commentary Archives - The Cracked Door

The Tower of Hattan (A Short Story)

One day a man of Hattan said, “We should build a giant skyscraper up to the heavens. It would be the perfect city, heaven on earth, with everything we need all in one place: our homes, our businesses, our shopping, our schools, our worship, our recreation. We would be able to do everything inside without ever having to leave.”

Many people in Hattan liked this, so they elected him mayor. They began construction immediately in the city’s center.

God saw their desire to build a wondrous tower just like the heavens and decided to help them. As construction demands grew, they needed more and more workers, so God brought people from all corners of the world to help create, build, and dwell in this new heaven, and they settled in the areas surrounding the tower.

As these workers started to build, some became weary of how these foreigners were hurting the city. Even worse, they started to incorporate their own thinking, their own concepts into the building. As the building became larger, these became parts of the foundation of this skyscraper.
The mayor tried to counter with an even more ambitious, unified plan to build over and around the deviations, which had become too embedded into the tower’s structural integrity to remove.

This required even more people with even more language and ideas. They moved into the ever-expanding communities surrounding the tower. Eventually, these peoples became weary of constructing the tower for the ungrateful inhabitants. Instead, these communities elected a new mayor who cancelled its construction once and for all to focus on the economic development of the now sprawling city and its residents.

At a press conference after her inauguration, she announced, “We will preserve the remains of this site as a memorial to our attempt to build a tower over the heavens.”

“The past mayor promised to build a heavenly place for us to live. What do you say to criticism that you are stopping this attempt to construct this heaven?” A journalist inquired.

“We are still going to try to make this city into its own heaven,” she replied. “But God’s Heaven is just wide before it is high.”

The Rabbit amidst the Flood (A Short Story)

I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. (Genesis 6:17, NIV Translation)

“We aren’t enough,” the rabbit cried to the others. They all looked equally perplexed and hurt.

“But why?” One stammered.

“I don’t know. God wants to do us all over again. That’s what he said. I was there when he spoke to the human.”

“But how would he expect to do that?”

“A giant flood.”

The statement washed over them. No one knew what to say. The rabbit sat there, but he could tell they couldn’t handle his presence anymore, so he left.

He stared out into the great vast night thinking about what would happen. Was God really going to drown them all? Did he do something wrong to deserve this? Was he or those he loved really so bad to deserve this?

God had said this newest species, the humans, had done something wrong, and he now regretted making them and all the other animals. But why single out all other animals as well? God couldn’t have been giving the whole story to this human. Maybe God only mentioned human wrongdoing to this human. The animals must have been something bad to get lumped in with the humans like this, and that was what he was going to find out.

Over the next several days, the rabbits spread the message of doom among the other animals.

The rabbit tried to work with the other creatures to form an action plan, but at first, the other animals just freaked out. They tried to think of as many ways as they could to pacify the deity and to convince him that their lives were worth continuing. They built altars to self-conflagrate, hoping this would appease God. Some even offered themselves to be sacrificed on the hope that their deaths might save all the other creatures.

Others turned to asceticism, convinced that we all must be too involved in the pleasures of the world. That must be why God is doing this. If they denied these to themselves, they thought they could save themselves or maybe even all the creatures of the world. Some predators even renounced eating their fellow animals entirely, until they withered nearly to the point of starvation.

God remained silent, never seeming to budge or care about how these animals harmed themselves on his behalf, but the rabbit could not get them to sit down and listen. So, he decided he needed to move on.

He went to the ocean, maybe the creatures of the sea had ideas on what to do. He sat at the edge of the water, striking up a conversation with a few sharks. As the rabbit asked for advice, they just laughed.

“There’s nothing you can do,” one shouted back. “Whatever you did wrong; you must accept your fate. Soon enough we will feast on the bounty of your corpses.”

He couldn’t get anything useful from them. The lucky freaks were immune, which they had come to see as a type of ordained privilege, as if they deserved to survive unlike these damned landed creatures. The fish did not see their land as kin but simply as an upcoming harvest.

These fish had given him an idea. They felt fine because they did not think they would be hurt by the danger. With proper hope for survival, his fellow landed creatures would be able to keep going. As a community, if they worked together, they might be able to influence the mind of God.

When he returned to his neighborhood, things had changed drastically. Anger had swept the terrestrial creatures. How could this god smite them for the evil the humans had done? They had each found their own way to curse God and die. Some retreated to their own worlds, where they could be by themselves. Even creatures that usually lived in flocks turned on each other and left for their own wildness.

Others sought to destroy the world around them. It was all going to wash away anyways. Who cares? They attacked other animals without thought or concern, seeming to revel in destruction. A few channeled their anger at the human building the ark, attacking him, his family, and the ark itself. He and his family were always able to hunt down the creatures that went after them, though, like God was protecting them.

Evidently, the other humans did not believe him about what God had said and criticized him for building the ark, but these animals strategically attacking him seemed to convince them that some unforeseen divine initiative was afoot. He thought some supernatural beings were sending him waves of animals to try to prevent him from fulfilling God’s command. This caused the humans to leave him alone and let him face his fate with the divine alone. For them, the gods must be having an argument, and they would wait to decide which side won.

