Breaking Bad

Ethics and morality! Whee!

While I think that many of us know that we will eventually die* we still conform to societal norms such as "don't steal, don't cheat, don't kill."

However, how would you act if someone came up to you and said "You have a terminal illness, you're going to be dead in n months."

How would you live your life? Would you still continue to do what you've been doing?

Or would you do things that you haven't done before or considered doing, being constricted by societal norms. Would you steal? Would you cheat? Would you kill?

I think that knowing you're going to die within a certain time frame frees you to do things that otherwise you wouldn't consider normally doing. Crossing things off your bucket list (the list of things you want to do before you "kick the bucket" and shuffle off this mortal toil) for example. Some of these things may be ethically or morally questionable, such as cheating, stealing, or killing. After all, what is the worst that can happen - you get killed? You're going to die anyway. You get caught? Fine, then the state has to provide your medical and take care of you until you die, which will probably be before you come to trial in any case. I can see how some people would see this as a win-win situation.

I can certainly sympathize with the main character on "Breaking Bad"--he's run out of insurance money and options. He's fifty years old with a pregnant wife, a terminal disease, and a special-needs son. He's probably depleted any savings that he had, and as evidenced in the short clip, is working at a car wash to supplement his income.

So he turns to making meth. A bad thing? Certainly society says so, we have laws against it**. However, look at it from another angle: he is a chemist, so he probably isn't making meth but actual amphetamines; as a chemist he certainly knows lab procedures; and as a chemist he is probably not going to cut the product with something like rat poison that can make people sick or kill them--his product is undoubtedly safer than virtually any other meth that could be bought.

*I, for one, don't plan on dying. As soon as we can download our consciousness to the vast Intertubes, I'll be one of the first in line. I want to be one of the 100 W pure energy consciousness that you see on Star Trek--though knowing my luck I'll just be a dim bulb...

** Prohibition doesn't work. Never has, never will. Prohibition against alcohol in the 20s gave us organized crime and the Kennedy involvement in politics (ol' Papa Joe Kennedy was a rum-runner and that is how he made his money). Prohibition against drugs has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, given rise to drug cartels, and has contributed to countless of innocent deaths. I don't know what the answer is, but frankly I know that it isn't Prohibition.