Breaking bonds
White lines of love and hate
pp. 191-198
in: Robert Arp (ed), Philosophy and breaking bad, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Why do Jesse and Walt remain a team for such a long time? They are not friends; Walt has forced Jesse to be his partner through threat of exposure. Jesse manifests the worst behaviors of Walt's students: irresponsibility, flippancy, drug-use, ignorance and immaturity. Jesse has equal reason to despise Walter; he's arrogant, uncaring, self-interested, and dismissive. Walter has a son to love; Jesse isn't an obvious surrogate child; Jesse's own life is full of friends and lovers. I explore the strange bond between Jesse and Walt, and argue that Jesse's practice of an ethic-of-care (and Walter's poor enactment of this kind of ethical system) finally, emotionally separates them from one another. Jesse is "family-man" Walter believes himself to be.