philosophy Archives - The Cracked Door

A Tentative Defense of One-Side Advice Arguments

In two recent conversations with friends, each independently mentioned how they have come to value expository writing that maps out all the different sides of a complex issue and explains how various people or schools of thought have navigated the issue, letting the reader explore the various perspectives themselves and forming their own answer. This form of writing is important, but for whatever reason, when I write prose, I have been drawn to a certain type of opposite: presenting a specific side or angle as a persuasive piece in order to nudge the reader to consider that side. This essay is a tentative defense of such one-sided arguments.

Life is complex, and practical or everyday wisdom needs to include multiple, even contradictory, pieces of advice in order to successfully navigate this complexity. Books or other compilations of proverbs as a genre of literature handle this well. A proverb is a one-side suggestion for how to handle a particular situation, and many compilations of proverbs offer conflicting advice over the course of the work.

To a strict logician, this may at first glance seem like a contradiction, but in the complexities of life, two conflicting thoughts can be true in differing situations. For example, the early bird does get the worm, but the slow and steady also win the race. These popular proverbs in US society technically reflect opposite sentiments, but there are times in life when quick action is advantageous and times when slow pacing is more useful.

Everyday wisdom is best when it is well-rounded and can consider the potential values in all, including directly opposing, vantage points. This is where one-sided opinion pieces fit in. They, like a proverb, offer one side or vantage point about how to navigate this complex thing called life, and as such, have value in the tapestry of everyday wisdom.

Society and regular social discourse may favor certain angles or ideas and don’t give other advice or vantage points due consideration. Presenting these left out angles as one-sided pieces counters that tendency and gives this perspective its due. It too may not be the only answer, just like the mainstream angle isn’t, but by unabashedly preventing it in a one-sided way, one counteracts the tendency to ignore and forces people to give it its due.

There are times when encyclopedic maps of the entire landscape of an issue are useful, but such an “in the clouds” perspective does not always meet people where they are when figuring out how to navigate the complexities of everyday life where it occurs. For that, one often needs to trudge along on the ground and explore how each piece of advice is well-adapted to its specific circumstance to determine what lessons (if any) one will glean from it that day. Maybe that is why so many cultures synthesize their everyday wisdom into proverbs, since it precisely reflects what has worked to solve each of the problems of that day.

How to Overcome the Nomad Nihilism

Traveling can encourage a certain type of nihilism. Often every few weeks (or sometimes every few days), you are in a new place. This can produce a constant sense of churn, kind of like a time loop movie, where you constantly reexperience new things and a new setting of people going about their lives. You don’t usually stay in a place long enough to experience the long-term consequences of your actions or to develop roots. Thus, like some of Phil’s benders in “Groundhog Day,” you could, in theory, live as hedonistically as you would like (as long as you do not break any laws) if you really wanted to. Pure hedonism was never really my thing, but I could understand its pull on many travelers.

Each new place starts to fit into the standard pattern of all other locations. You end up looking at people going about their lives, removed from the signals of meaning that ground most humans in their daily lives. You technically don’t need to wake up at a certain time (unless you choose to impose that on yourself), go to work at a certain time, or otherwise follow the rhythms that produce the structure for most people’s lives.

Likewise, you are not connected in the web of relationships that many encounter in their daily life. Instead, you witness an endless stream of new people you meet along the way. If you do not click with a certain person or even those in an entire community, you can simply move on to another place. This produces the advantages of flexibility. You are not stuck with the same people over and over again like how many people are forced to tolerate their neighbors for years on end. This allows you to be yourself. At the same time, though, you are presented with endless choices and often do not have to experience the social consequences of social sanctions for your actions.

All of this can give the feel of endless cycles, leading to a type of nihilism. I can understand Phil’s “whatever” attitude in Groundhog Day much better after experiencing tons of new places in rapid succession. After a while of being in new places again and again, it can feel about the same after a while. What do you want to do today? Whatever you want. Some days that is a grand adventure, but others it’s sitting on the couch and doing nothing. It’s all been done before, and any grand adventure is probably similar to ones you have already done many times.

