ABSTRACT
Preservation has become an important part of architectural practice, but how might ethics help us determine what is good to preserve and what isn’t. One potentially useful line of inquiry arises from the ethics of preserving human lives, at both the beginning and end of life. We do not have a right to deprive people of their future, and assuming that the possibility of having a future still exists, then we do all we can to preserve their life. The same could be said of buildings: if they still have some “life” left in them and a possible future, then we should do all we can to keep them alive, not just for practical reasons, but for ethical ones as well.
