefer TB over JTB Medical School because
the former involves less effort. However, the fact some choose to ignore
a particular intuition does not mean that the intuition isn’t there. It is no
different than observing that some citizens ignore rational intuitions about
equality depending on their particular circumstances and the incentives in
play. Therefore, this is not a sufficient reason for concluding that intuitions
about knowledge are non-generalisable.13

THE INTRINSIC VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE AND POLITICAL

JUSTIFICATION
Intuitions about the intrinsic value of knowledge persist in the political con-
text, affecting how we think and reason about educational justice. Therefore,
such intuitions may be helpful in identifying wrongs that educational insti-
tutions should be mindful of. Wrongful, in the sense that these intuitions
signal when a person’s or group’s interest in the acquisition of knowledge
(for reasons not easily reducible to their interest in acquiring some other
good) is not being recognised. For example, it appears that there are cir-
cumstances in which a failure to recognise a citizen’s intrinsic reasons for
valuing knowledge is seemingly wrong. Denying someone access to knowl-
edge simply by virtue of the goods they have in other spheres of life is also
potentially unjust under some circumstances. And it also seems to be the
case that, all things considered, it is better that society move closer to justice
by increasing, not decreasing, knowledge. The fact that we can use these
intuitions in order to formulate hypotheses about what is wrong, harmful or
unfair, at the very least, suggests that there are plausible propositions about
access to knowledge for its own sake that need to be debated.
Of course, at this stage of the argument ‘seemingly wrong’ or ‘potentially
unjust’ acts are just that—propositions about what it just or unjust that
require justification. How can these claims be justified? To what extent can
they provide ethical guidance? One way is to try and justify the intuition
that motivated those propositions directly. By ‘directly’ I mean that we
connect this intuition to some insight about the good life. This seems to

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14 C. Martin

have been the approach taken by liberal educationalists. For example, they
have argued that coming to value knowledge for its own sake cultivates
our ability to be able to value anything else for its own sake, and being
able to value things for their own sake is key to a person’s wellbeing or
flourishing (Peters, 1977, pp. 71–74). If sound, we could say that people
have a right to knowledge for its own sake, especially when we are raising
questions about justice in the educational domain, because people have a
fundamental interest in cultivating their capacity to take notice of, and value,
final ends and not merely the means necessary for whatever they happen
to (contingently) desire. This is why it is wrong to, say, fail to recognise a
person’s claim on educational resources when they cannot provide extrinsic
reasons for that claim—in the relevant cases we are unjustly constraining
a person’s capacity to value. However, the direct argument is unlikely to
succeed as a basis for justifying claims about justice in a liberal political
framework. This, because it presupposes an ideal of human flourishing that
is insufficiently14 neutral about the good to warrant such claims (Strike,
2004).
What I call the indirect approach is more promising. By an ‘indirect’
approach I mean that we should be able to identify principles of justice that
can explain what is wrong-making in cases such as those I have outlined
above. To be clear, I am not saying that there ought to be a singular principle
that does this. If I am right, we are dealing with are pre-theoretical intuitions
about the value of knowledge. Being pre-theoretical, we should be able to
capture them across different conceptions of liberal justice even if we end
up disagreeing about which principles do a better job of capturing them.
The fact of disagreement is no mark against my claims that i) the intuition
is there, ii) that it is politically relevant, and iii) it can motivate justifiable
propositions about educational justice. Political philosophers disagree about
the particular principles that best capture our intuitions about equality. Some
proffer strict equality. Others claim that inequality is fine so long as it leaves
the worst better off. But they nonetheless recognise that equality is part of
the fabric of our shared civic morality.
For example, it seems intuitively right that the obligation for universi-
ties to generate economic or other goods should be limited or tempered to
some degree on the grounds of more basic obligation to pursue knowledge.
But it would be a mistake to assume that this means that political justice
is somehow contrary to seeking out knowledge as a final end. Rather, we
could take this intuition to mean that universities have reason to further
knowledge and understanding and, if universities are to be just, they should
structure opportunities for citizens to access that knowledge and under-
standing for reasons that are not only contingent on external political aims
or goals. One way to think about what’s unjust about selective universities,
for example, is that they make a citizen’s interest in accessing more com-
plex forms of knowledge and understanding contingent on unchosen life
circumstances. On this view, we have a principled, luck egalitarian reason
to place priority on admitting university applicants from less well-off back-
grounds. While we ought to level the socioeconomic playing field in such a
way that luck plays little to no role in outcomes, we should care about fair

