A picture I took of my dog Mochi, my quarantine and the Good Place binge-watching buddy. Photo credit: Cecilia Guan
One of my favorite shows of all time is The Good Place. If you haven’t watched it yet… What are you waiting for? If you already have, you’ll know how central the exploration of different philosophies is to the show. Eleanor Shellstrop, the main protagonist, finds herself in the Good Place (a heavenly afterlife) after a fatal accident. She soon realizes her placement was a mistake and that she was meant to spend eternity in the Bad Place. As a last ditch effort to assuage her guilt, she recruits the help of Chidi Anagonye, a moral philosophy professor, to help her learn to be good and earn her spot in the Good Place.
What becomes evident early on in the show is that learning philosophy is quite different from applying it. In other words, to know what it takes to be a good person is not the same as being one.
For example, John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian concept of the greatest happiness principle suggests that we should do actions that provide the greatest pleasure to the most people. To be a good person, at least in Mill’s opinion, requires making sacrifices for the greater good. However, the well-known thought experiment of the trolley problem complicates his simple formula, and The Good Place hammers home just how impractical abiding by only one philosophy can be. In one clip, Chidi is forced to simulate the trolley problem. He repeatedly runs into (no pun intended) trouble with being decisive about which way he should steer the trolley. His ethical paralysis highlights how utilitarianism lacks consideration of an individual’s irreplaceable worth. My CC professor showed this video clip during class to demonstrate how viewing philosophy as a binary guide to ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is much too reductive.
What I took away was that there are complexities of human decision-making that have no logical basis. Some things just can’t be explained by a cost-benefit analysis. It is at this point where philosophy fails that we as individuals really begin to be challenged.
CC arms us with a foundation of philosophies to interrogate life’s ethical questions. This skillset became abundantly clear to me when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted our sense of normal. I couldn’t help but see the trolley problem taking place in our hospitals or the tragedy of the commons playing out with PPE and medical equipment. As I flickered in and out of Zoom lectures from the safety of my childhood bedroom, all I could wonder about was how people could be so selfish—disregarding stay-at-home orders, ignoring mask regulations, and hoarding basic necessities. I dug myself into a hole of cynicism and despair.
Yet, over and over Core texts encourage me to dissect how my preconceived ideas of truth influence my actions and judgements. It was our virtual CC class about Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil that made me question if we are ever fully conscious of the reasoning behind our actions. Arendt concluded about Eichmann’s complicity in the Holocaust, “he had no motives at all… he never realized what he was doing. He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness.” Her words reminded me of a quote from René Descartes’ Meditations I, which I read during Literature Humanities: “I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.”
Taken together, these tidbits from the Core reminded me that we are all products of our backgrounds and society’s status quos. This understanding grounded me when I found myself becoming critical of other’s choices during the pandemic. Although philosophy alone can’t explain or quantify ‘goodness’ and ‘badness,’ it gives me an analytical foundation to explore what truth means to me.
I won’t give any show spoilers, but the trajectories of the main characters in The Good Place follow a similar path. Chidi, once he lets go of his strict, Kantian lifestyle, finds himself freed from the confines of philosophy. He becomes empowered by previous authors, seeing their work as stepping stones for his own research.
Both The Good Place and the Core have taught me about the beautiful complexity of this flawed world. Where they leave off is where I can use my voice, ideas, and research to try to improve it. Maybe this conclusion is obvious. But I hope this memo encourages you to do your research—whether empirically, philosophically, or even just internally—on what it means to be ‘good’ and whether we owe it to be ‘good’ to one other.