I really enjoyed the first four seasons of 24, not because Jack tortures bad guys and wins, but because the show showed how good people, with really, really bad choices, sometimes do bad things for a good purpose. Remember when they torture one of their fellow workers at CTU because they suspect her–and she turns out to be completely innocent?
Liberals spent much of the 1980s promoting the idea through the educational system that right and wrong are either cultural or situational. The National Education Association for a while had a “lifeboat” scenario that they encouraged students to use to discuss who to throw overboard from a leaking lifeboat. Obviously, the goal was to promote the idea that abortion is ugly, yes, but think of how much worse it might be for the pregnant teenager if you she carried that baby to term!
No surprise; once you abolish the notion of absolute right and wrong with respect to ethics, you can throw God out of the picture, too. That such scenarios are actually extraordinarily rare in the real world didn’t seem to bother liberals back then.
24 created similarly rare scenarios where a good person has to made hard choices (as happened with waterboarding of three al-Qaeda VIPs)–and suddenly, liberals aren’t happy with situational ethics. What a surprise!
