Morality and Ethics in TV: A Kantian Approach to Breaking Bad

Imagine you are a high school chemistry teacher and family man diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Faced with this news, you decide to use your brilliant chemistry skills to provide your family with everything they will need after your passing.

Together with a former student, you begin a lucrative career cooking up and selling meth. This is the story of Breaking Bad’s Walter White.

From this follows many questions. Is it morally or ethically sound to act in ways that society would deem to be wrong if it is with the intention to carry out the duty of preserving the health and happiness of one’s family?

Immanuel Kant argued that what is ethical is so because it comes from acting out our duty, and that morality should be evaluated by one’s motives and intentions rather than the actual consequences or outcomes of the actions.

So Kant would say, essentially, that Walter is justified in his actions because he does so with the positive and moral intention of providing for his family.

What do you think? Is the Kantian approach sound enough to argue in favor of Walter’s twisted life?

Controversial Curves: Mad Men’s Joan Holloway and Feminism According to Ayn Rand

Mad Men’s portrayal of women in the workplace during the 1960’s has been considered to be extremely accurate. My personal favorite example is the show’s casting of Christina Hendricks and her fiery character Joan Holloway.

Joan is arguably the most important feminist character and portrait of Rand’s feminist philosophy on the show. Confident and sexy, she rejects the status quo and refuses to settle into a life of marriage and children.

A career woman, she takes her job seriously and is looked up to by all other women in the office. She also is an advocate of contraceptives, as Rand was throughout her life. She expresses her personal motives and sexual identity without guilt, making her Rand’s ideal feminist character.

Creator Matt Weiner has said time and time again he views Mad Men as a feminist show. Former female secretaries from the time period have said the show hit the nail on the head when it came to depicting sexual harassment in the office.

Although Joan appears at times to bow down to the male-centered power structure of Sterling Cooper she uses her charm, wit and beauty to pretty much run the entire office and the personal lives of all the employees.

And those curves? A character all their own. Joan Holloway IS the modern woman of 1960’s America and a great depiction of Rand’s most essential feminist views.

Don Draper: Mad Men’s portrait of Ayn Rand’s male hero

AMC’s hit dramatic series Mad Men is more than media tycoons, cigarettes, cocktails and affairs. Its characters and themes illustrate a larger and more important concept: Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American philosopher and prominent writer of the 20^th century. She coined her own philosophical concept of Objectivism, which holds that humans are independent and autonomous beings whose sole purpose is of self-interest.

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute,” she wrote in her novel Atlas Shrugged.

Writing from a realist perspective, she contends that the only way society can function is if it embraces human nature rather than fight it. Because humans are inherently selfish creatures, the only economic system suitable is that of capitalism. 

Each lead character on the show is crafted from a somewhat seamless translation of Rand’s more prominent fictional characters and concepts.

For my next few posts, I will give some examples of Rand-inspired characters from the viewpoint of both genders. The first is Don Draper, Creative Director of Sterling Cooper advertising firm in Manhattan.

Draper’s character seems to be written by Rand herself: handsome, charming and intelligent with a mysterious past and a lack of interest and fulfillment from his portrait-perfect family.

Admired by his colleagues (and viewers) for all he seems to have going for him, Draper is constantly running from his life and from himself. Driven by his own desires and selfish motives, he has numerous affairs with independent and liberated successful women.

Don Draper is the strong male hero (or anti-hero, for that matter) that Rand was waiting for, an enterprising and entrepreneuring success nothing short of perfect. 

“The reason you haven’t felt it is because it doesn’t exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons. You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.” -Don Draper, Mad Men Season 1, Episode 1: “Smoke Gets in your Eyes”