2022 Roseman Lecture in Practical Ethics (Cécile Fabre, All Souls College, Oxford)

This year’s Roseman Lecture will be delivered by Cécile Fabre, a professor of political philosophy and senior research fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She is also affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Nuffield College, Oxford. She most recently published Economic Statecraft: Human Rights, Sanctions, and Conditionality (Harvard University Press, 2018), preceded by Cosmopolitan Peace (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Morality of Defensive War, co-edited with Seth Lazar (Oxford University Press, 2014), Cosmopolitan War (Oxford University Press, 2012), Justice in a Changing World (Polity Press, 2007), Whose Body Is It Anyway? Justice and the Integrity of the Person (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Social Rights under the Constitution: Government and the Decent Life (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Professor Fabre will also hold an associated seminar, with prerequisite readings, on Friday, March, 25, 2022, between 10:00 AM and 12:00 noon. The seminar is titled “The Duty to Accept Apologies.”

Talk Title

“Snatching Something from Death”: Value, Justice, and Humankind’s Common Heritage

Talk Abstract

When Notre-Dame Cathedral was engulfed by fire on April 15, 2019, the world (it seemed) watched in horror. On Twitter, Facebook, in newspapers, and on TV cables ranging as far afield from Paris as South Africa, China, and Chile, people expressed their sorrow at the partial destruction of the church, and retrospective anguish at the thought of what might very well have happened —the complete loss of a jewel of Gothic architecture whose value somehow transcends time and space. My aim in this lecture is to offer a philosophical account and defense of the view that there is such a thing as humankind’s common heritage, and that this heritage makes stringent moral demands on us. I first offer an account of the universal value of (some) heritage goods, and then offer a conception of justice at the bar of which we owe it to one another, but also to our ancestors and successors, to preserve that heritage.

The Roseman Lectures in Practical Ethics are sponsored by Ellen Roseman and the Constance and David Roseman Fund at the Toronto Community Foundation.

To join the lecture online: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/84253752457