The rabbit developed the idea to try to build his own ark. He organized a group of creatures with different sizes and skills, and they started by watching the human see how to build one. But they were never able to replicate his tools. They had no thumbs to hammer or even form the hammers and nails in the first place.

What they constructed never got off the ground. He could only compare his failure with the providential success of the man’s even more massive boat. He slowly realized all hope was lost. He was going to die. This God had decided to kill them, and there was nothing they could do about it. And for what? For the evils of some humans beyond their control. He really hated these humans.

He sunk into his burrow refusing comfort. As his daughter, I tried to get food for him to keep him going, but there seemed little point. He had already accepted that he was going to die, and nothing would change his mind.

In the process of finding food, the ark-building human found me. I had been chosen, as one of only two rabbits to survive on his boat. I desperately wanted to be with my father, but I guess I had another calling. God himself seemed to pick me, because no matter how much I tried to escape to see my father in his last moments, I could not.

As the waters engulfed the earth and we remained in our protective kiln of ark, I looked at the darkening world. As the waters rose, I could see my father salvaging the last bits of his makeshift boat, trying to keep his raft together on top of the coming storm, only for one extra-large wave to sink him into the depths.

This is the story I tell to you my children. Tell the story of your Great Rabbit Father. Remember the loss that God wrought onto us animals because of the humans. Trust no one. Humanity and their God least of all. Once we hopped in pride, but we must be vigilant. The world is dark and horrifying, and all we can do is try our best to survive.

What The Good Place’s Ending Leaves Out about Ethics (Reflection #9 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Eleanor helps comfort Tahinni through her family trauma.

This is my final article reflecting on the Good place (see the previous article and my whole series). It’s been an insightful ride. To be clear, the Good Place is one of my favorite sitcoms, both for breaking new ground in what is possible in a sitcom and for encouraging people to think through what it might look like to truly heal from wrongs in an afterlife. Yet I think its ending leaves something crucial out: only individuals receive resolution and improvement in the afterlife itself, denying any kind of collective rectification of the moral problems facing our world.

In the show, the main group of characters manage to reconfigure the afterlife from a punitive system where literally every human in the last 500 years gets eternally tortured in the Bad Place to a refining system where each individual must work through their moral failings so they are able to join all other perfected individuals in the Good Place. This changes the thinking around justice in itself from one of punishment to self-improvement for all.

One could analyze this shift in itself, but here, I will focus on a crucial aspect of justice that this leaves out: any discussion of rectification of the world to resolve the problems we have created. Broadly speaking, this rectification could look like seeking to fix or repair what an individual has destroyed through one’s immoral acts and more broadly like trying to resolve the structural issues built on the accumulation of immoral and destructive decisions by multiple humans. They get let out entirely in the show’s resolution. Instead, the show’s new afterlife implicitly encourages individuals to focus on themselves as the exclusive or primary focus of what it means to develop morally. Let’s break them down further through some examples.

One day when I was a little boy, I did not want to eat whatever my mom served me for dinner that day, so what did I do? When she went to the kitchen for a second, I threw it all on the floor. When my mom returned, not only did she scold me for throwing my dinner on the floor, but she made me clean it up. As part of rectifying what I did, I had to clean up the mess I made. There could be many situations where fully rebuilding what was destroyed due to the immoral life is impossible (arguably full rectification is never possible), but a person who has done something wrong and feels guilty for it will often try to do the best they can to repair things for whoever they hurt through their actions.

Now this also applies at a larger scale. Humans have collectively built systems that destroy the environment and impoverish many through stifling inequality, and to fully make up for these, we also need to collectively repair their damage. But in The Good Place, all individuals no longer have to fix the problems they create once they die from that when they die. Once they die, they get to go through their own inner perfection and go to the Good Place, even if the systems they were a part of while alive remain just as destructive on earth. As a matter of fact, they would have to undergo an internal transformation after they die whether they do anything to fix the damage they have caused, meaning that the damage they caused does not end up mattering to their existence anyways.

Any positive reformation of anything in this world does not matter in the reformed afterlife system they created at the end of the series. Take, for example, an individual who commits some kind of atrocity, ranging in severity from a parent abusing one’s children or an orchestrator of a mass genocide. That person dies, enters their purgatory, which presumably teaches them the error of their ways and makes them into a better person, and then they go to heaven. That’s great for them, but they do not need to take any concrete action in the world itself to deal with or fix the intense suffering their actions have caused. Genocides and even abusive parents unleash cascading suffering into the world (both to humans and nonhumans) that can take several generations to heal. The show makes clear that the victims of atrocities from others will experience a healing during the afterlife, but that is long after the fact. Why must they suffer in the first place?