I call nomad nihilism. It’s the dark side of flexibility. After a while, you can start to feel meh about the specifics of where you are (the new people you meet, the new sites you see, and so on) since to you, it’s all been done before.

Unlike in Groundhog Day, you are in new places, which can produce new dynamics. This only goes so far and eventually these small novelties start to compress into a singular lull. Within this, though, lies the start of the solution.

You still take some things with you, however: your memories, photographs and any other physical or written artifacts, and most importantly, any relationships you made along the way. These grounded me against the meaningless lull of novelty. Notice these are mostly the positives of the places you have been to: the people you clicked with and maybe form a lasting friendship with, not those who never clicked with; the beautiful photographs of the places you found interesting, not the ugly places or tourist traps you wouldn’t go back to again, etc. Except for memories, which are always with us no matter how harmful, you have the choice, meaning you can focus exclusively on the positives.

This produces a significantly different dynamic than regular, settled life. On the one hand, you have significantly greater control to craft the experience that works best for you. You can decide where in the world to go, what to visit in each place, and when to interact with others in a locale with less “intrusions” into your time by others than in settled life. At the same time, this means your decisions do more to craft the experience you have. That day, you can choose to be hypersocial and speak with tons of people you can, or you can choose to be a hermit talking to no one (or anywhere in between).

Over time, your choices influence your overall experience over the long-run. If you choose to focus on yourself or your work in the short term, that is often fine, but if you do that all the time, you run the risk of never finding time for those around you and creating an overall less immersive, less vibrant experience for yourself. The freedom to craft your own experience comes with more responsibility as you are often what stands in the way of living your joy.

Constantly changing environments can also help you see the arbitrary constructions of human existence. Constantly witnessing new environments with new variations of the human experiences can make you notice the parameters that form normal human affairs, whether that be a conversation or seeing how a specific community celebrates a particular holiday. This removes some of the “magic” of normal life that someone may experience if they only lived within one community. The external world losing some of its muster can make retreating into your own world more appealing.

It seemingly hyperindividualizes you. Our society glorifies being completely able to choose when and how you interact with others, and traveling the world is an ultimate manifestation of that. You both learn much more about humanity from seeing the diversity of experiences around the world, and you have the freedom to construct the experiences that you want. It enables you to see the strings that hold communities together, but such a removed perspective can also feel distancing, reducing community to the assemblage of specific factors. To work through its cons, you must figure out how to take time to engage with the communities in which you are in.

You ultimately need a balance between solitude and external. You need to explore, learn new things, and meet new people. These relationships, in particular, help center us, both who we are and how we regulate our emotions. You also need to relax and rest. Finally, creativity is crucial too: I agree with the Youtuber Sisphysus55 that art or creativity is the ultimate solution to burnout. Producing whether for others, just ourselves, serious, or whimsical helps reorient ourselves as well. I found these three to be the pillars of overcoming nihilism: relationships, rest, and creativity.

A Letter from a Retiring Medium (A Piece of Complete Fiction)

I have been a median for many, many years, and as I sink into the relaxation of retirement, I want to explain medium-to-medium the secret annoyances of the job that we mediums don’t normally talk about.

Clients usually almost always want to talk to the recently deceased. These young dead with their constant problems and unresolved issues from their mortal lives are by far the most annoying: desire for revenge, love, unfinished business, or whatever. All of this makes them needy and moody. Of course, living people who remain caught in the thralls of life tend to gravitate towards them. Moody attracts moody.

The older the dead the more interesting they get. After one has lived longer than one’s lifetime in the world of the dead, they start to get hit by the fact that their life here is a less significant portion of existence than their afterlife. It takes time, but even those most impacted by fame on earth will eventually seep into indifference about their mortal existence, engulfed by the eternal wave of their afterlife now in front of them. This gives them an insightful perspective about our world, which rash clients, caught up in whatever earthly need or desire they might have, never seem to appreciate.

My absolute favorite to talk to are those who have been dead for tens or even a hundred thousands years. They can be hard to find, but when you manage to summon them, their life on earth is a distant memory that they may not even recall from the piles of eternity that has already buried itself on top of it. Their voices, encapsulating all they once were, all they once sought, synthesizes into a singular, beautiful hum, a single note they beam with the melodious brightness of a distant star.

