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Notes -
Glass Onion ends with burning the Mona Lisa because Teacher Lady has her feathers so ruffled, and I don't think "black woman destroys cultural inheritance of humanity because she's peeved" is that moral a narrative. If you wanted to look at it in a certain light, you could even claim it's racist: black people depicted as resorting to violence because they're incapable of responding to set-backs any other way.
But to be fair, Johnson's Knives Out universe is a very stylised one running on particular tropes and only tangential to our reality. It's artificial and chock-full of artifice, because it's recreating the Golden Age 'body in the library' detective stories where the more baroque the plot, the better, so long as you could be held to have played fair with scattering clues throughout the book (the early Ellery Queen novels routinely had a "challenge to the reader" about 'can you guess/work out whodunnit?' before the final chapter wrapping up the entire case).
I can steelman that one. If your sibling was brutally murdered, and your response is to freak out and break some 'property,' is that really morally objectionable? Are we genuinely weighting the continued existence of the Mona Lisa (of which there are many copies, its not some hidden gem) over a human life at that point? Its a thought worth weighing, at least. I think one can sympathize enough to see why from the sibling's perspective a piece of artwork is not worth preserving over the life of a loved one.
And yet, it is also pretty hard to believe the point "genius black lady invents something which is stolen by mediocre white guy" since that's something that has probably never happened in all of history.
The concepts in Glass Onion were actually really good and were probably dragged down by the Johnson's absolute need to get his message across at all costs.
It’s worth a great many human lives by most reasonable measures
Can we quantify it? How many family members would you sacrifice to preserve it?
I think people's moral intuitions will diverge pretty aggressively on this.
Zero, I'd burn the whole world down to protect my family, but that's why we don't let the parents of soldiers decide our military strategy. It's good and right that each of us individually values our loved ones above everything else, but you can't possibly make society-wide decisions like that.
If some demon told me he would destroy the Mona Lisa unless I agreed to let him sacrifice a random stranger, and then kept adding strangers until I told him to just destroy the painting instead, I imagine I'd get to a couple dozen before my conscience swang the other way. But maybe not, it's really hard to predict how my ethics would fare under such extreme circumstances.
Yeah.
And I think that is the question he was waving at with that scenario. "Are you truly outraged more by losing the painting than by this character's family being murdered and the killer getting away with it?"
The character destroying the painting will have a very different perspective on it than us, the outside viewer.
But destroying the painting doesn't achieve anything except destroying the painting. It doesn't prove he committed the murder. It isn't a motive for him to commit the murder. It has nothing to do with the murder. It's just destruction.
Yeah, but which one makes you more upset.
Have I stopped beating my wife yet, you ask? I reply that I am not married.
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