Healing occurs only by literally removing people from their environment into a make-believe world. For example, both Tahani and her sister experience healing from the trauma of their parents’ constant abuse, which allows them to overcome their lifelong competition between each other. They then get to experience positive relationships with each other and their parents all as healed people. Instead of fixing their relationship dynamics together, their reformation seemed to occur in their individual purgatories, where they presumably learned the error of their ways and grew as people (with the entire show being Tahani’s transforming state). In the show, they did not know what the others would be like after getting through their purgatories demonstrating that they were not together in any of it. This is innovative in many ways, but its portrayal of healing is entirely individualistic. Each human goes through purgatory in isolation outside of the social systems in which they existed and both created their virtues and vices. For example, for a familial conflict like this, I would love to see them go through purgatory together, probably in a way that changed some of the unfair power dynamics latent in the abuse and resolved everything together.

Also, what about non-human entities that suffered? For example, there is no reformation or healing in this system to animals that humans caused to suffer. A dog abused or neglected by its owner presumably was left on earth to die with no redemption. It also ignores any healing to the suffering of more collective entities like human communities and the environment. Instead of the humans experiencing renewal in a make-believe purgatory, I would love to see humans have to come back to the earth (maybe as some kind of ghost or other supernatural spirit) to reform the suffering their actions have caused in this world to mitigate how much suffering future humans and the environment in this world have to suffer. For example, if someone led a genocide, they would have to spend the next part of their afterlife healing all the damage this caused the world since. As a child, if I spilled something on the floor, my parents, as part of me having to learn my lesson, usually made me help clean it up, instead of whisking me into another room for a lesson, and then sending me on my way.

All of this points to its human-centered individualistic view that does not consider any systematic change to society or the ecological world and ignores the plight of animals and other nonhumans in this world as inferior and cosmically irrelevant. All that is necessary for “moral” perfection is a change in the characters of individual humans, which ignores the calls for systematic justice in both the social and environmental contexts. Even though The Good Place takes a courageous step in the right direction in helping people rethink justice, I think if we were to reimagine the afterlife to better address the injustices of humans, it would need to include the entire world and involve a fuller rectification of what humans have destroyed in this world.

How Is Complicity for Current Injustices Actually Distributed: The Good Place’s View of the Modern World (Reflection #8 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

The main cast of characters “enjoying” frozen yoghurt.

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series. I hope you enjoy.

In the Good Place, making moral and ethical decisions has become noticeably harder than in the modern world. Over the past 500 years, no human has lived a life worthy in their points system to make it into the Good Place, instead all of them have been damned to the show’s version of hell. Wow, that is quite a statement about the modern world.

The show’s reason as to why this is happening is that the modern world has grown increasingly complicated, meaning that we must shift how we assess the morality of the decisions humans have to make to navigate this world. For example, Michael describes a boy in the Paleolithic Era picking fresh flowers from the forest and giving them to his mom, an altruistic act that earns him many positive moral points. When an equivalent contemporary boy buys flowers to present to his mom, his generosity gives him some positive credit, but it is offset by the unethical treatment of the worker who farmed the flower, the oil needed to transport it to that shop, and all sorts of other factors. In defense of the flowers now being negative, the Judge responds that the information is available about, say the plight of the workers on the flower plantations, and the boy chose to buy those flowers that had been farmed in that way and thus to implicate himself into that context. The response from the other characters is that researching everything or completely removing yourself from all instances of injustice while still doing what is needed to survive is unrealistically difficult in the contemporary world.

This illustrates the fundamental problem the show sees within modern life: the vast interconnectedness makes people reliant on systems that conduct unethical acts in difficult to understand ways around the world. And the individual is held responsible for how their, even seemingly innocent, acts are complicit in these injustices.

I see an implied primitivism in this view. Past eras of history were simple, much more local. Then when you make a decision, all the necessary thinking is right there in front of you. Modernity has produced interlocking webs that remove an individual from the full context in which the products around them come from, becoming overly complex ethically and morally in the process. This vaguely reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the innocent noble savage or that mass society corrupts individuals, and also Mahatma Gandhi’s view that humans are best off living local lives in their small communities but that mass travel and communication has corrupted humanity as it forced it to scale up. In contrast to many primitivist thinkers, though, the show does not consider a return to “simple society” to be realistic, instead ultimately arguing that the retribution nature of moral criticism is what has got to give.

As an anthropologist, I view such primitivism as an oversimplification of past periods of human history. Humanity has almost always been interconnected in multilayered connections. The show imagines the past as a kind of simplified ideal that solves some of the complexities they see in today’s world. I would say that individual decisions have always been complex, with full knowledge of the implications of one’s actions across other communities beyond one’s familiarity practically unknowable.

Second, by arguing that absolutely no one has gotten into The Good Place, the show implies that modern injustices implicate everyone to an overwhelming degree, which flies in the face of how injustice seems unevenly distributed in the world. The show consistently states that no one has gotten into the Good Place for 500 years. So the societal shifts that prevented people from being able to get into the Good Place started 500 years ago. That corresponds rather well to the rise of European colonialism and the start of what many historians call the “modern era” in the 1500s and 1600s (and the very end of the 1400s). European colonialism changed many of the global relationships and power dynamics around the world, resulting in the societal systems that still last in various forms today (such as capitalism, which the current distribution of places in the world are “wealthy” and not, etc.). These systems seem to be exactly what creates the complex social systems that make moral decision-making now overly complicated.

