How Ethical Are You?
An old ethics question raises the hypothetical dilemma of the value of life
A philosophy professor at Portland State University, Peter Boghossian, went viral this week when he posed an old ethics question to his 124k followers on Twitter. He simply asked, “If the Louvre were burning and you could only save the Mona Lisa, or an old dog, which would you save?”
The tweet utilized the polling option and allowed people to vote on the issue. While not entirely surprising, the results still showed how wildly different people viewed this scenario through their own lenses of morality and estimations of value regarding the preservation of history and the transience of experience. Far more people said they would choose to save the Mona Lisa than one might have expected, though the dog still ended up winning the most votes.
This hypothetical scenario is usually presented by putting the choice of art preservation against that of human life. A somewhat famous poem by Linda Pastan called “Ethics” references this question, with the choice being between saving an…
