The Good Place and The Normative Question

(This is the text of a talk I gave at the gracious invitation of the British Embassy in Ankara. Hope you enjoy it!)

In January 2017, Kayla Chadwick of the Huffington Post wrote what became one of the defining pieces of journalism for the Trump era in American politics. Titled, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” the essay notes the difficulty of having a certain kind of argument. On the one hand there are reasoned debates to be had about how best to organize and distribute collective resources, but on the other hand are arguments about whether helping other people is good at all. And in the face of a denial of such a claim, it’s difficult to know what to say beyond observing that someone denying is lacking in some core empathetic capacity. As Chadwick writes, “if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you. I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings.”

With this question Chadwick takes us out of the realm of political journalism and into philosophy. Why, after all, should we care about what happens to our fellow human beings? Of course in the immediate context of interpersonal political debate probably no answer will be effective. To the somewhat inebriated relative yelling about his freedom Chadwick is perhaps imagining here, whether an answer is convincing will have little to do with its philosophical merits. But that does not mean a philosophical answer to the question is useless–far from it. Rather, it simply means that it will be primarily useful for ourselves. This, as Christine Korsgaard puts it, is “the normative question.” She writes:  

And  in ethics, the question  can become  urgent, for the  day will come,  for  most  of  us, when what  morality  commands,  obliges, or recommends  is  hard:  that  we  share  decisions  with  people  whose intelligence  or  integrity  don't  inspire  our  confidence;  that  we assume grave responsibilities to which we feel inadequate; that we sacrifice our lives, or voluntarily relinquish what makes them sweet. And  then  the  question  -  why?  -  will  press,  and  rightly  so.  Why should I be moral? This  is not,  as H. A. Prichard  supposed, a misguided request  for a demonstration  that morality  is in our  interest (although  that  may be one  answer  to the question). It  is a  call  for philosophy, the examination  of  life.

The question is old, Korsgaard explains; at least as old as Plato and quite plausibly even older. But it has waxed and waned in prominence over the history of Western thought, perhaps because for many of our ancestors it had a simple answer: one should be moral and care about other people because that’s the only way to go heaven! In other words H.A. Prichard is correct historically if perhaps not philosophically: over the long run of human history many have thought the normative question answered by concluding that once one accounted for the role of the afterlife, morality is in fact very much in our own long-term interest.

Yet some puzzles remain, even aside from the straightforward point that it is hardly obvious whether any kind of afterlife exists or, if it does, whether individual morality is a criterion of judgment applied at the entrance. This is first of all more a way of ducking than answering the question, for what is going on here is not actually an explanation as to whether it’s rational to care about or help other people irrespective of a benefit to oneself, but a broad brush explanation that moral action does actually benefit oneself. To that extent though, there’s one sense in which it’s no longer really moral action at all—it’s just ordinary rationality. As Immanuel Kant would put it, if the only good thing is the “good will”—the unique capacity of conscious agency expressed in a moment of acting solely for the benefit of others and without regard to oneself—then there is a sense in which there’s no real goodness here. Correspondingly the problem has some theological implications, too. The fact it leads to heaven cannot be the reason a divine judge would regard a given action as moral, since that it is the outcome not the justification. And then it leaves open finally what exactly life is like in the afterlife: if the point of living a good life is to attain some reward in eternity, then why should we be good once we have achieved? It would certainly sound odd if the point of living well was to pass some test after which one was free to live as sinfully as one desired, yet that is occasionally exactly one gets from some ways of talking about the relationship between morality and religion. 

Note here that what seems to be a puzzle about the universe—what kind of thing the afterlife is like, what kind of thing goodness is—can be redescribed as a problem about the relationship between two capacities. On the one hand human agents we seem to have the capacity for the deliberate pursuit of a goal, what’s sometimes termed instrumental or means-end reasoning. I’m hungry, so I eat a sandwich. And on the other hand we seem to have the capacity for something different, for self-controlled deliberate free action that seems to be entirely our choice. Both capacities seem to be the source of rational behavior: when we do something because it serves a goal, we say this makes sense, and when we choose to do something because it benefits the world, this can seem rational too. But then that leaves the puzzle Henry Sidgwick called the Dualism of Practical Reason: we have two ways of justifying a decision, and no way of arbitrating which is more rational in moments when they come into conflict (as they often do). In that sense to a significant extent thinking about heaven is really thinking what life is like here, now, and how we thinking about the nature of human action and deliberation. That connection between the two  seemingly distinct problems is one the recently-concluded television show The Good Place exploits brilliantly.  

