The King’s College London Peace Lecture will be given this year by Prof Cécile Fabre on the topic, ‘Snatching Something From Death’: Value, Justice, and Humankind’s Common Heritage

Professor Fabre is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford,  Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Justice in a Changing World, Whose Body is it Anyway? Justice and the Integrity of the Person, and in 2012 Cosmopolitan War.

Cécile Fabre has just completed an eight year long project on the ethics of war and peace. She is also working on the ethics of economic statecraft and on the ethics of espionage.

The lecture will be in Bush House Lecture Theatre 1 on Tuesday the 10th of March

The lecture will begin at 6.30pm till 8pm with a reception afterwards

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 defence 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.