Evil The Wire is drenched in moral matters. We see dilemmas between consequentialist and duty-based moral reasoning:
• Should Herc lie about where he got his information about Marlo? • Is McNulty right to lie about the existence of a serial killer if it results in the police department's getting more resources?
• Is there something fundamentally wrong about the creation of Hamsterdam?
We see individuals working on improving their own moral characters: • Cutty (trying to get himself right) • Prez (trying to find his purpose in life) • Bubbles (trying to kick his drug habit)
We see discussions of whether there are moral absolutes: • Bodie criticizing Marlo's ruthlessness as a violation of the criminal's code • Omar's criticizing Stringer and Avon for breaking the "Sunday truce" Kima's reporting of McNulty and Lester to Daniels for their manufacturing of the "Red Ribbon Killer" case Morality is often presupposed, however. It's assumed that there is good
and evil, and the debates, if there are any, are really just over which actions are good and which evil. It's perhaps a little more than ironic when the card accompanying the flowers sent to Butchie's funeral reads, "Butchie, Woe to them that call evil good and good evil. Your true and loyal friend, Proposition Joe." ("Transitions," Season 5) Butchie's death is a crucial event in Omar's life and belongs in our
investigation here, but before we get into that, we need some specifics about Nietzsche's vision of the overman. The overman will certainly not call what is evil good and what is good evil. Instead, he will question the very basis of this distinction between good and evil. When Nietzsche wrote, he didn't think the overman had come to be yet.
He, and his literary mouthpiece Zarathustra, were preparers of the way, bridges from man to the overman. It's not clear whether Nietzsche thinks of the overman as the actual next evolutionary step or an unattainable exemplar. The reason why it's not clear is that Nietzsche intentionally writes in a way that makes it hard to nail him down. He characteristically contradicts himself. He uses some of his terms in idiosyncratic ways. He admits that he likes to wear masks in order not to be easily understood, and even to be misunderstood, by inappropriate readers.