The Intrinsic Value of Heritage

Abstract

Abstract This chapter identifies and elaborates some familiar reasons for valuing heritage (such as a heritage site giving us a sense of connection with the past). Our deeper interest, though, lies in the capacity of such features to contribute to our ability to live flourishing lives. The ability of heritage sites and artefacts to make these contributions is essentially connected to their particular properties, such as being the place where our ancestors worshipped or the desk where Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations. Our account explains why we have reason to value both heritage that matters for our own flourishing and heritage that matters for other people’s flourishing. Each person’s flourishing is morally significant and, thus, we each have moral reason to care that other people enjoy flourishing lives. This, in turn, gives us moral reason to protect heritage that contributes to that flourishing. These reasons can justify the imposition of non-consensual risks of even serious harm on persons, permitting us to impose some such risks in order to protect heritage. They can also ground duties to incur risk to ourselves to avoid damaging heritage and to save heritage from other threats. Our account therefore vindicates the Hague Convention’s assumption that we can justify harms to persons for the sake of protecting heritage. Nevertheless, there are intuitively plausible limits to these risks, and these limits are comparatively low. We cannot, ordinarily, justify either imposing or forcing people to incur even moderate risk of serious harm for the sake of protecting heritage. Unless a person consents to bear or incur such a risk, imposing or forcing her to incur it is impermissible.