The Ethics of Repair

A very early talk, this was a paper presented in the final year of my undergraduate degree in Philosophy at King’s College London, 2018. At the time, I had been thinking about how one could do ‘medical ethics for conservation’, and proposed a philosophically informed reading of the manifesto of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

Since working with conservation colleagues over the course of my Undergraduate Research Fellowship, MA project and my recent work with the Chelsea Maypole Group, I would now moderate this ambition. One of the beauties of conservation thinking is its inextricability from practice — its ethics can’t be understood unless faced with the material reality of its decisions. Collaboration allows us a more sensitive route to understanding and shaping this ethics through practice, as opposed to imposing exterior frameworks from the outside.

The conference was the project of the King’s College London Philosophy Society, coordinated by Jack Allen, Elsa Brsinger, Immy Kimberly and Abigail Wood.