The Good Place and Philosophy

Description

A humorous and philosophical look at life in Heaven, or is it Hell? The Good Place is a fantasy-comedy TV show about the afterlife. Eleanor dies and finds herself in the Good Place, which she understands must be mistake, since she has been anything but good. In the surprise twist ending to Season One, it is revealed that this is really the Bad Place, but the demon who planned it was frustrated, because the characters didn't torture each other mentally as planned, but managed to learn how to live together. In The Good Place and Philosophy, twenty-one philosophers analyse different aspects of the ethical and metaphysical issues raised in the show, including: Can individuals retain their identity after hundreds of reboots? Looking at all the events in the show, it follows that humans don't have free will, and so are people being punished and rewarded unjustly? Is it a problem that the show depicts torture as hilarious? This problem can be resolved by considering the limited perspective of humans, compared with the eternal perspective of the demons. The Good Place implies that even demons can develop morally - how would this play out in real life? Since Chidi knows all the moral theories but can never decide what to do, it must follow that there is something missing in all these theories - what is it? The show depicts an afterlife which is bureaucratic, therefore unchangeable, does this therefore make the afterlife deeply unjust?

Steven A. Benko is Associate Professor of Religious and Ethical Studies at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. He is the editor of the forthcoming book Ethics and Comedy (McFarland, 2019). Andrew Pavelich is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Unviersity of Houston-Downtown.