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Running for four seasons and 53 episodes from September 2016 through January 2020, The Good Place tells the story of four people—Eleanor Shellstrop, Jason Medoza, Tahani al-Jamil, and Chidi Anagonye—on a journey through the afterlife, and the two semi-divine beings, Michael and Janet, charged with shepherding them. The show opens with the characters discovering that they are dead and in the afterlife (a seemingly idyllic small neighborhood with a large number of frozen yogurt shops); the (seeming) angel Michael explains that throughout their lives there has been a points system on which action is given a score, and those with sufficient scores ascend to, yes, “the good place.” In that sense the show begins with what has seemed to many the ending of a genuinely human life. But things are not quite as they seem. Spoiler alert: the characters slowly discover that they are not actually good people, that they did not score sufficiently on the points system, and that while there may be a good place somewhere they are not in it and are, in fact, in the bad place. So it turns out that their journey to the Good Place and to becoming good people has only begun.  The four characters are assisted in this project particularly by Chidi, himself a moral philosopher, and one only to happy too explain to his new friends the nature of morality. 

The show touches on many of the most famous problems in moral philosophy, using a particularly deft touch with Philippa Foot’s famous description of the “Trolley Problem” (here’s a clip from the episode). So, you get the point. The idea the trolley problem is designed to bring out is that our ideas about how to calculate the worth of human life change depending on what might seem like irrelevant considerations. In particular, as Chidi notes, we are inclined to think that we should prefer saving five people to saving one when the decision seems forced by external events, but not to think that saving five is worth killing one when it would be brought about solely by someone’s (a doctor’s) decision.  And the show uses the scene to characterize the seeming angel Michael—now revealed as in fact a demon, who designed the seeming-Good-Place-actual-bad-place neighborhood (the evil nature explaining the prominence of frozen yogurt)—who lacks the moral intuitions that the four humans share. 

Many of the show’s invocations of ideas  in moral philosophy work like this, structuring a scene or working to reveal a character’s personality rather than contributing immediately to an overall argument. Yet over the course of the four seasons a show a coherent overall view does emerge.  Each season ultimately offers the same arc: characters begin not knowing they are being tested on their morality, and then gradually learn it. The show thus returns to several repeated and related insights: first, a sense that of *course* people would act better if they knew they were being judged on it, and they do so when they’re given support/extra reason to think morality matters; second, a sense of unfairness that they didn’t know, and that there’s something unfair about being judged on a scale one doesn’t know about; third, most confusingly, and most importantly, a sense that once one does know about the afterlife and the points system, there is a sense in which one’s actions lose their moral qualities. As Eleanor Shellstrop learns to her sorrow, once you know you’re going to get into heaven by getting a certain number of points, the points don’t count.

Partly, this is the Kantian problem of the nature of the good will. But to its credit the show introduces a quite different and striking objection to this way of thinking about morality via a minor character, one Doug Forcett. In a podcast episode with Ezra Klein, the showrunner Mike Schur emphasized the Doug Forcett scene, explaining that Doug “wakes up every day and just tries to do the most good he can do for everybody else to get the most goodness points. And as a result he’s barely a person anymore. He’s not living a good life — he’s serving a master. And the master is this idea of goodness.” It’s a fascinating dimension to have included in the show, because it clarifies first of all that the ideal is not the saintliness of moral perfection. Doug’s problem is not just that he cares about getting to heaven above all; the problem is that the things that actually are good in human lives and that make life worth living and valuing are being paradoxically eliminated by his pursuit of goodness. Note too that this complicates our thinking about the relationship between instrumental and moral reasoning: to ask oneself solely how one can benefit other people, it turns out, is to fail to achieve those benefits. And the show has an interesting way of literalizing the problem: note that despite scoring very well on the arbitrary points system Doug doesn’t seem to be making anyone actually happier.  The local sociopath is not living a happier life because of Doug’s sacrifices; if anything Doug is enabling his cruelty. An aspiration to benefit other people may be an essential condition of living a good life, but apparently it must be grounded in the ordinary world of ordinary people pursuing ordinary goals to achieve its effect. 

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So then how does The Good Place answer the normative question? Why should we care about other people? The show’s initial answer is seemingly and deceptively simple: it’s a way of respecting your conscience, the “little voice” in your head.  As Michael puts it to Eleanor at one point, “I had a friend that said whenever she was doing something bad, she’d hear this little voice in her head, a distant little voice, saying, Come on, you know this is wrong. And then when she started doing good things, that voice went away. It was a relief.”

