| Summary: | This article seeks to analyse the moral and ethical evolutions in TV series 24’s seventh season. In its first years, the show was accused of overtly supporting the utilitarian antiterrorism policy of the Bush administration. Still, it arguably initiated an ideological reorientation in its seventh season which started airing in January 2009 just a few days before Obama’s inaugural address. All the controversies surrounding the show – the first of which being its highly criticised depiction of torture – were now being thoroughly questioned within the diegesis, which fuelled an overall philosophical debate on which ethics to espouse in the War on Terror. Two normative ethical theories were opposed, namely Emmanuel Kant’s deontology and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism. Hence, this article highlights the ideological tensions at work in 24’s seventh season and assesses the extent to which the show actually departed from its original ethical stand in the wake of Obama’s election.
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