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(2017) Philosophy and breaking bad, Dordrecht, Springer.
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.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40343-4_1
Full citation:
Baker, J. (2017)., What's stopping me: Breaking bad and virtue ethics, in R. Arp (ed.), Philosophy and breaking bad, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 3-15.
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