but reading closer it says:

>Back at home, Young had a problem: She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. She couldn't sell it. And giving it back to its rightful owners was a lot harder than it sounds.

So it sounds more like she felt she couldn't keep it or sell it because of her morals.

on edit: of course if she had sold it maybe 10 years down the road the Germans come and say we want our head of Germanicus back please, then either the people who bought it are on the hook or maybe also her for selling stolen goods (depending on laws and how much people want to enforce them)

http://www.marcfennell.com/stolen (Sorry I couldn't find the RSS feed)

PODCAST MAIN PAGE: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...

RSS FEED: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...

Anyways, I think to some extent our civilization is descending into a kind of mass packrat disorder. We seem to fetishize preservation to an unhealthy degree on both small and large scales. Sometimes things break, are burnt down, or are left unmaintained until they die. But new things are created all the time, and maybe sometimes we get a little too stuck on the old stuff and don't acknowledge the new.

Of course if you’re talking about architecture, there’s lots of fetishization of the not-very-old stuff from last century, because They don’t want you to know that we lost the building techniques of the Tartarian Empire. Or something.

But really I'm talking about broader social trends and what we do at the society level. Yes, architecture. Mustn't tear down that building that no one has been able to live in for 20 years, it's sacred. But also relics, ideas, monuments to even monumentally stupid and awful things, etc.

Problem solved

There's a difference between justification and acknowledgement. Just because people are able to acknowledge that specific artifacts only exist because they were stolen, does not mean that they believe the original theft was "right or reasonable."

I mean...sure, but then what's the point of this facile acknowledgement? Yeah, if you hadn't burglarized my house yesterday, all my things would have burned up in the fire that happened there today. That's all well and good, except you still stole my shit. The fact that you inadvertently saved it from being burned is irrelevant to the action of the theft.

Why should anything beyond facile acknowledgement be expected from the average person when it comes to appreciating artifacts that still exist on our planet?

Is it a moral crime to simply appreciate a painting, even though it was stolen hundreds of years ago? Are people "justifying" that crime that happened before they were born, because they're glad that the painting still exists?

Yes. Because your enjoyment deprives the ancestors of the people who actually created it. Try personalizing this to see if it resonates. There's a quilt that has been in your family for centuries, with each family member adding a patch. At some point, your house is burglarized and the quilt is taken. Hundreds of years later, the quilt is around the world, being seen by people who have absolutely no connection to it, meanwhile your great^n children no longer have access to this piece of their cultural heritage.

If my house was burglarized and a family quilt ended up in a museum after it was stolen, I certainly wouldn't blame the patrons of that museum for looking at it. My grievance would be with the current custodian of the quilt.

It's reasonable to expect stolen property to be returned. It's not reasonable to expect people to know the history of every piece of property they look at in order to determine if it was stolen or not.

Huh? Where did I "decide they're wrong"? In this hypothetical you're concocting, you're saying someone "looted" something from someone's trash? That's not what looting typically means. Looting typically means taking things the people from whom they were taken from deemed valuable.

You just don't like it, and that's fine. I can't say I really like it either. But it doesn't mean it's your job to fix it or that you have a right to just take the things preemptively. Continuing to perpetuate colonial abuse is not going to somehow Magically Fix Everything This Time For Sure, it's just going to keep making things worse.

And you know what, maybe they don't in the moment. But essentially none of these things ever get repatriated even when the people they came from explicitly say they want them back. And you can see the logic that justifies this ongoing theft all over this comment thread: "the people who stole it are dead so it's ours now."

This is the problem with all of these after-the-fact justifications. In order for them to exist, the things have to have been taken before the destruction. If I steal your TV and then your house burns down, have I "saved" your TV even though I still won't give it back? Am I now in the moral right?

These small analogies are obviously not perfect, but I think they illustrate the order of causality when we talk about "harm".

What if you die and i buy your tv at an estate sale, and then later your ancestors change their mind? [I'm mostly just posing this as a thought experiment, i dont think its exactly the same as this either]

I mean there is a lot of nuance involved. Sometimes i think repatriating artifacts is the right thing to do. However, if we were talking about say Roman artificats i would say that the modern descendents are so far removed that their claim is no more legitament than anyone else. But there are certainly cases where modern descendents have compelling claims.

But really, for the most part Roman artifacts are in Rome or Italy or the descendants of Roman client states they came from. Rome was never really looted like Africa or the Americas or even much of Asia were over the colonial power era. Likewise, neither were the colonial powers themselves, so there’s no real culture drain being helped along by holding on to a Roman or British or French or Spanish artifact.

