This chapter focuses on the everyday. It considers how responsibility for the everyday, quotidian care of cultural heritage is assumed or allocated and the form that this takes. It analyses how care is translated into access, preservation and care of collections and places and how risk is managed when access has the potential to harm the long-term future of cultural heritage. This chapter analyses the ways in which access and preservation are supported, through financial support as well as in statutory provisions; it analyses the duties of care placed on custodians of cultural heritage and the role played by standard-setting.

This chapter defends the existence of negligence, understood here as a form of inadvertent moral wrongdoing for which the wrongdoer is presumptively and non-derivatively responsible and blameworthy. The wrong in question is failure of due care. This common-sensical claim needs defense in view of widespread skepticism about the possibility of non-derivative inadvertent wrongdoing. A major source of this skepticism is the conviction that all wrongdoing must ultimately derive from intentional or knowing violations.