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to its formal character. An act is ethical if it’s what could be a rule for everyone else—regardless of what that action actually is. Because it is free of content, the categorical imperative is easily distorted; rather than doing what we think everyone should do, we might think we should do what everyone else is doing. Since George Michael grows up in a house of lies and deception, he feels incapable of being truthful and honest. He can’t tell Michael the truth about his feelings for Maeby. The moral law slips into a form of conformism and groupthink.6 While George Michael tries to do the right thing, he often takes his cues from those around him.

Going Both Ways

Arrested Development is hilarious in its characters’ unconscious use of double entendre. Lines are written and delivered to perfectly capture the contradiction between what the characters intend and what they actually do. These scenes are especially funny because the characters’ intentions are good—but these good intentions are crushed by complete lack of self-awareness. Because it’s unexpected, double entendre often makes the show more fun than a ship full of hot seamen. Michael names his son after himself and his father—only to end up with George Michael. While trying to be a good uncle, he naively sings “Afternoon Delight” with Maeby. Tobias is proud to become the world’s first “analrapist,” a unique combination of an analyst and a therapist. When George Michael has a crush on his ethics teacher, Lindsay thinks he needs a mother figure and offers to “fill that role” for him at any time. It’s like watching Sally Field morph into Mrs. Robinson before your eyes. The Bluth stair car is hurtling toward hell, down the road paved with good intentions.

For Kant, moral action is all about intent: Acting on reason, out of respect for the moral law, is the only basis for ethical action. As Kant writes, “Duty is the necessity of an action executed from respect for law.”7 Actions that spring from desire or feeling have no moral worth, even if they’re permissible. It might be good for Tobias to be a “leather daddy,” so he can get close to Maeby, but if that’s his motivation, that’s not truly ethical. Morality requires submission to the categorical imperative. Our desires must be constrained, bound and chained so as to obey the commands of the moral law. We stand, for Kant, “under a discipline of reason,”8 and it’s when we find ourselves handcuffed, kneeling at the feet of the moral law, knowing that we deserve to be punished because we have been very, very bad—that’s when we’re moral, and discover our true humanity. Tobias, stop licking the moral law’s boots, you horse’s ass!

In its own unique way Arrested Development asks us some critical questions about Kant’s approach. Is ethics really all about intention? When Michael tries to do the right thing by offering the housekeeper a ride, but terrorizes a random woman who thinks he’s going to kill her, is he really acting ethically? When Lindsay takes up a philanthropic cause, but wants to dry the wetlands, are good intentions really enough? Or is some attention to what one actually does necessary?

Beyond the Never-Nude: Nietzsche’s Man of the Future

More and more it seems to me that the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today.9

Whereas Kant’s philosophy strives for inner consistency so as to avoid self-contradiction, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) asks whether morality itself is a contradictory project. Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s world held Kant’s ethics to be the height of human achievement, and valued the freedom, respect, and disinterestedness (unselfishness) of Kant above all else. For Nietzsche, however, these values were anything but what they seemed; the very “progress” of Kant completed the decline of humanity.

First, Nietzsche reflects extensively on how our values are constructed: what’s the origin