Learning from the Devil

Abstract By accommodating the antihero programs in the context of aesthetic cognitivism on the one hand and philosophical theorizing about evil on the other, I explore insights—ethical goods, as Carl Plantinga refers to them—that these works give us into social and phenomenological aspects of evil, and I argue that they also serve as a philosophical probing of immorality and wickedness. I claim that antihero program is a subgenre of crime fiction and that it continues crime fiction's traditional interest in evil individuals and immoral actions, and I strengthen this view by relying on contemporary research in criminology. My account is based on analysis of the aesthetic features of these works, on the particular aspects of viewers’ long-term commitment to serialized fiction and the affective relations they develop for the characters, most notably their cognitive interest in the stories and the effective ties for the characters.