So good luck as you enter this deadly profession. Your customers will be annoying. Fulfill their desires; resurrect their lovers, their mortal enemies, their family and friends, or whoever they request. But before you get tired and burnout from the drama, make sure to take time to slip into the deeper wells of humanity and rest in the solace of the vast ocean of humans past. It’s your best break from the constant waves of the whims of those who still strive.

Now is finally my time to begin my retreat into this same vast expanse that is existence. I start with retirement from the world of production and sustaining before I, too, will eventually take the plunge into the great expense of eternity. May you take up this mantle well.

Sincerely,
Your fellow retiring medium

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 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.

Shattered Icons: Rebuilding Identity in Times of Change

The last several years have felt like an iconoclastic phase in my life. By this, I mean a stage of life where most of the things I once held dear have fallen apart right in front of me, and I have had to figure out how to reform myself.

Iconoclasm refers to movements where people would destroy the sacred icons or images in their houses of religious worship. In particular, this would happen from time to time in Medieval Christianity. The Christians would slowly accrue many icons (statues, sacred objects, or other things) that would become a core part of how they experienced God. Churches would become full of such icons.

Then, every once in a while, a movement against icons would sweep through the church. They would feel that the icons got in the way of true worship of the divine and would seek to purify or cleanse the church of such “idolatries.”

This metaphorically matches my current period in life. Many of the things that became most important for me and central to my identity demolished right in front of me, or at least that is how it felt. For example, jobs that gave me a sense of who I was turned out not to be what they seemed; important relationships withered; disciplines and interests that once compelled me have lost their favor; and the places where I lived that once centered have withered away.

How does one make sense of all of this; might as well respond? It can feel overwhelming, making it hard to know what to do. For me, it has been a slow trickle over several years, not a single cataclysmic event. Thus, the stress and processing has come in trickles as well.

I have noticed that I have been more cautious of relying on new things, since in the back of my mind, I doubt whether to trust it. I also notice that I have to give myself more time and patience to process everything that has happened. I need to be patient with myself while I do so.

Having an iconoclastic phase does not seem bad in the long run. It is teaching me what really matters in my life. A kind of refining fire of those past things that I have held onto, allowing me to transition into whatever new life stage I am forming. Often someone needs an iconoclastic phase during transition stages in life to supplant what one has and make room for whatever is to come.

That’s how I have been handling this stage of life. Maybe if you have such a phase, you would handle it similarly, or maybe in a completely different way. Either way, you learn a lot about yourself, however, by how you handle transitions.

Descartes’s Demons (A Short Story)

“How do you think we should deceive him?” The first demon asked.

“We could make him think he’s reincarnated,” The second demon offered.

“Too obvious. Descartes would figure out his body was an illusion if it changed several times.”

“Time is circular?”

“Ah but can a Descartes cross the same river twice? This would fail if every time he experienced the same thing, he didn’t feel like the same person.”

“Well, we don’t have much time,” The second one stated. “He’s starting to doubt our whole operation.”

“Hmm, this could actually be good,” The first one declares. “Let’s lean into it.”

The demon walks over to the microphone to speak directly into Descartes’s mind’s ear, “How do you know the world exists? What if everything you see, hear, and feel is all an illusion crafted by some evil demons?”

New puzzles flurry unto the screen projecting Descartes’s mind’s eye.

“What on earth are you doing?” The second demon interjects. “You’ll ruin everything!”

“I have an idea,” It responded and put its mouth back up to the microphone. “You think; therefore, you are. But you can only be certain of your own thoughts, since that’s all you can truly know exists in this world.”

The second demon chuckled appreciatively, beginning to understand.

“God must exist, so your reasoning must come from him. And why would he give you faulty reasoning?” It paused for a few seconds for dramatic effect. “But everything else you must doubt.”

It turned and smiled towards the second demon, “We can control him now. Feed him all our ideas, and he’ll think they must be perfect reasoning rooted in the divine. Even better, he will still believe he is doubting everything, going back to ‘first principles.’ Sometimes lean into the storm, and it will blow you to even greater heights imaginable.”

(If you would like to read more short stories, you can browse them here.)