07/04/2026 Hoover Tuesdays "The Duty to Vote in an Unjust World"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Cécile Fabre (Oxford University)

Standard justifications for the moral duty to vote appeal to citizens' general duty of reciprocity not to free ride on the provision of the public good of democratic governance, or to a general duty of justice to support just institutions - which include democratic institutions. However, proponents of the duty have not properly addressed the question of the scope of the duty - to wit, by whom it is borne, and to whom it is owed. This is problematic: all liberal democracies (even relatively stable ones) are marred by wrongdoings, both public and private. The question, then, is whether the fact that some agent has wronged another agent makes a difference to either party's duty to vote and to their claim to be the beneficiary of the duty. While it stands to reason that, if anyone is owed a duty to vote at the bar of justice, victims surely are, it is not obvious that wrongdoers too have that claim. While it seems clear that if anyone owes a duty to vote at the bar of justice, wrongdoers do, it is not obvious that victims too owe it. I defend the following theses. First, the fact that a citizen has committed a serious wrong, of the kind described above, strengthens the case for holding him under a duty to vote. Second, the fact that a citizen has been or continues to be the victim of such wrongs does not exempt her from the duty - a duty which, moreover, she owes to wrongdoers as well as to innocent citizens, who include fellow victims.

24/03/2026 Hoover Tuesdays "Can we wrong someone by bringing them into existence? One possible consequence of placing too much value into the future"

07/04/2026 BIP#24 "Humankind’s Common Cultural Heritage: Ethical Issues of Appropriation and Return"

The workshop will present a work in progress by Cécile Fabre offering a philosophical account of humankind’s common cultural heritage. Starting from the emergence of the World Heritage movement following the Nubian monuments salvage campaign and the 1972 UNESCO Convention, the book examines the claim that certain cultural goods belong to humanity as a whole and ground strong moral obligations, particularly towards future generations.        
The project argues that some cultural goods are part of a shared heritage insofar as all individuals have reasons to value them, and that they generate pro tanto duties of justice. At the same time, these duties must be qualified in light of concerns about territorial and private property rights, risks of cultural appropriation, and trade-offs with other important interests.         
The workshop will focus in particular on the chapters devoted to cultural appropriation and the return of cultural artefacts, which together explore key ethical tensions surrounding humankind’s common cultural heritage.