Cultural Heritage
To many, the thought was this: Notre-Dame Cathedral, but also the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal, Da Vinci’s manuscripts, and the collections of the world’s great museums, somehow belong to all of us, irrespective of national and political borders. And this, many also think, places all of us under very strong moral obligations to protect them from destruction and neglect, but also to open them up to as many people as possible.
Yet this is a controversial view. To put it harshly, its proponents are taxed for being Eurocentric and neo-colonialist. To put it charitably, they are charged for being insufficiently sensitive to culturally specific value judgements about those landmarks and objects. Either way, what does it mean, to say that something is part of humankind’s heritage? How do we reconcile the universalism of common belonging with the fact that large parts of our supposedly common heritage are in private hands?
What does it mean, to say that something is part of humankind’s heritage?
If something is part of that heritage, does it matter, really, where it is? Should we care, for example, that the Parthenon Sculptures and the Rosetta Stone are in London rather than Athens and Cairo? How do we resolve disagreements between different political and cultural communities over what to do with those objects? Assuming that there is a moral duty to preserve, or at the very least not wilfully to destroy, cultural objects, is the duty more stringent for the fact that those objects somehow belong to all of us? How does it fare, when tensioned against other duties, such as the duty to alleviate global poverty?
Professor Cécile Fabre addresses those issues in her current monograph – under contract with Oxford University Press. Her book offers an account of universal value which vindicates the intuition that some tangible cultural goods are part of humankind’s common cultural heritage yet is sensitive to the particular and plural ways in which individuals and groups relate to those goods. It does so by engaging with academic disciplines outside philosophy: history, archaeology, anthropology, law and heritage studies.