Examination of ethics in “The Good Place”

There are flaws in this show. Subjective, of course, as our perception of flaws always is. But in my perception, there are a few widely gaping flaws– which don’t cancel out the brilliance of the rest, but do detract from it a little.

Vague but significant spoilers below. Tw for thoughts about suicide, depression, religion, and cruel divine punishments.

The worst for me personally was the ending, since I’ve always felt that “not wanting to be immortal” is just “being suicidal” on a longer time scale– and whenever fiction postulates that this is a healthy mental state we should all strive for, I feel it’s more akin to a “sour grapes” rationale than actual rational thinking.

And it can really worsen my depression, if I’m in an especially bad mood where this concept (mortality/ impermanence/ the lack of any lasting effects of my actions) is making me struggle to see any point in anything.

A fictional counterargument to that doesn’t change my mind. It just feels like someone is purposely drawing my attention again and again to a horrible thing that saddens me, telling me against all evidence that it’s actually a happy thing, and then patronizingly scolding me for not being happy about it.

But that’s beside my main point here.

Which is an exploration of the show’s weirdly inconsistent messages about intentions versus actions, and how they count towards reward or punishment in the afterlife system of the fictional world.

Now, I would not expect those messages to be in tune with my own ethics, or really anyone’s. The fiction is clear that the system being portrayed is dysfunctional on all levels.

But I do have questions about the inconsistency of the system’s internal rules, nonetheless.

For example.

It’s shown that a person can go to The Bad Place in punishment for having selfish intentions, even if their overall tangible contribution to the world was good in every way. In fact, it is stated that any person who knew about the afterlife system prior to death cannot go to the Good Place, no matter how much good they did– because this makes their intentions selfish automatically.

….Which does raise a lot of never-addressed questions about… anyone who does good because of belief in any afterlife with reward and punishment.

But the main contradictions have to do with examples of people in the story.

For instance, the one person who came closest to actually knowing about the afterlife system before death, and who tried his best to live by its rules specifically because he’d experienced a revelation about how it worked (Doug Forcette) ….was on track to end up in the Bad Place.

And yet, while other characters were trying to find out why, the obvious explanation (selfish intentions; awareness of the system) was never even suggested. The answer ended up being that it was simply impossible for him to live up to the Good Place’s impossible standards regarding tangible good works.

And it’s also shown that the one person who was considered a special case, requiring a special solution (The Medium Place) was a person (Mindy St Clair) whose intentions and actions in life were the average amount of selfish, up until a sudden change of heart in her final days, and whose plan was used posthumously to do so much good that she was no longer considered to deserve hell.

I do consider these to be plotholes, because they present something seemingly illogical as if it made sense, without ever self-awarely addressing how illogical it seems at first glance.

However, a good interpretation can patch any plothole. And that is among my favorite things to do as a fan of fiction. And I am a fan of this fiction, despite its holes.

Assuming truth of the statements about how intentions count (and we were never given any reason to think characters were lying about that in general)… the next step is to calculate how much they do count. The system is said to assign a number value to every good or bad action in life. So presumably it assigned values to intentions as well, which could be added and subtracted like the other values.

But, if we accept the rule about people who know about the system prior to death…..then we have to accept that intentions stemming from that knowledge count infinitely. They will outweigh absolutely any quantity of good actions.

Now, when the rule is stated, it’s in reference to a scenario where people who have been to the Good Place and/or the Bad Place are then returned to the living world with their memories intact. They have the knowledge through personal experience.

Is there a difference between that and the kind of experience that Doug Forcette had?

You could argue that he could not be considered to “know” about it, because he simply dreamed it up in a drug-induced hallucination and happened to be right.

But he clearly considered his revelation to be truth. And there is no reason that people sent back to the living world with memories of the afterlife would believe their experiences were real, any more than he did. As far as they knew, theirs could just as easily have been a dream or hallucination.

You could also argue that he had unselfish intentions because he had, over the years, grown to believe sincerely in the rightness of the rules he was following. But, so had the people who were being returned to the world after their time in the afterlife. And in both cases the original cause for it was …this “knowledge.”

So, three possibilities.

1. The system arbitrarily draws an illogical distinction between those two ways of getting “knowledge.” By the system’s rules, Doug’s way of getting it did not count towards his damnation, and did provide him with the framework to follow rules optimally, but he was still unable to reach the impossible goal even with that head start.

2. The system drew an arbitrary, illogical distinction between the two ways of getting knowledge, but the distinction made one way infinitely damning and the other way mostly damning. Doug’s way of getting the knowledge was not an automatic damnation, but it counted heavily towards damnation, more than he could possibly ever make up with good works.

3. There was no distinction. Both ways of getting the knowledge were infinitely damning, and Doug was doomed no matter how much good he could have done.

The fact that this was never mentioned, even by people familiar with the system, is an irregularity, but this would have to be explained in any of the three cases. In the prior two, we may have to assume that the characters never mentioned it because they were all aware of the arbitrary distinction. In the third scenario we may have to assume that some of the characters were unaware that Doug had the forbidden knowledge. In either case, we may also assume that it was sometimes talked about off screen.

Which is not really the satisfying kind of plothole fix, but… it’s what we’ve got. Moving on.

Finally. The “medium place.”

This is a very odd scenario for several reasons.

First, it’s pretty outrageous to imagine that Mindy St Clair was really the only example in history of such a discrepancy between living and posthumous effect on the world. So, either there are many other “medium places” scattered throughout the cosmos… or there was something else particularly unusual about her situation.

Second. If posthumous effect on the world can really change one’s afterlife, then what of the earliest humans who ended up in the Good Place? Didn’t they, and both the good and the bad in their intentions, also set off chains of events leading to both great evil and wondrous good? Are they spared simply because over that many eons, the good and evil stemming from one’s life basically even out? Why was the decision not made sooner after their death, as it was in the case of the Medium Place? Why was a Medium Place not created much, much earlier? Is this due to changes in management and how the process worked?

…Probably. This is starting to feel like a bureaucratic aberration more than anything else.

Which is fair. Plenty of room for that in the worldbuilding here.

Anyway. Point number three.

As much as we like to say that “hell is other people”… heaven is other people too, just different ones in different ways.

And a total, permanent absence of other people– an eternal solitary confinement–

no matter how many books and movies you had to pass the time–

is something that the great majority of humans would consider a form of hell.

And there is precedence, within this worldbuilding, for some people– for various experimental reasons– to be put into a definite Bad Place that is disingenuously claimed to be something else.

(Sad windchime noises.)