I think we should confiscate all the money from those with money management skills mostly the poor, because they are going to squander it. We should give it to the rich because they know how to retain money and will do more good with it... That's your logic.

What makes you think that returning artifacts to the rightful owners will make them disappear?

The perception that the rulers of the country are a bunch of kleptocrats who are likely to be ousted by another set of kleptocrats in short order.

Generally however as long as the artifacts are in hands of a museum they're generally safe no matter how unstable the host government is. The only exception is when certain religious extremists gain power and go on an spree of cultural destruction like in Syria.

I've got bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram

If there's one thing we British know about, it's valuable artworks disappearing from their homelands under deals of questionable legitimacy.

Personally I don't care at all about artifacts like this so the principal of the matter seems more important to me then the potential destruction of the artifacts.

It's their stuff to potentially get destroyed or go missing. If they would rather take that risk upon themselves then so be it.

> If they would rather take that risk upon themselves then so be it.

I think that's an important point - they aren't being given that choice right now - if the British Museum decided to return all the Benin Bronzes then it's not inconceivable that Nigeria would leave them in the custody of the British Museum until it had a safe space to house them - or possibly loan them to the British Museum if there were doubts of the item's safety.

What about stuff that you do care about? Would you go against your principles then?

I'm not aware of anything that would conflict with my stance. The point being that no object is more important than the principles here. The world will keep on spinning if all this stuff is destroyed. The bar for conflicting would be something that causes problems for our continued existence on earth.

Perhaps something such as a country "owning" a river and deciding to freely dump nuclear waste into it which in turn causes problems for everyone.