This paper takes the position that our current treatments that involve infilling with a neutral rather than matched colour are deceptive to the viewer and that such deliberate mediation through the act of conservation can deny the viewer an authentic understanding of the heritage object. Governing guidelines and documents describe authenticity as the alignment of the object and its story but for some practitioners the concept remains tied to originality. Authenticity could be considered a fluid concept as it is built (...) via the individual relationship between object and viewer. Many of the default approaches to conservation fail to address the fluidity embodied in the object and its representation of the passage of time. A lack of examination into the inherent biases of our work defends the status quo within our museums under a cloak of neutrality. Disruptive conservation is proposed as a challenge, exemplified by a jarring visible mend. It is an approach designed to disturb complacency. It calls upon analysis of our biases and challenges the consequences of freezing the meanings of our conserved objects. Placing the process of disruptive conservation into treatment dialogues enables conservators to account for the object’s journey in how their intervention is portrayed. It stops the object existing simply as a representation of the past and allows it to continue its evolution. The question ‘Why don’t I make this fill in hot pink?’ is offered as a catalyst for an appraisal of an object’s place and context without assuming or imposing a fake neutrality. (shrink)

What is the morally significant feature of discrimination? All of the following seem plausible – (i) discrimination is a kind of wrongdoing and it wrongs discriminatees, which is a matter of intrapersonal morality; (ii) in view of cases of indirect discrimination, significant normative features of discrimination are best captured in a discriminatee‐focused, or harm‐based, way; and (iii) discrimination, as an act‐type, necessarily involves interpersonal comparison. The first task of this article is to address which of intra‐ or interpersonal comparison is (...) relevant to philosophical questions concerning discrimination. I submit that each of them has a place in the theory of discrimination; while interpersonal comparison is relevant in determining whether a differentiating act counts as discrimination, intrapersonal comparison is relevant in assessing whether it is morally wrong. The second task is to develop further a harm‐based answer to the latter question. My final proposal is as follows: discrimination is pro tanto morally wrong to the extent that it makes the discriminatees worse off than they would be were it not for the discrimination at issue, where one's well‐being is understood in terms of what one endorses in one's optimum form. (shrink)

In Lying and Insincerity, Andreas Stokke argues that bald-faced lies are genuine lies, and that lies are always assertions. Since bald-faced lies seem not to be aimed at convincing addressees of their contents, Stokke concludes that assertions needn’t have this aim. This conflicts with a traditional version of intentionalism, originally due to Grice, on which asserting something is a matter of communicatively intending for one’s addressee to believe it. I argue that Stokke’s own account of bald-faced lies faces serious problems (...) and give several responses on behalf of intentionalism. Some bald-faced lies are best understood as irrational attempts to deceive. Others are best understood as indirect speech acts of various kinds. Still, others are best understood as conventional speech acts, which differ from communicative acts like assertion in the ways that they must be embedded in social institutions or practices. An overarching theme of this essay is that we should not make theoretical decisions about how to classify speech acts by consulting ordinary usage. (shrink)