British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 61 | Number 3 | July 2021 | pp. 307–316 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayab009 © British Society of Aesthetics 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com New Objections to Cultural Appropriation in the Arts James O. Young Some writers have objected to cultural appropriation in the arts on the grounds that it violates cultures’ property rights. Recently a paper by Erich Matthes and another by C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl have argued that cultural appropriation does not violate property rights but that it is nevertheless often objectionable. Matthes argues that cultural appropriation contributes to the oppression of disadvantaged cultures. Nguyen and Strohl argue that it violated the intimacy of cultures. This paper argues that neither Matthes nor Nguyen and Strohl succeed in showing that cultural appropriation is often objectionable. 1. Introduction Cultural appropriation continues to be hotly debated, all the more so in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, but two things have changed in the period since the pub- lication of Young (2008). For a start, the scope of the debate has greatly expanded be- yond the realm of the fne arts. Now appropriations of clothing styles, hairstyles, dance moves and a variety of other cultural products are sources of controversy. The grounds on which philosophers base arguments against cultural appropriation have also shifted. Young (2008) focused on harm and profound ofence as grounds for objecting to cultural appropriation. A new generation of philosophers has generally accepted that acts of cul- tural appropriation often cannot be shown to be wrong on such grounds but hold that the acts can still be morally objectionable. This essay will examine two recent ways of arguing against cultural appropriation. According to the frst, advanced by Matthes (2019), some cultural appropriation contributes to oppression and, consequently, is wrong. According to the second, acts of ‘cultural appropriation can constitute a breach of intimacy’ ( Nguyen and Strohl, 2019 , p. 981) and, consequently, be wrong. This essay will argue that neither of these new arguments successfully establishes the conclusion that appropriation from minority and indigenous cultures is, in general, wrong. The framework established in Young (2008) ought to be retained. Unless an act of cultural appropriation can be shown to be harmful (in a way that violates a right) or gratuitously profoundly ofensive, then the act ought not to be regarded as morally objectionable. Both Nguyen and Strohl (2019) on the one hand and Matthes (2019) on the other agree that debates about cultural appropriation are not debates about cultural property, and that cultural appropriation is not harmful in the way that theft is harmful. According to Matthes, we ‘don’t need the concept of property to understand the cultural appropriation debate—we need the concept of power’ (2019 , p. 1005). In a similar vein, Nguyen and Strohl state that the wrongness of cultural appropriation ‘cannot plausibly be analyzed in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/61/3/307/6352358 by University of Victoria user on 16 September 2021