For the most part when conversations need to be had about restoring artifacts, it’s that period we’re really talking about.

My enjoyment itself is what does that? What if viewing the artifact bores me to tears? No moral crime then?

Right on, I hear ya. If museums want my money, they can break into my house and steal it, like they stole their artefacts.

> That sounds like an a posteriori justification for stealing, like saying "see, that building ended up being bombed, so it's a good thing I stole all these Ukrainian paintings from the country last year".

The logical fallacy here is using one unrelated bad event to justify another unrelated bad event.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument would be that we should constantly keep looting art left and right, because who knows where and what is going to be destroyed at any moment.

Nor did I say that anyone said that it "justified" the theft. What I said was that that line of argumentation "sounds like an a posteriori justification for stealing".

Person1: A

You: This sounds like B, which is fallacious.

Person2: A

You: Again...this sounds like B, which is fallacious.

Me: No one is claiming B

You: I never said anyone claimed B. I said this sounds like B.

Sound about right?

Yup, with the added bit:

If you're not claiming that A is like B, then what's the point of you bringing up A to the discussion, at all?

Between these two facts, I think it would be way weirder if everyone quietly ignored the historical record of a specific artifact just because it was stolen. Imagine walking through a museum with a tour guide who is able to give mounds of information about every piece on display, until you ask them about a certain bust, and they say "oh we don't talk about the history of that piece" and you say "why not?" and he says "because it's not relevant".

Be honest, what you're actually saying is, "this information isn't relevant TO ME."

http://www.marcfennell.com/stolen (Sorry I couldn't find the RSS feed)

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...

I believe you're looking for the phrase "post hoc", because a posteriori refers to knowledge that can only be gained from application of a test of some sort, whether logical or scientific.

They're stating a fact, not asserting the fact justifies some behavior.

But sure, yes, if they had not been stolen, certain items may have been destroyed. OK. And, so what, what's your point beyond this trite truism?

What's the point of your weirdly aggressive hostility?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_of_Saint_Mark

Or is all of that legitimate because they all spoke French? (Remember, Napoleon was a Corsican!)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor

My reading might be wrong.

I own land in the UK, which in reality means I brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who was given it by the king as a reward for helping kill the previous owner.

And if someone quarries marble on my land to make a statue, it has the same provenance.

So we've basically decided there's a sliding scale. If it was stolen at gunpoint 1960 you've got to return it, but if it was in 1690 you get to keep it.

This is true for many things: homes which people own taken from Japanese-Americans, wage theft discovered too late,…

If you only care about your children and you have an effective means of transmitting wealth gotten through evil means, you merely have to forgo the benefit yourself.

Indeed, across the entire globe, only a tiny fraction of the population own the vast majority of land and other resources.

Let's all sort out this much bigger and globally impactful inequality first, before worrying about some museum pieces.

This is an interesting question. The answer is hard to pin down precisely, but sometimes when there is a change of governance the culture continues to exist. For instance, if something was produced in Japan before World War II, Japan remains the heir even though a new constitution is now in place. Similar with something produced in Moscow during the Soviet era: Russia is the heir. But something produced in Kyiv during the Soviet era, Ukraine is the heir.

> The easiest woke thing

Please don't derail discussion with inflammatory culture war, it's against the HN guidelines.

I think for the same reason we have a Statute of Limitations on property crimes, you shouldn't have to return anything. Returning it would be very woke indeed.

Do children inherit the sins of their parents?

And using your bad example. If someone 300 years from now had an item of little sentimental value to them, but meant the world to another family that has a strong history tied with that company, wouldn’t you say that the moral thing is to give it to people that care about the object?

It’s not always about the law and giving legal responsibilities. It’s just about doing the decent and moral thing.

I mean, if I took a gold bar stamped with your name and authentically yours from you and decades pass and your son meets my son and my son shows off his gold bar, does your son not have a right to that bar?

Seems like straightforward theft. Intellectual property and imputed losses are hard but an item that is still itself? It feels different.

For example, do the people who think art taken during the colonial era from Asia and brought to France or England should be returned also think that art taken from the Catholic Church should be returned to the Catholic Church? Probably not. Has this happened? Yes, absolutely.

In any event morally unscrupulous rich people in other parts of the world may have no problem buying or stealing these items once they have left western museums where they may disappear forever.