The show portrays everyone as damned with no distinction of their position within these global forces, despite the fact that people have had very different positions within these systems. For starters, 500 years ago was the start of European’s subjugating large parts of the world and forcing pretty much all other peoples to produce resources for their benefit. Sure, overtime this may have embroiled people born in Europe and maybe even their colonies in implied forms of complicity against injustice outside of their control, but it took hundreds of years for European colonialism to cast its shadow across the entire world. It did not just start 500 years ago. What about people in Oceania who due to geographic isolation had no real contact with Europeans or those implicated in European colonization until the 1700s or 1800s? For example, was everyone from Australia in the 1600s, who had no knowledge of these forces because they did not know about these other parts of the world, subjected to eternal damnation for all time? The show says, “Yes,” when it says that absolutely no human has been able to make it to the Good Place in the last 500 years, even though some of their societies may have looked more like the hunter-gathering society the boy discussed above lived in. This arbitrary caught off of 500 years makes some sense within European history, and in presenting it as such a unilateral caught off, they are eurocentrically presenting European history as the history of all peoples.

Furthermore, it almost exclusively portrays everyone as beneficiaries of this inevitable system, despite the fact that inequalities distribute decision-making unequally. The victims of modern injustices are just as damned for all time as those who benefit from or at least live in a society that benefits from such injustices. For example, the oppressed farmer who picked the flower in the above example would also be damned for all time. Was this farmer’s decision just as complicit in systems of injustice?

Consider an example of US slavery to illustrate how absurd that would. During the slave era around the 1830s to 1850s, large swathes of US Americans were complicit in the slave trade. Not just the slave owners who directly owned the slaves, but the (usually) white managers who oversaw the slaves work each day, those who transported the cotton in the South and beyond, made it into shirts (at that time, increasingly this happened in mills in the US North and England), the banks (usually in the North) who organized and traded off of Southern Cotton from the South, and other parts of the world that bought the cheap textiles. Sure, the system was an awful injustice with multiple layers of complicity, but how complicit was your average Black slave? He or she has no (or little) choice in producing the cotton and very limited choices in terms of what they consume as “owned property.” But in the show, that slave received eternal damnation, since their choices evidently also made the world a worse place.

This view of the modern world in terms of becoming trapped by complex choices where it’s unrealistic to understand and respond properly to how everyday decisions and objects prioritizes the perspective of the privileged beneficiaries of these global forces. It reflects a bias for the experience of US Americans, especially US Americans who are middle class or above, the show’s primary audience. The United States has been a major beneficiary of the global world order, with many parts of the world directly or indirectly committed to producing items to feed our economy, often with unjustly poor wages and conditions.

Thus, I think the show compellingly demonstrates one way to experience the funneling of vast resources to the United States and other places that primarily benefit from the contemporary global system. In the US, this can feel like an uncertainty over the morality of how the various goods we might buy have arrived on our shelves and the difficulties understanding the ins-and-outs of the vast supply chains necessary to provide us with these cheap goods in the first place. To be clear, they have great insights into what this experience is like, something uncommon for sitcoms to try to tackle.

At the same time, by universalizing it as the experience of every single human over the last 500 years, it reflects a bias towards a rather limited and privileged perspective on these global forces. The idea that this is just as much a problem for slaves as discussed above, for example, or that their decisions also have made them complicit in unjust systems resulting in their damnation is insulting. The same would also apply to the other forms of injustice and oppression committed around the world. It tangles the beneficiaries and victims of injustices as just as complicit in the system itself. I appreciate that the show tries to tackle the moral complexity of basic life decisions and injustices committed around the world, but I wish it had done so in a way that did not imply that everyone had the same basic experience of these injustices.

“The Good Place”, Annihilationism, and How Finitude Shapes Our Passions (Reflection #7 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Chidi and Eleanor experience complete contentedness together in the Good Place.

I find it fascinating that at the end of the series, “The Good Place” ends up advocating a form of optional annihilationism. Annihilationism is, broadly speaking, a form of the afterlife where persons (their souls, essences, or whatever you want to call what them) ceases to exist. It mostly refers to an idea within some forms of Christianity that God makes the damned cease to exist instead of eternal torment hell like most Christians argue. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, for example, has historically advocated this view.

The Good Place’s annihilationism is rather different: the humans in heaven/Good Place can choose to cease to exist whenever they get tired of heaven. After they have chosen to complete all they want to, they can cease to exist, where their self gets “recycled” back into the universe through what seems like a vague form of reincarnation. In the show, the eternity of heaven made it into a type of hell: no matter what people did, they continued to exist for all time. The never-ending accumulation of experiences eventually made everyone there feel lethargic like their mind was in a fog. They would indulge themselves in gratifying activities (like for a scholar, learning about whatever she wants), but no matter how long she does this for, there is still an infinite length afterwards. Eventually within this eternity, she forgot almost everything she learned and started doing the minimal amount necessary to function each day. In response to this, ceasing to exist was a potential release. Whenever they have become who they want to be and done all they want to do in Paradise, however long that takes, they can choose to cease to exist. The show implies that pretty much all humans (with Tahini being the only potential exception) will eventually choose to not exist in this way.

