First: I like The Good Place. It is legitimately a good show. Kristin Bell’s turn as the narcissistic Eleanor, a self described “Arizona trash-bag,” is a delight. I still reference Jason leaning against a wall and whispering to a poster “oh, Ariana, we’re really in it now,” (though usually I’m bespeeching Theodor Adorno instead). And the reveal that Michael, the benevolent architect of the Good Place, was actually a demon torturing the cast is one of my favorite TV moments.
But.
But this show is not the moral guidepost that some people have turned it into. ‘Be good to one another’ is not an actionable moral philosophy; it is a truism. People hate moral philosophy because it is hard. It leads us to conclusions that are unsettling. Almost no one has a logically consistent moral framework because doing so requires you to consider questions like ‘if lying is always wrong, is it okay to lie to a Nazi?’ and ‘is it okay to cause the death of three people if doing so will save the life of ten?’ and potentially coming to conclusions that feel deeply wrong.
The central conceit of the early seasons of The Good Place is the points system. Every action a person takes is awarded a positive or negative number of points; when they die, these points are tabulated and the person is sent either to the Good Place or the Bad Place (or, in one case, the Medium Place) depending on the point total. In the first season, we slowly discover that no one in our cast has actually earned their way into the Good Place. We already thought that Eleanor was there by mistake, as was Jason, but it turns out that Chidi and Tahani didn’t actually deserve to be in the Good Place either; Chidi was too indecisive to ever do any good, and Tahani’s motivations were too selfish.
But that turns out to not be quite true. Eleanor and company didn’t make it to the Good Place - no human has since the Renaissance, allegedly. Apparently, capitalism means that no human (except that Medium Place person) has been a net positive in the world in centuries.
It is exceedingly unlikely that the showrunners had this idea in mind from the beginning. People like to treat shows they like as if they have every single moment planned out from the start but that is exceedingly rare; not every show is Arrested Development, and not every show needs to be. Case in point: Janet, who is omniscient, says in Season One that Abraham Lincoln is in the Good Place, before the reveal that no one has made it to the Good Place in five hundred years. Mindy makes it to the Medium Place even though, according to the logic of the show, no amount of charity she did should matter because of capitalism (and she didn’t even actually do anything - she died before her plans could be implemented, and they were put into place by her sister who still, presumably, got sent to the Bad Place). The show might’ve not even planned to have Michael be a demon initially (there’s not really anything until the reveal to indicate he’s acting with malicious intent); it is quite unlikely they were planning twists for seasons that hadn’t even happened yet. The Good Place was airing during the height of the ‘all art should be about how capitalism is bad’ online zeitgeist; The Magnus Archives fell into this trap around the same time, forgetting that it started as a meditation on the nature of fear and transforming into a muddled metaphor about capitalism in its fifth season.
But there was a very obvious way to go if it was going to make some sort of point about morality: the point system. The point system is very obviously broken - the fact that it has ended with everyone in what is basically Hell for several hundred years should be evidence enough of that. Even Doug, a human character who figured out the afterlife’s point system in the midst of a drug trip and spent his entire life trying to earn a positive point total is doomed to end up in the Bad Place. Some of the things that get you or lose you points are absurd: eating a sandwich or scratching your elbow can earn you points, while rooting for the New York Yankees1 or saying ‘bro-code’ will lose you points - Hell, being French apparently gets you sent to the Bad Place automatically. But when the characters travel to the Neutral Zone to confront the accountants about what is surely a mistake in the system we are told, nope, it’s functioning as intended, don’t worry about it, it all makes perfect sense to condemn all of modern humanity to Hell to be tortured by sadistic demons with no possibility of escape.
The very obvious conclusion to this absurdist point system’s story arc is that the system is bad. This is a recurring critique of utilitarianism: that you can’t actually quantify positive and negative value so easily, and trying to do so can easily justify otherwise wicked actions. This gets brought up a lot with long-termism, but it has been an issue with utilitarianism since the beginning. John Stuart Mills, the philosophical father of modern utilitarianism, was a proponent of free market capitalism, specifically while those policies were ravaging India’s ability to deal with drought and famine.2 You can talk about the cold equations all day long but all too often the person making those calculations will weigh them in their own favor. You don’t even have to really have to do a specific critique of utilitarianism - that’s a little bit inside baseball for most viewers. But ultimately it didn’t have to have any deeper meaning. The points system was a dumb sitcom joke, and dismantling it could’ve just been another setup for more jokes - or, potentially, character growth.
Take the example of Michael in the episodes “The Trolley Problem” and “Rhonda, Diana, Jake, and Trent.” “The Trolley Problem” introduces us to the infamous trolley problem which Michael, who is a demon, after all, seems to have a hard time understanding, as he keeps trying to maximize the amount of human suffering it involves; at the end of the episode, it turns out he’s using the thought experiment as a way to torture moral philsopher Chidi. But in “Rhonda, Diana, Jake and Trent,” Michael offers a sincere solution to the trolley problem - you have to sacrifice yourself.
That is a terrible solution. It doesn’t actually answer the dilemma presented by the Trolley Problem - sacrificing yourself isn’t a possible solution in the scenario, and it’s essentially just the ‘kill one person’ answer. What if no one is willing to sacrifice themself? Does anyone have an obligation to offer to do so? What if just one person isn’t willing - are they doing something wrong by saying no? Michael’s answer doesn’t work as a solution to the trolley problem - but it does work as a way to show Michael’s growth as a character. He went from reflexively torturing the rest of the group to being willing to sacrifice himself so they could make it to the Good Place.
Which raises another question: why doesn’t the point system apply to demons? Are they not moral actors? Yeah, Michael is torturing the cast as an alleged method of punishing them, but he (and the other demons) all seem to view torturing humans as an end in itself. When Eleanor and company discover that nobody makes it into the Good Place anymore, the demons actively sabotage their attempts to get the system reformed. They violate the rules of the afterlife and don’t abide by agreements set up with the actual Good Place. The demons apparently invented some of the evil in the world, like comedy roasts.
We can ask the same question about other supernatural beings in the show. The real, actual Good Place does nothing to resist the machinations of the Bad Place - they were apparently too preoccupied with trying to entertain the souls who had made it to the Good Place before they eventually got frustrated and gave up trying to do anything at all. Chidi’s inaction wasn’t excused because of his indecisiveness, and the end result of that was mostly mild inconvenience for those around him rather than eternal torment. Eventually the angels, frustrated by their inability to keep the humans in the Good Place happy, abandon them entirely - when the Judge decides to reboot all of humanity because of the flaws in the points system, they’re nowhere to be seen.
And then there’s the Judge. She’s basically the Demiurge - she created the universe, complete with all the flaws that (apparently) lead humans towards wickedness, so why doesn’t she bear any responsibility for it? She’s apparently not even aware of the exact way the world functions - when she goes to the human world to see it for herself, she expresses shock at how she’s treated and agrees that the system needs some sort of fix. But considering how badly she (and possibly the other supernatural entities) messed up, aren’t they culpable for the suffering that’s gone on in the human world and in the Bad Place?
Like, none of this actually matters. I’m not condemning The Good Place for not being some deeper exploration of morality. It was certainly a little deeper than the average sitcom, but it was still ultimately a sitcom. Everything I brought up above was mostly just a springboard for silly jokes - and that was really all it needed to be.
I am from neither New York nor Boston so don’t @ me about this
I realize that I’m being harsh on utilitarianism here, but that’s primarily because The Good Place seems like it was setting up a critique of it