What's stopping me
Breaking bad and virtue ethics
pp. 3-15
in: Robert Arp (ed), Philosophy and breaking bad, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Breaking Bad poses a question about morality: if there is no such thing as cosmic justice, what is the point of being good? In this chapter, I argue that the writers of Breaking Bad ably convey a Miltonic account of evil, continue and improve upon the very argument Milton made in Paradise Lost, secularizing it and applying it to our era. Yet I argue that the show ends up offering a critique of Miltonic ethics. It is Aristotelian virtue ethics, and not Miltonic ethics, that offers a better answer to the question "Why be moral?" Walter White's dramatized life, in other words, is an inadequate response to the question.
