prior probability

Note: this is the second post in a multi-part series.

Craig Kettleman, a thieving treasurer, has been accused of embezzling $1.6 million in taxpayer dollars from Bernalillo County. With the help of his wife Betsy, who is fully aware of her husband’s crime, the Kettlemans (pictured below) decide to keep their ill-gotten gains and soon go into hiding, and at one point, they offer Jimmy McGill the sum of $30,000 to keep their hiding spot a secret. [“Hero” (Season 1, Episode 3).] The criminal conspiracy between Craig and Betsy Kettleman, not to mention their bribing of Jimmy, once again generates a difficult moral dilemma: should Jimmy keep his promise to stay quiet? After all, he has accepted their money, and we have a moral duty to keep our promises. But at the same time, lawyers have an ethical duty to avoid assisting a client—even a prospective one—in conduct that the lawyer knows to be criminal. [See, for example, Model Rule 1.2 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which prohibits a lawyer from counseling or assisting a client in conduct the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent.]

But Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is not the only character in “Better Call Saul” who is a party to an ongoing illicit agreement. As it happens, most of the characters in this popular spin-off series, just like most of the characters in Breaking Bad, end up making promises that are either illicit or illegal, or both. For the record, I will highlight two additional illicit relationships in “Better Call Saul” in my next post …

Note: this is the first post in a multi-part series.

The proposition that “promises ought to be kept” is quite possibly one of the most important normative ideals or value judgements in daily life. [1] But what about illegal or immoral promises?

Philosophically speaking, what is the moral status of such illicit agreements, i.e. promises that are wrongful in some legal or moral sense? What moral obligations, if any, do illicit promises generate? As it happens, these philosophical questions are posed time and time again in the hit TV show Better Call Saul, beginning with the episode “Uno”–the series premiere–when our hero Jimmy McGill (pictured below, right), with the help of two teenage accomplices, orchestrates a phony vehicle-pedestrian accident in order for Jimmy, a small-time struggling Albuquerque attorney, to lure a prospective client.

In brief, Jimmy’s accomplices agree to help him stage a car accident in exchange for $2000. The moral dilemma, however, is this: Had this elaborate but illicit scheme worked according to plan (spoiler alert: it did not!), wouldn’t Jimmy have been morally obligated to keep his promise to pay the twins the promised $2000? After all, we have a general moral obligation to keep our promises, but at the same time, Jimmy’s promise was part of an illicit scheme; his promise to pay off his accomplices was an immoral one. So, how can one have a moral obligation to perform an immoral action?

Moreover, in many ways Jimmy’s entire persona–beginning with his conman’s past in Cicero, Illinois–is a living embodiment of this moral paradox. Back in Cicero, for example, Jimmy’s closest friend was Marco Pasternak (pictured below, left), a fellow con artist. Together, they would run an elaborate con in which they duped unsuspecting marks into buying fake Rolex watches. [See, for example, “Hero” (Season 1, Episode 3) and “Marco” (Season 1, Episode 10).] The mark thinks he is buying a genuine Rolex, but he must also know that what he is doing is wrong; after all, he is buying a dead man’s Rolex with the dead man’s own money! So, is the mark morally entitled to get “his” money back? And if so, do Jimmy or Marco have a moral obligation to provide such a refund?

Either way, it is no exaggeration to say that all the relationships in “Better Call Saul” are explicitly premised on illicit promises! To see how, I will identify several such ongoing “illicit agreements” in my next few blog posts.

[1] See, for example, David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Book 3, Part 2, §5 (David Fate Norton & Mary J. Norton, eds.) (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). See alsoAllen Habib, Promises, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018). Cf. Mary Midgley, “The Game Game”, Philosophy Vol. 49, (1974), p. 235: “[P]romising is everywhere a kingpin of human culture.”

My next “Advanced Topics in Law” class, which is scheduled for later today, will be devoted to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally, so before I start blogging about Better Call Saul and the problem of illicit promises, I want to share two recent headlines regarding Bitcoin with my loyal followers:

For the record, here is a link to the Peter Thiel article (dated Oct. 21, 2021), and here is a link to the Jamie Dimon article (Oct. 11), but more importantly, who is right about Bitcoin: Thiel or Dimon? To the point, is Bitcoin an irrational bubble, or the best thing since sliced bread?

Bonus Video: Check out this entertaining rap battle between “Alexander Hamilton” (anti-crypto) and “Satoshi Nakamoto” (pro-crypto):

I will be taking a brief hiatus from blogging today and tomorrow, but I will soon resume my blogging duties by turning my attention to the hit show Better Call Saul. (Pictured below is the poster for Season 6 of Better Call Saul, the final season, which is scheduled to air sometime in 2022.) Specifically, I will explore the problem of illicit or wicked promises and what moral weight, if any, we should assign to these types of promises.

The government is once again “postponing” the release of the next batch of JFK assassination records. For your reference, here is the official announcement.

What if we replaced all of Alabama and Mississippi as well as most of Georgia and parts of Tennessee with “Greater Florida”? And what if, instead of sleepy Tallahassee, we made St Augustine, Florida’s oldest city, the capital of this new mega-state?

All great college courses are based on thought-provoking questions. This syllabus asks the most important question of all. (Source: University of Florida.)

Via Kottke: “The Simpsons Library Instagram account has been documenting all of the books, magazines, and other printed matter that has appeared on the long-running sitcom.”

That is the title of my research poster on the law and ethics of Chegg, which I will be presenting at the Florida Statewide Symposium on Best Practices in Undergraduate Research this weekend. (This year, the symposium will take place at the University of Florida in Gainesville; more details about this annual symposium are available here.) Reduced to a screenshot, my massive poster will look like this — click on the image for a better-quality resolution: