Shrunken heads and vessels of wrath

This chapter investigates the nature of our moral responsiveness towards cultural heritage and the difficulties that attend this. It is argued that moral awareness must form a regular component of our encounters with heritage if it is to be seen fully in the round, since such encounters are essentially encounters with the human beings who created that heritage. While some heritage objects make more urgent demands on our moral attention than others, all heritage is a product of social, political, religious or ideological contexts that merit ethical scrutiny. However, objective and unprejudiced moral responsiveness to cultural heritage is not easy to achieve, and it is sometimes hampered by the distorting impact of certain popular conceptions of the role and value of cultural heritage and by the phenomenon of ‘museumification’ and its tendency to regularise and homogenise our experience of heritage. The chapter closes with a discussion of sceptical doubts about the propriety of entertaining moral attitudes towards cultural heritage founded on the difficulties of seeing the world as our forebears saw it. Bernard Williams’s thesis of the ‘relativity of distance’ maintains that trans-temporal moral assessments of persons and actions are illicit on account of the epistemic and affective gaps between the people judging and the people judged. It is argued that Williams’s view is unnecessarily cautious and alienating, and that we are linked to our forebears through the cultural heritage they have left us, which enables us to grasp those common features of humanity that validate our trans-temporal moral attitudes.