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 Educational Justice and the Value of Knowledge 15

luck-independent access to higher education even if it made no direct differ-

ence to socioeconomic equality. Put differently, it would seem intuitively
wrong to argue that it would be fine to leave untouched the many barriers
less well-off citizens face in accessing higher education if removing those
barriers would not materially improve their life chances. Luck egalitarian-
ism can help to capture this intuitive wrongness: unequal opportunities to
access knowledge, full stop, cannot be justified in terms of bad luck.
Finally, it’s worth emphasizing the significance of linking intuitions about
the value of knowledge to questions of educational justice. If it is the case
that knowledge is indeed valuable for its own sake it doesn’t necessarily
follow that this value has anything to do with educational justice per se.
The discovery of pristine environments and scientific achievements are also
intrinsically valuable. I can value a pristine environment without ever having
to experience it. I can value a scientific discovery without ever understanding
it.15 Similarly, knowledge may indeed have final value, but it does not follow
from these grounds that I have a right to access an educational institution.
I might simply be content to value the fact that, somewhere, there are
institutions devoted to the promotion of knowledge, and I value this fact
because knowledge is valuable. However, the persistence of such intuitions
in our reasoning about justice suggests that knowledge for its own sake
reflects an interest shared among all citizens. That people have a capacity
to know and an interest in knowing makes access to knowledge a matter
of justice—something that people should have equal opportunity to access
and where equality of access is its own end.

KNOWLEDGE, ACTION AND EDUCATIONAL JUSTICE

I have argued that our reasoning about educational justice is affected by
rational intuitions about the intrinsic (non-contingent and non-instrumental)
value of knowledge. I’ve also appealed to these intuitions in order to advance
some substantive, if tentative, claims about educational justice. However,
my broader aim was to show that the relationship between the value of
knowledge and educational justice needs more philosophical attention. In
what follows I explain what I think are the stakes in this analysis.
At a general level, the obligations of liberal states to their citizens flow
from a political framework that sees knowledge and understanding as having
contingent value. Claims about the external goods that knowledge and
understanding happen to serve support these obligations, not the goods of
knowledge and understanding themselves. However, our intuitions about
the intrinsic value of knowledge suggest there may be features or conditions
of knowledge that should inform the roles and responsibilities of educational
institutions on independent grounds. The intrinsic value of knowledge is a
problem of justice that we should care about.
Before concluding I want to suggest how a focus on the intrinsic value of
knowledge in educational justice arguments may not only pay justificatory,
but motivational, dividends. First, individuals working within educational
institutions are likely have intuitions about the intrinsic value of knowledge
and, because they have devoted their working lives to such institutions, we

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16 C. Martin

can expect these intuitions to be strong. That is to say, they value knowledge
for non-contingent and non-instrumental reasons, and this valuation impacts
on their practice. However, these intuitions may conflict with political jus-
tice. For example, teachers may find themselves devoting more time and
attention to students that can grasp increasingly complex or broader swaths
of knowledge and understanding. But they may not realise that some of
those students are able to make such cognitive achievements because of
socioeconomic advantages or intellectual ability. Additional attention may
unwittingly reinforce existing injustice. One way to handle this problem to
is to tell teachers that they should override their intuitions, and make sure
that they allocate their time in ways that will not disadvantage less well-off
and less academically able students. But it may be better to make teacher’s
intuitions about the value of knowledge explicit and help them think through
how those intuitions fit within a broad conception of justice. For example,
if knowledge has intrinsic value student students of all backgrounds and
ability should have equal opportunities to experience cognitive achieve-
ments. My point is that striving for compatibility between intuitions about
knowledge and justice has practical advantages. First, individuals within
educational institutions will likely find their work to be more rewarding if
they can understand in what ways, and why, what they value about their
work is compatible with a just society. Second, educational policies that aim
for justice are likely to be more effective when those policies are compatible
with what people working within educational institutions value about their
work.
Second, claims about what is just or unjust may get more traction within
educational institutions if they can appeal to values intrinsic to such in-
stitutions. This is because principles of educational justice need to foster
commitments strong enough for citizens to be moved by them. If the social
goals of educational institutions are always-already contingent and subject
to change of government or public opinion, it is difficult to see how those
working within such institutions will acquire an enduring sense of justice in
the context of their work.16 Far better, I think, to argue for improvements in
socioeconomic or other political goods indirectly. For example, less well-off
students would likely get a better economic return on their higher education
investment if they had better instruction, or if universities made sure that
such students had access to research assistant jobs on campus instead of
having to work menial service jobs off campus. But rather than front the
economic goals as a final end it would be better to lead with the claim
that equality of access to knowledge and understanding is itself a matter of
justice and, for this reason, students from poorer families shouldn’t have
to endure bad teaching or work jobs that are more likely to set back their
educational goals than advance them.