But what is this voice? It’s not God or any sort of divine being; in the show’s theology God is a middle-aged woman with a high libido who couldn’t care less about humanity. By the end of the show the voice has taken on quite a different meaning: it’s just yourself, one fully informed about your past.  Now, the show presents this as a radically new shift in the nature and structure of the universe, and certainly it would be surprising if our consciences were literally our past selves. But put another way this is one of the oldest ideas in moral philosophy: one ought to care about other people because it’s the only way to be oneself.  In other words the core answer to the normative question depends on integrity: acting in accord with the moral law is the only way to express one’s freedom authentically, and to keep one’s life and self whole. 

Presented this starkly, the view looks pretty implausible. If the voice in your head at the end of the day is just you, why should you care about it?  G.A. Cohen in a response to Korsgaard puts the problem well:

You might think that, if you make a law, then that law binds you, because you made it. For, if you will the law, then how can you deny that it binds you, without contradicting your own will? But you might also think the opposite. You might think that, if you are the author of the law, then it cannot bind you. For how can it have authority over you when you have authority over it? How can it bind you when you, the lawmaker, can change it, at will, whenever you like? 

If the authority underlying the law is just oneself, then this seems to have solved one problem only at the cost of creating another. We can now explain why the law isn’t an imposition from some authority whose authority needs establishing; the only authority issuing the law is just you. But since it’s just you, it might seem like the capacity to command yourself also gives you the ability to change your mind any time you want.  Now, in the theology of the Good Place, the voice has the knowledge of your past selves that at the end of the day certain decisions will have additional benefits for some future self. But—and this is a surprisingly troubling point—why should the now-you care about those past or future selves?  Granting that acting to satisfy some desire now will make it harder for some future occupant of your body to do something, why does this give you a reason not to do it?

This is the brilliance of Korsgaard’s work, and one of the key implications of the narrative arc of the Good Place.  Roughly the notion is that any theory of rationality that explains why you have a reason to care about your future self is going to also make it rational for you to care about other people, and that’s just because of the nature of what a reason is. There’s no principled way to include, so to speak, all and only the future people who happen to inhabit your body. Acting on the basis of a reason means taking a kind of independent stance, being able to will the action from any perspective (this is the good will). But because this means you’re not arbitrarily excluding any parts of yourself, acting on the basis of a genuine reason also lets you make yourself into a coherent entity, something with integrity. One of my hobbies is following the word integrity through different languages and cultures, and the Turkish concept of bütünlük (wholeness) gets at this dimension of the concept better than English does. The real justification for integrity is the idea of wholeness, the idea of making oneself into a single coherent thing by following a clear principle. 

I suggested that the Good Place arrives at a version of this idea via its narrative structure. That structure is a marriage plot: above all the show tells the story of Chidi and Eleanor falling in love with each other. What it intriguingly conveys, however, is that this process of commitment is also the process of Eleanor becoming a better person and bringing herself into a kind of unity.  Partly this emerges gradually: Eleanor’s moral development involves her gradually coming to remember unpleasant facets of her life and incorporate them into her sense of self. But it’s also made strikingly literal near the end of the third season.

This clip is a bit long, so let me set the scene.  For complex plot reasons, the human characters have all had their physical bodies dissolved and are currently incarnated only inside the mind of Janet, one of their supernatural semi-divine guardians.  This process is not smooth, and they hope to quickly escape and reoccupy bodies soon. But there turns out to be an additional complication: Eleanor has told Chidi that she loves him, and he is unsure what to say back. This pushes Eleanor into a rapid shift of identities, rapidly changing voices, bodies, and appearance. The point, it seems to me, is that Eleanor’s commitment to something outside of herself is what lets her maintain herself as a coherent, unified entity, and so the possibility that she can’t maintain the commitment forces a kind of fragmentation. 

Let me suggest that this is how the show portrays what immoral action really is: moments when we act with only parts of ourselves, with less than full awareness of who we are and what we want. Conversely, when Chidi kisses Eleanor, the real point is to stress that Eleanor’s commitment to the moral law need not be abandoned, and that this commitment can continue to bring herself into a coherent structure. It can sound strange to say that committing to something outside oneself is a way of being oneself, and that following a rule can be a way of being free, but as Harry Frankfurt notes this is in fact one of the most stable insights in the history of human thought.