This is a very interesting idea. Would this be what an eternal existence in the afterlife would feel like? To answer that question, one would have to determine who or what we would be in such an afterlife, and based on that, to what extent would our present psychology apply to this “self” there. These are not simple questions. Many views of the afterlife chronicle some kind of change to who we are, both as individuals and collectively as a species, which raises all sorts of other questions. One big one is, If we do change, how can we know that these “changed selves” are really us and not a new entity in a new world based on ourselves? I am not sure we could ultimately answer these questions without experiencing existence in this fundamentally changed way, so instead of trying to weigh into those debates, I will focus on the implications of the Good Place’s answer to our current temporal existence.

The Good Place’s answers take cues from human psychology in this world where limited time produces important constraints that shape our desires and motivations. In many ways, our minds seem built to keep us through conflicts and tribulations. These can range from the overarching life goals that span years, decades, or even one’s entire life to mid-term quests that take maybe a few months to complete to daily needs or challenges. For this, time itself plays a major role in defining and setting constraints on these conflicts. Humans do seem very goal-oriented: we produce goals and actively strive to do specific things in the quest to resolve the conflicts we face.

A lot of psychology literature seems to indicate that these goals give us meaning and orient our lives. When we don’t have enough to do, boredom kicks in, stimulating us to go out and determine new activities with new potential conflicts to overcome and goals to attain. Now, rest is also crucial psychologically, and people can try to do too much. Workaholics, for example, may constantly try to do more and more without taking sufficient time to rest. Among other problems, this can lead them not giving sufficient time to reflect, which best happens when you slow down and pause your inner drive. But, Our drives still keep us centered in who we are, and humans tend to be most satisfied when balancing rest and activity.

All of this seems very adaptive to our current lives. Here we need to actively pursue things in order to survive yet ultimately have a limited amount of time on earth to complete what we set out to. The Good Place’s heaven demonstrates how connected our psychology is to such an existence by showing how if you remove finiteness from our lives, suddenly these human psychological drives don’t make sense. Heaven removed people from conflict to survive; they don’t have to make sure they eat, drink, sleep, and do other activities to stay alive. This leaves only goals they actively choose to pursue. It makes perfect sense that this would not be able to last eternally. Our own passions in this world (including our curiosity and desire to learn more) were adapted to keep us going for a finite number of years. In the show, most supernatural beings seem content to exist eternally, but humans would have to become a seismically different being to become like them.

That is my main takeaway from the Good Place’s argument in favor of the “annihilationist option.” Trying to analyze to what extent it is an accurate or necessary depiction of a good afterlife would be too difficult, since we do not know enough about the supposed afterlife in the first place. In particular, we do not know enough about what human persons in any so-called afterlife would be to tell whether such a move would benefit or otherwise be necessary for those humans. But, through its contrast with our current existence, it makes a statement about how our current psychology seems adaptive to our finite existence. What would curiosity or the desire to have fun look like without our physical needs? As much as we in Western culture like to separate these supposedly “higher pursuits” from our physical needs, I am not sure we could have them in a way similar to how we think of them now without our current constraints of time and potential death.

Is “The Good Place” Really Good? Using Foucault to Explore Afterlife Engineering (Reflection #6 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

The Good Place’s vision of personality reform is certainly innovative: Humans upon death go to a type of purgatory where a group of supernatural beings (made up of both demons and angels) force them to confront their biggest flaws and grow as people. Once these imperfections have been fixed, and they have been perfected, they get to go to heaven, where they can enjoy the remainder of their existence. This seems like an improvement from torturing everyone for all time that modern humans endured up to that point, but it still feels insufficient. This reflection will use the social philosopher Michel Foucault to analyze this new system.

A good starting point is to ask, “What are someone’s flaws, and how can we be certain that another can both know these flaws and put them in a situation where they must confront and fix their flaws?” These flawed supernatural beings can objectively know someone’s flaws and with enough time (not a problem in the infinite afterlife) eventually chisel humans down until they change who they are in a way that addresses that flaw. The show thus answers yes to both of these, but I find both ideas, especially the first, rather debatable.

The show presents this as good, because everyone eventually gets to go to heaven, and sure, such a universalism is certainly better than universal damnation, but it ignores the complexity of determining someone’s fundamental flaw. What if the supernatural beings have it wrong, interpreting something as a flaw that is not? Does a person’s flaws exist objectively in the first place? For example, historical figures receive intense debate about what about their lives are “good” or “bad”, virtues or vices, understandable, criticizable, or somewhere in the middle? On a practical level, these same beings had been so unable to empathize with humanity that they condemned all modern humans to damnation. How could such creatures really work through the complexities of a person’s entire life to weed out their weeds and their chaff? The sitcom depicts them as a positive, lively reform, but in say a horror, supernatural beings that use their control over us to try to remake us into what they desire would be nightmare fuel.