CONCLUSION
I have argued in this paper that, alongside familiar concerns about the role
of educational institutions in promoting political goods such as equality and
autonomy, such institutions have a distinctive role to play in promoting just

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 Educational Justice and the Value of Knowledge 17

access to knowledge and understanding for its own sake. First, I have argued
that liberal political arguments can elide our intuitions about the value of
knowledge and, to the extent that such intuitions are relevant to judgement of
justice, they ought to be explicitly accounted for. Second, I have claimed that
these intuitions are likely to be more robust when we reason about the justice
of educational institutions, and so these intuitions should be of particular
concern when theorising the nature and scope of educational justice. Third,
have I argued that once these intuitions are explicitly acknowledged they
can be plausibly captured by different liberal principles of justice. Finally, I
outlined some ways in which capturing intuitions about the intrinsic value of
knowledge, in addition to informing judgements about what is educationally
just, are more likely to motivate educational institutions to support liberal
political principles of justice than they would otherwise

Correspondence: Christopher Martin, Associate Professor, The University

of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, Canada.
Email: christopher.martin@ubc.ca

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Bruce Maxwell and Nick Tanchuk for their comments
on previous versions of this paper, and for questions from the audience at an
AERA 2018 symposium session on educational justice and intrinsic value.

NOTES
1. A note on terminology. I mean ‘liberal political’ to denote a broad sense of liberalism, as opposed
to Rawlisan political liberalism. The former refers to a family of views that understand liberalism
as a political framework. The reason I use the term ‘liberal political’ and not simply ‘liberal’
is to distinguish from ‘liberal education’ understood as a conception of education or curriculum
justification. The distinction is important because my aim in this paper is to reconcile claims about
epistemic value, such as those made by liberal educationalists, with claims about educational
justice, as made by liberal political theorists.
2. This is not to say that liberal educationalists are insensitive to political problems. As I understand
it, they thought that the aims of education ought to be defined and justified on their own terms
followed by an analysis of what those aims mean for a political community. See, for example,
Peters, 1979.
3. I stress ‘normative’ because I want to distinguish this approach from structural functionalism. I
mean ‘function’ or ‘role’ as understood within a theory of a just liberal society.
4. For a good example of how political values determine the scope of a common curriculum, see
Callan, 1995.
5. One might argue that the reason-based approach to dissemination is more valuable because it is
autonomy-respecting or autonomy-promoting. But this brings us back to a political argument for
the (contingent) value of knowledge and understanding.
6. For a discussion of plural epistemic goods in education see Siegel, 2005. For a critique of value
monism in epistemology see DePaul, 2001.
7. On some virtue epistemic accounts, one knows when one can take credit for one’s own epistemic
state. See Lackey, 2007, for an example.
8. I take the view that intuitions about the value of knowledge are not beliefs so much as widely held
seemings, that is, rational intuitions that seem to be true irrespective of what one actually believes.
It seems better to know than to merely believe, for example. For an account of rational intuitions
and their role in philosophical argument, see Bealer, 1988.


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18 C. Martin

9. Ben Kotzee has claimed, for example, that ‘[w]hen we take an epistemic view of educational
justice, it becomes clear that less knowledge is not the answer—more is’ (Kotzee, 2013, p. 349).
10. There may be a sense here in which knowledge and understandings is ‘morally special’. For more
on the moral specialness thesis of goods see Segall, 2007.
11. A good example is the expansion of UK higher education. While participation among less well-
off students increased over time, evidence has shown that it has resulted in a greater increase in
educational attainment for already well-off families (see Blanden and Machin, 2004).
12. On the idea that we can break the link between educational attainment and qualifications see
Brighouse and Swift (2006, pp. 488–491) and also Kotzee (2013, pp. 336–337).
13. In fact, there is some empirical evidence that intuitions about knowledge are cross-cultural—see
Marchery et al., 2015.
14. I say ‘insufficiently’ because different conceptions of liberalism vary in their commitment to
neutrality as a constraint on political justification. I also leave open the possibility of a liberal
perfectionist argument taking a more direct line of argument.
15. For a helpful analysis of final value, or value as an end in itself, see Rabinowicz and Rønnow-
Rasmussen, 2000.
16. ‘Rawls described a set of moral principles as stable if it is able to generate attitudes that are
sufficiently strong to outweigh other factors that would lead people to act unjustly . . . stable moral
principles generate strong desires to comply throughout society’ (Klosko, 1994, pp. 1883–1884).

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