The Moral Of The Story: how the humanities teach us about people and how to live in a shared world with them

There is a saying that goes “budgets are moral documents.” Often attributed to Martin Luther King Junior, the phrase has been used by everyone from U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Jesuits. This saying highlights the fact that budgets direct the allocation of resources, and thus put an explicit quantified value on an organization’s implicitly-stated priorities. They literally put an organization’s money where its mouth is. Because cuts to humanities programs at institutions like West Virginia University, Cardiff University, and Australian Catholic University are typically framed in economic terms, this “budgets-as-moral-documents” framework helps identify the moral value of humanistic knowledge and study.  

It's important to emphasize the moral case for the humanities because claims that the balance sheet is decisively tilted against the humanities disguises what is ultimately a moral argument behind the veneer of numbers. The data does not straightforwardly prove that humanities programs or bachelors’ degrees are poor investments. Studies have long shown that humanities courses like first-year writing are overwhelmingly revenue-generators. This article, originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2010, shows that across many major American institutions like UCLA, The University of Washington, and The University of Illinois, humanities courses bring in more in student fees than these low-overhead subjects cost to deliver. In 2015 a study found that while science graduates may make more than their peers with humanities degrees out of the gate, lifelong earnings of humanities majors tend to be much greater than those of STEM grads. More recently in 2023, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences found that in every state in the US, the earnings of people with humanities bachelor’s’ degrees was solidly in the middle of the pack: behind STEM and business, but ahead of social sciences, education, and the arts. That same study found that nationally, American humanities majors’ median salary was only a few hundred dollars off from the median salary for all workers with bachelors’ degrees. While some institutions have experienced declining humanities enrollments, others have not. Surveying relevant experts and stakeholders across campus, a 2022 feature in The Harvard Crimson finds that “cultural bias” against the humanities is the main reason students decide against concentrating (majoring) in humanities subjects. Many of the numbers speak in favor of the humanities’ economic impact, and the one number that could suggest their decline (i.e., enrollment figures) is based on vibes, not facts. Even though it typically wears the dressing of numbers, data, and budgets, the case against the humanities’ value in contemporary higher education is itself a moral (some may say ideological) one. The current debate about the value of the humanities is fundamentally about morals, not budgets. 

Debating morals is one of the oldest humanistic practices on record, and the fact that you can’t engage in contemporary debates about the humanities without doing humanistic work should be a slam-dunk case in their favor. At this meta-level, the communicating, relating, and organizing to figure out how we ought to live together in society shows that the fundamental work of existing together in the world requires the very sorts of skills you learn by studying the humanities. As Peter Coviello, chair of the English department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, puts it,  

serious work in English prepares its participants...for the perplexities, anguishes, and errant joys of being alive in the world. What does work in the humanities testify to, if not the painful wonder of being a person, being human, among other persons?...[Novels and poems] won’t offer you a ready-made blueprint for a world less ruinous...But reading them, investing our imaginations in them, fighting about them, puzzling through them in collaboration with colleagues and comrades and students and friends—this, I think, does an awful lot to adhere us to life, to fortify our attachments to one another and thus to the world itself, even in its bleakest configurations. 

Debating morals with our friends or colleagues, reading about historical and fictional peoples’ dilemmas, figuring out how to think before you speak, understanding how persuasion and bias work, listening when other people are speaking and showing them that they have been heard, knowing how to agree to disagree with someone – these are all skills you practice when you study the humanities, either formally in class or informally in reading groups, online forums, and the like. Studying the humanities teaches us about people and how to live in a shared world with them. 

For example, I have three degrees in philosophy, and all that studying has taught me about specific types of human behavior that I recognize in my everyday interactions in the 21st century. “Sealioning” is the term for a type of online trolling where users harass others with a barrage of “just asking questions” posts. Amy Johnson of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society defines sealioning as  

Fus[ing] persistent questioning—often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points—with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate. It disguises itself as a sincere attempt to learn and communicate. Sealioning thus works both to exhaust a target's patience, attention, and communicative effort, and to portray the target as unreasonable. While the questions of the "sea lion" may seem innocent, they're intended maliciously and have harmful consequences. 

The term was coined in 2014 by cartoonist David Malki, but even earlier than that I recognized such overzealously persistent questioning in the name of reasonable debate as something much older and more familiar to this philosopher. It’s how Socrates behaves in Plato’s early dialogues: “My dear friend Euthyphro, what is piety? No, really, what IS piety?”; “Meno, what is knowledge? Not that! What is it then?” This behavior was so annoying and unproductive that Athens executed Socrates for it. In the 3000 or so years between the invention of written philosophy and the invention of social media, this same anti-social behavior has endured, more or less unchanged. Studying ancient Greek philosophy helped me identify its manifestations on what was then called Twitter, allowing me to recognize bad actors as such and avoid engaging with them and “feeding the trolls.” Here, work in the humanities helped me understand people and relate to them in socially constructive ways.  

Teaching us about people and how we can (or shouldn’t) cooperate, the humanities help us individually and collectively build a better society. From books to video games to public speaking to advertising, the humanities are the media in which we relate to one another; the humanities are the stuff of human society, and that’s their moral value. To value society is to value the humanities. 

Though some people seem to think “there is no such thing as society,” the UN Sustainable Development Goals are guiding principles here at Palgrave and our parent company SpringerNature, and they very much promote the functioning of a healthy, just, and sustainable society. Palgrave’s commitment to the humanities is part of our broader commitment to the SDGs and the kind of society they are designed to facilitate. Budgets are indeed moral documents, and Palgrave’s annual publication budgets of books across the humanities reflect our business’s moral orientation around the SDGs.