I’m a big Breaking Bad fan. The show is about a man, Walter White, who gets diagnosed with cancer and decides to start making and selling meth to make money to support his family after he dies. The premise of the show is that selling drugs is bad, and doing this bad thing eventually led to Walter becoming morally corrupt and evil. This brings up a few questions,
1) What makes something morally wrong?
2) Where is the line between doing morally wrong things, but still being a good person, and doing morally wrong things, and being a bad person?
Morality is the system through which we determine right and wrong conduct. There are many different theories about how we should determine morality. When determining morality, it’s important that it’s not subjective or centered on an individual’s self interests. Morality should be able to be applied universally, which is why constructs like religion, aren’t good judges of morality. Morality should also be consistent, which rules out constructs like the law. The morality theory that best fits these criteria is utilitarianism. This theory states that right and wrong is determined by the overall goodness of the consequences of action. When it comes to morality, consequences of one’s decisions, and actions, should take precedence over intention. You could have good intentions, but be morally wrong due to the actions, and the consequences of those actions, that took place to reach those intentions. Walter White is an example of this, as well as other pop culture characters, like Thanos in the Marvel movies.
So what makes something morally right? The utilitarianist would say that to be morally right, you must act towards maximizing human well being. The reason that human well being is specified, is because other living entities aren’t on the same level of consciousness as humans. They exist outside the framework of morality. Other things in that category are things like war. The actions between soldiers at war against other soldiers, are outside the framework of morality. The ideal action would produce the best consequence, while having the lowest amount of pain and suffering. Self defense is a grey area. When it comes to self defense, you have the moral right to defend yourself enough to subdue your attacker. However it’s only morally right to kill in that situation if your life is on the line, and there’s really no other option other than killing.
Adding on to this, a morally wrong action includes harming an outside party for your own gain, without their knowledgeable consent, while you have knowledge of your action. This is important to include to explain why things like euthanasia, and distributing drugs are not morally wrong. While both of these actions are harmful to the person receiving them, it’s their moral right to choose to do those things. Knowledgeable consent is an important part of this equation. Any kind of coercion or deception impairs someone’s ability to provide knowledgeable consent. So selling drugs is not inherently morally wrong, but forcing someone to buy your drug, or intentionally selling them a drug that isn’t the one they asked for would be morally wrong. You can make the argument, that selling drugs leads to other morally wrong actions, but my response to that would be that legalizing that practice would lead to those morally wrong actions becoming less prominent relative to selling drugs.
Where is the line between doing morally wrong things, but still being a good person, and doing morally wrong things, and being a bad person? Going off of Breaking Bad, Walter White isn’t a bad person at the beginning of the show, but by the end he becomes one of the worst television villains of all time. But how did he get there? In the beginning episodes of the series, he makes morally wrong decisions, but the audience viewed it as acceptable because he was trying to make money to help his family. As the show went on, and his riches grew, he continued to do more morally wrong actions. Even after it was clear that he made more than enough money to support his family after his death, he continued to harm others for his own personal gain. You could make the argument that once someone reaches that point, that’s when they cross over to the dark side, and become a bad person. I disagree with this idea.
This idea that people are good or bad because of the number of morally right and wrong decisions they make is too black and white for this society. The line between good and bad is thin. Earlier I mentioned that morally right actions must be done to maximize the wellbeing of the people. In Breaking Bad, there’s this scene where Walter kills two men who were in a gang, and forced kids to sell drugs, and kill people. Now you can view what Walter did as the morally right choice. That community is better off without those two guys, but that decision to kill those men, whether morally right or wrong, doesn’t make Walt a good person. I think the point that Breaking Bad, is trying to make, is that nobody is good or bad. Anyone is capable of making morally wrong decisions if they’re put in a certain situation. This is something I agree with for the most part. There are a few exceptions, but it’s rare that you can label someone as purely good or bad.
This video is another example of the blurred line between good and bad
https://youtu.be/87404S8oOAs
Just some guy on the internet 