Do We Have an Obligation to Protect Cultural Heritage? BY QUINCE PAN people with the strongest claim right to cultural heritage would be the ones most involved with cultural heritage. But who might they be? Looking at the past, one possibility is the creators of heritage objects. But it seems strange that they have a right to the persistence of their creations even beyond their death. Indeed, “heritage” is a term we apply to objects with historical value, and at the are time of creation, these objects have no historical value.
A historic building, a traditional craft, an endangered language — objects of cultural heritage that give us reasons to protect them. We recoil when we see people destroy an ancient monument without good reason. We feel indignant when a construction company digs up a Roman artefact and puts it back into the pit instead of handing it over to the local museum. Our indignation seems justified — supported by legitimate reason. Do we have an obligation to protect cultural heritage? And if we do, what kind of obligation is it?
Looking at the present, one possibility is the contemporaneous beneficiaries of cultural heritage. On this view, we wrong present-day appreciators of cultural heritage if we do not protect heritage objects. But again it seems strange that one has a right to the persistence of a heritage object merely by valuing it.
Because of the significance of moral norms (vis-à-vis norms of etiquette or rules of a game), it is popular to see moral obligation as the archetypal form of obligation, with other kinds of obligation (e.g., legal, political) being either comparable or reducible to moral obligation. Furthermore, it is popular to see all moral obligations as “directed”, “bipolar”, or “second-personal”: owed to people, be they individuals or groups. On this account, moral obligations are closely associated with claim rights, because one’s moral obligation to φ arises when people are entitled to one’s φ-ing, and thus one wrongs (and warrants blame from and an apology to) these people by failing to φ.
A more promising possibility is the contemporaneous “managers” of cultural heritage, such as the wearers of a traditional costume or the speakers of an endangered language. These managers of cultural heritage have a greater interest in a heritage object because they are not only beneficiaries of the object, but also the very people who maintain the heritage object. It is controversial whether people can own heritage objects (e.g., Balinese dance) like property (Matthes, 2018). But, arguendo, let us assume so, for we do speak of cultural objects as theirs —
Suppose that we have such a moral obligation to protect cultural heritage. The
30
