ethics Archives - The Cracked Door

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.

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.