Let’s consider what Michel Foucault, the French philosopher in the middle of the 1900s, would have to say about this. He extensively analyzed how modern Western societies focused on human reform, in order to “improve” people, fix their flaws, and make them supposedly useful or productive members of society. One key example is his book, “Discipline and Punishment,” where he discusses a shift in modern Europe a few hundred years ago from the state publicly and violently beating and executing criminals to a focus on locking them into reforming prisons to reteach them, all to remake them into useful members of society. For him, the punishment of criminals shifted from a vagrant punishment for daring to defy the government and the society at large by doing crime, an intense yet skin-deep attack on their bodies, towards the more “civilized” prisons, where instead of intense, physical violence but must experience the thousand little cuts of the state trying to reform the prisoners’ very selves.

The beings in the show make the exact same change. The demons of hell tortured humans with brutal physical violence (like forcing strange creatures into their butts and genitals), relishing their power over the humans’ bodies. The torture was extensive seemingly to punish people for their evilness. The new system, however, focuses on reforming their very selves, in order to fix their flaws. In the episode where the demons learn how to construct these learning experiences, they teach the demons how to use each human’s flaws to psychologically torture them: to put the human in high-pressure situations where they must encounter their biggest psychological insecurities, all in the name of reforming them. This may have a pragmatic pedagogical strategy to wean the demons off the mentality and slowly over the course of the lessons encouraging more positive ways to engage with people’s flaws, but either way, this illustrates how spiritually dark the idea of forcibly reforming people can become.

Now these differ from the states that Foucault in important ways. The Medieval and early modern European states that Foucault wanted to warn against threatening their social order by making a public spectacle of mutilating their bodies; in contrast to the demons seemed to do so partially to entertain and humiliate and partially because they thought the humans they were torturing were incorrigibly awful and deserved to suffer for it. More importantly, the new purgatory state at the end of the series was decidedly not a punishment but a refinement, and after they passed through it, each human got to live in heaven on their own terms for their own ends, not to benefit the community, in contrast to the idea of remaking prisoners into productive members of society.

At the same time, however, it is not a coincidence that the show writers would construct a similar process to a reformist prison. They are subconsciously tapping into the similar energy that Foucault was analyzing in contemporary Western societies. This energy makes the idea of changing people into what everyone else considers the best versions of them. It can also manifest as an energy to pressure people into optimizing themselves to perfect themselves either for their own good or the good of their communities, and contrasts with, say, the idea of engaging with people how they are and take collective responsibility for our role in shaping the so-called “bad people” into who they have become. My question is, Would such an afterlife, where supernatural beings who have absolute control over our entire selves (including of our very consciousness and memories) and use that control to remake us how they see fit, really be such a good world after all?

The Good Place Miniseries (Introduction)

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite sitcoms in this century so far, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. I hope you enjoy:

Reflection 1: Revolutionizing Sitcoms: “The Good Place’s” Unique Window into Making Television

Reflection 2: Navigating the Afterlife’s Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Empathy, and Organization Change in “The Good Place”

Reflection 3: What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote At the End of the Day, Part One: Utilitarianism (First part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts utilitarianism)

Reflection 4: What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Two: Deontology (Second part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts deontology)

Reflection 5: What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Three: Virtue Ethics (Third part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts virtue ethics)

Reflection 6: Is “The Good Place” Really Good? Using Foucault to Explore Afterlife Engineering

Reflection 7: “The Good Place”, Annihilationism, and How Finitude Shapes Our Passions

Reflection 8: How Is Complicity for Current Injustices Actually Distributed: The Good Place’s View of the Modern World

Reflection 9: What The Good Place’s Ending Leaves Out for Ethics

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Three: Virtue Ethics (Reflection #5 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

This is the third and final post in my miniseries about ethics in “The Good Place” (see Part One, Part Two, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here). All of this is part of a wider series I am writing about that TV show. In this post, I will talk about how the series portrays the ethical theory called deontology. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series.

Now for the final major ethical theory in Western philosophy: virtue ethics. I think this one is the closest one to what the show adheres to. Virtue ethics emphasizes the development of people’s characters, focusing on how to develop virtues. Virtue ethics often emphasizes developing conducive environments where people can cultivate the instincts or dispositions to think and act virtuously.

This is in contrast to consequentialism, utilitarianism, and deontology, which seek to create a unifying criteria for how to determine what is right and wrong in all circumstances. Virtue ethics, instead, focuses on how to grow individuals’ character so that they have the skills and natural desire to make moral decisions on their own. Many virtue ethicists emphasize on how to develop the right settings that encourage people to develop virtuous behavior.

One way virtue ethics comes up frequently in the show is in its emphasis on doing moral behavior for the right reasons. This is most apparent with Elanor whose major flaw is selfishness. She frequently tries to perform good acts, but her points do not go up because she is doing it for self-centered reasons (e.g. to earn her way into heaven). And she is not the only character that encounters this. In a pure consequentialist or deontological framework, all that matters is whether the action is moral or immoral (even if they disagree on how to tell whether an action is moral), and thus one’s internal reasons for doing the right thing are not as important. For virtue ethics, though, one’s motivations are crucial: they impact what type of person someone is becoming.

