“Markets in Cultural Artefacts” – Cecile Fabre (All Souls College, Oxford)
Friday, April 11, 2025
4:00 – 6:00PM
Law Building, Room 1447
RSVP HERE
Join us on April 11, 2025 in the Law Building, Room 1447, for a colloquium with Cecile Fabre, All Souls College, Oxford. The talk will take place from 4:00PM – 6:00PM with a reception to follow.
Markets in Cultural Artefacts
Cultural artefacts such as paintings, antiquities, sculptures, manuscripts and old musical instruments are routinely bought and sold on open markets. The literature on the moral limits of markets is virtually silent on this kind of markets. One can see why: selling and buying votes, kidneys, sex, and military service seems much more problematic than selling and buy art. Nevertheless, the relationship between markets and cultural artefacts is not straightforward. Some of those objects are commonly described as priceless notwithstanding the fact that they clearly have a price. Moreover, some of the practices linked to markets in cultural artefacts elicit moral condemnation: first and foremost, looting, but also licitly buying a work of art yet only as an investment and locking it up in a vault never to show it to the public, and selling artefacts onto global markets with little regard to the adverse impact this may have on the communities to whose culture they are central. This paper provides a qualified moral defence of markets in cultural artefacts. It makes a preliminary case for the defence: it argues that, as a first cut, such transactions are morally justified; indeed, its parties have the right so to transact with one another. It then tackles two objections, responses to which help refine the case. As we shall see, markets in cultural artefacts are global markets, in part characterised by power imbalances between the Global North and Global South. In the light of those concerns, I mount a defense of an interesting kind of limits on global markets, to wit, export restrictions.
Cécile Fabre is Senior Research Fellow in Politics at All Souls College, Oxford. She holds degrees from La Sorbonne, the University of York, and the University of Oxford. Her research interests include theories of distributive justice, the rights we have over our own body, and the ethics of foreign policy. Her books include Cosmopolitan War (OUP 2012), Cosmopolitan Peace Cosmopolitan Peace (OUP 2016), Economic Statecraft (Harvard UP 2018), and Spying Through a Glass Darkly (OUP 2022). Her current project is on the ethics of preserving cultural heritage. She is a member of Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the British Academy.
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