This article draws together research from various sub-disciplines of philosophy to offer an overview of recent philosophical work on the ethics of historic preservation. I discuss how philosophers writing about art, culture, and the environment have appealed to historical significance in crafting arguments about the preservation of objects, practices, and places. By demonstrating how it relates to core themes in moral and political philosophy, I argue that historic preservation is essentially concerned with ethical issues.

Climate change will have highly significant and largely negative effects on human societies into the foreseeable future, effects that are already generating ethical and policy dilemmas of unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity. One important group of ethical and policy issues raised here concerns what I callenvironmentalvalues. By this I do not mean the impact that climate change will have on the environment as a valuable human resource, nor am I referring to the changing climate as a threat to humans in (...) terms of floods, storms, and droughts, important as these are. Rather, I am concerned with the way climate change—and the policies that may be adopted to respond to it—threatens both things we value and, potentially, some of our environmental values themselves. (shrink)

The widely-heralded arrival of the “Anthropocene” era seems to call the existence and value of the natural world into question. Is the world prior to human alteration of it something worth preserving? Can and should we attempt to restore ecological conditions prior to human disturbance? Ecological restoration has traditionally used the past as a reference point in establishing standards and assessing the value of restored landscapes. In many landscapes, however, the traditional notion of historical fidelity provides inadequate guidance because contemporary (...) and future social, ecological, or climate contexts differ, or will differ, radically from those that historically prevailed. Thus, some scholars recommend that we move toward restoration that looks to the future instead of the past. Others propose a “narrative ethics” that accounts for the past while allowing a place to evolve in ways that fit its unfolding story. Both futuristic and narrative approaches to restoration accommodate change and acknowledge a role for social values. However, both have been criticized as overly anthropocentric, and neither is strongly action guiding. Using examples of restoration at former military sites, I consider how we might develop an ethics of ecological restoration that acknowledges change while taking account of the past. (shrink)

This paper describes the disorienting aesthetics of some environments that are characteristic of the Anthropocene. We refer to these environments as 'mashed-up' and present three dimensions - phenomenological, epistemological and narrative - of the aesthetic disorientation they can trigger. We then advance the suggestion that a rich, nuanced and meaningful aesthetic experience of mashed-up Anthropocene environments (MAEs) calls for a mode of appreciation grounded on performative practices of aesthetic familiarisation with particular MAEs and entities and processes thereof. Familiarisation with MAEs, (...) we further note, can have disorienting codas of its own. It can reveal and highlight, rather than eliminate or alleviate, the solid strangeness of Earth even in the systemically humanised world of the Anthropocene, and it can expose and tie at least some of our agency, identity and sources of meaning in life to the same unstable evolvability of particular MAEs. (shrink)

The paper is a dialogue between a conservation architect who works on medieval churches and an analytic aesthetician interested in the principles underlying restoration and conservation. The focus of the debate is the explanatory role of narrative in understanding and justifying elective changes to historic buildings. For the architect this is a fruitful model and offers a basis for a genuinely new approach to a philosophy of conservation. The philosopher, however, has been sceptical about appeals to narrative in other contexts (...) (for example, self-identity), and rehearses some reasons for this scepticism. The dialogue explores the pros and cons of the narrative approach to conservation and seeks to forge a compromise that acknowledges concerns about inflated claims for narrative while pursuing the merits of this particular application. (shrink)