As a matter of fact, the whole show seems designed to cultivate virtues. The world Michael created to torture humans accidently forces them to develop as people in a trial by fire, and overtime, saving the themselves and all humanity ends up perfecting them as people. Their adventures force each character to confront and work through their major flaw and develop positive virtuous instincts. Then, the show concludes by replicating aspects of this environment for all humanity, who after death must go through a simulated environment forcing them to work through their major flaw/flaws and develop perfected (or at least better) virtuous characters.

The show routinely demonstrates that the environment produced by being with the others in the group is what causes each character to grow. For example, the judge tests all the characters in isolation, and pretty much each one fails. Similarly, when she sends each human back to earth to see whether they are better people, they quickly relapse into their old selves. It is only when Michael brings the group together reconstructing the dynamic they held in the afterlife, that they improve as people. The judge’s tests focused on whether each individual had grown by themselves beyond their personality problem, and the show demonstrates this to be the wrong question. They grow and improve as people when put in environments that help foster that in them.

The show starts with a consequentialist, multiversal afterlife system with a points system to determine moral worth to reflect that, and over time, the show demonstrates how lacking such a system is, consistently showing that instead humans develop virtues in relationships with others.

At the same time, the afterlife system is a labyrinth of bureaucracies full of various afterlife beings, so the main crew’s attempts to reform the universe amount to a pragmatic institutional change. Relics of the old system still persist at least at first: they still seem to use the consequentialist points system to ultimately assess people’s moral worth even in the afterlife. Many of the afterlife beings in that institution don’t understand the change and at least initially still operate within the old mentality. Maybe overtime, they learn this new way of thinking.

This leaves open whether this new system will work. Will these beings be able to change their approach as they operate within the new system? Will the continued use of the points system to evaluate whether someone is able to enter the Good Place introduce corruption, or will the fact that each human has an infinite chance to improve mean that eventually everyone will? In the show, the series heavily implies these kinks have been worked out, and the new system is working great. But, I am not sure the show did enough work to convince us of that. That said, the series clearly values virtue ethics, and the characters try to create an afterlife system that will foster virtues in every human.

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote: Deontology (Reflection #4 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

This is the next post in my miniseries about ethics in “The Good Place” (see Part One, Part Three, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here). All of this is part of a wider series I am writing about that TV show. In this post, I will talk about how the series portrays the ethical theory called deontology. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series.

Deontology evaluates the morality of one’s actions based on a set of principles or rules. Different deontologists may have different principles (ranging from divine commands to general values or principles of what makes the best society), but deontologists view strict adherence to it as key in evaluating whether something is ethical.

Most of the series depictions of deontology center around Immaneul Kant, one of the best known modern European deontologists. Chidi, the main philosophy character in the show, was a Kantian scholar and considered himself a follower of Kant. In short, his system of ethics emphasized the importance of not using other people but treating their autonomy and freedom as paramount. Thus, for him, our actions ought to be those for which, if everyone did that action in that situation, would not hurt or constrain others in the world.

Chidi’s presence in the show is a constant reference to deontology. This is especially reflected in Chidi’s strict adherence to his principles about what the right thing to do is. Yet the show seems to use him to critique deontology. It puts him in situations where he must break his own rules as a source of plot conflict: forcing Chidi to agonize over whether to follow his principles or do the “dirty deed” necessary in the moment. For example, he must decide whether to lie for a noble cause, whether that is to not disclose that Eleonor (and later Jason) do not belong in the Good Place or pretending to be a fellow demon when a secret agent in hell itself. Kant famously argued that lying is always wrong, and even in a situation where it seems better to lie, it actually is not. It’s better for humanity overall to always tell the truth even in a situation that harms you or those around you.

Each time, he is put in a situation where he must decide whether to lie for a good reason. He struggles, but ultimately does lie. This seems to ultimately critique deontology, as if the show is arguing that sometimes the rules must be broken. Especially when the others around you are not willing to be nice or cooperate (like demons) or when the stakes are the eternal damnation of all humanity. Sometimes, though, he lies to uphold a contradictory value (such as to keep a prior promise made not to help before knowing that helping involves lying), but in a number of circumstances, it is clear that in some circumstances, he and the show thinks it is necessary to forsake one’s principles when push comes to shove.

Chidi’s insistence on adhering to strict moral principles is part of what causes him to struggle to make decisions, his biggest flaw in the show. At the same time, though, his principles were his most virtuous trait. It influences the other characters, catalyzing their own development: in almost every time the characters’ minds are wiped, Chidi ends up teaching them philosophy, which betters them as people (especially Eleanor). His strict adherence to more principles makes him reliable.

One penultimate example of this during a major climax in the series is Chidi helping the entitled and narcissistic former CEO, Brent Norwalk. The character seems almost utterly unredemptive, but in the heat of the moment, when helping could mean eternal damnation, Chidi was the only character willing to help him. He did so not because he thought that Brent deserved it (Brent had done no redemptive action) but because of his internal principle that it is morally right to help others in need. Through this and other moments, the show illustrates how standing by your principles can be an incredibly morally virtuous act.

