Danny ChaiScott’s right; the self-sacrificial nature of Jack Bauer is one admirable, Christian quality, so I guess it’s not completely wrong to admire him. Honestly though, I don’t think think that’s the primary quality people admire. They just think he’s bad arse.
The problem with JB is that his moral issues are muddied by the fact that he always knows the best thing to do, and the things he does nearly always gets the results he wants. These things being true, using whatever means necessary seems a little more justifiable, a little less troubling. But that’s not true to real life at all. What would be far more interesting is if he was only right 80% of the time. And his methods achieved his results only 80% of the time. Then would he still be justified in doing what he does? That would raise some really thought-provoking issues.
But yeah, the fact that he’s always right and effective muddies the moral difficulties of his actions. In real life, what he does would be terrible. Like torture. It’s (supposedly) well established that torture is not an effective means of eliciting information from prisoners; in the end, they’ll just say anything to make it stop. You could get the wrong message about that from watching 24. And if you think about it, the Bush administration is like a Jack Bauer – they believe they should be able to do anything to achieve their ends, and that anything short of that is a waste of time that puts lives in danger. And that mentality, in both JB and the government, is wrong.