Another way the show reflects on deontology is in how the show emphasizes the people’s motivations and inherent goodness or badness in its points system. The points system uses people’s intentions to determine how good or bad an action is. Utilitarianism or other forms of consequentialism often do not see internal motivations as important: instead what happened is only what matters, no matter their intention. In the show, though, being nice for a selfish reason seems to lower the point value of the nice act (and in some cases, make it wholly negative). Although keep in mind, this could really better reflect virtue ethics, which I will discuss in my next article in this miniseries. This aspect of the point system could be a thread deontology.

All of this illustrates the show’s complex relationship with deontology. Overall, the show does not endorse deontology, preferring more nuanced, maybe pragmatic, circumstantial ethical deliberations cultivated overtime than developing universal ethical principles for all time. Chidi has to overcome his principles constantly throughout the show, arguing that at the very least strictly following one’s ethical principles is too much. Life (or the afterlife) is too complex for rigid moral rules.

At the same time, it illustrates how honorable it can be to have principles and stick to them. Importantly, in all of these quandary moments, Chidi decides to do what is best for others around him, especially those in a vulnerable position. Thus, it presents helping others as honorable, whether that means lying to protect someone or like in the situation with Brent, selflessly risking one’s own salvation to help save another. Its view of when to follow principles and when to break them is more fluid, but having ethical principles in itself is noble.

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote At the End of the Day: Utilitarianism (Reflection #3 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

“The Good Place” spends a lot of its runtime evaluating and critiquing the various ethical theories, making it difficult to classify it according to some predefined ethical school of thought like checking a box. It also has its ethical theory unfold over the show, both defining and refining its views over the seasons.

Chidi, in one episode, remarked how there are three forms of morality in Western philosophy: utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. And all of them stink! Well put: these are the three major moral frameworks someone might learn about in an Introduction to Philosophy class, but most people’s views of morality in the real world draws from aspects of all three. In this three part series, I will investigate to what extent the show advocates for each of them . Through this I will investigate the nuances of how the series works through morality. (See Part Two on Deontology, Part Three on Virtue Ethics, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here.)

Utilitarianism

Let’s start with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism argues that what is moral is what produces the greatest amount of happiness. It’s a form of consequentialism, since it uses the consequences of actions to evaluate whether something is moral. So, in some forms of consequentialism, if I intended something good or positive, but something bad happened instead, then the bad consequence, not my good intentions, is what matters, and we should condemn that action as immoral. For example, if I gave someone a candy bar as a gift, with good intentions, but they died eating it from a peanut allergy, then that action would be unethical despite my positive intentions.

At first glance, the points system seems rather utilitarian or at least consequentialist. It evaluates the morality of human actions based on whether the actions have positive or negative consequences in the world. The show emphasizes multiple times that this includes instances where a character was not aware of and did not intend those bad consequences.

But the characters ultimately argue that this is a flawed way to evaluate morality. For example, when discussing the potential problem with the point system, Michael describes how thousands of years ago, giving someone a gift of flowers was seen as a good thing, but now, because of societal consequences unknown by the character, such as the poor labor conditions of the flower picker or environmental costs required to ship the flowers, the action is bad. These bad consequences are outside of the person’s reasonable knowledge or control, and thus it is not fair to use them to condemn the person for deciding to give flowers.

The show ultimately presents the points system as a flawed way to evaluate morality, and thus I do not think it endorses utilitarianism. But they do seem to present aspects of utilitarian and consequentialist thinking as valuable. The points system turns out to be fundamentally flawed, but they do not do away with it altogether. It is still the primary way they evaluate humans morality throughout their lives; they just limit the extent to which that the points system is the final decider of each human’s fate. Instead of damning those who failed to eternal torment, created a space for humans to refine themselves until they got a sufficiently positive score.

The main cast’s criticism is not that people’s consequences cannot be used to evaluate the morality of their actions, but that modern individuals cannot be reasonably held accountable for these unforeseen consequences because it is too difficult to keep oneself abreast on every potential result of their actions in the increasingly interconnected modern world. Thus, the show still seems to endorse a type of limited consequentialism but with caveats on the degree and scope of what consequences are reasonable and unreasonable to hold someone accountable for.

But, maybe making only a change to allow humans to reform their behavior and earn their place in the Good Place was a pragmatic move from the time-crunched main cast (and show makers who seem to condense the series at the end to wrap it up early). A massive bureaucracy of supernatural beings governed the afterlife, and maybe this was the one practical change they thought they could make to reform it over time. It would undermine the whole points system as an evaluation of morality anyways, without having to officially change a point system that many supernatural beings like.

It is hard to say, but the points system is still the basis of people’s moral worth and whether they made the subsequent moral improvements necessary to be considered “reformed.” Thus, it still has the central role in evaluating people’s moral worth.That said, I do think the show makers intended to seriously critique utilitarianism and consequentialism, although were not able to fully eradicate the system in the world without spending too much time articulating alternatives. Thus, the series inadvertently endorses these two systems while trying to officially oppose its excesses.