This is a continuation of last week’s post about the moral arguments contained in the recently concluded NBC sitcom, The Good Place.

Argument #4: “Do no harm” should not always trump “do good”

This is kind of a complicated argument to articulate. In The Good Place the reason the afterlife points system is flawed is because a person’s score is overwhelmed by negative points due to the unintended consequences of their actions. The world is so interconnected that the simple act of me buying an apple means I’m implicitly supporting the exploitation of farm laborers, and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions because of the fuel that was required to transport the apple, and giving profits to the co-owner of the apple company who hates orphans. There are a bunch of negative externalities to my actions, so I get a bunch of negative points.

We might not initially have a problem with this (especially if we’re utilitarians) because there are also lots of positive externalities to my act of buying an apple. And these positive externalities are just as hard to predict as the negative ones. Maybe the trucker who transported this apple was having trouble holding down a job, but now has steady apple-trucking work. And maybe I’m also giving profits to the other co-owner of the apple company who loves orphans way more than the first co-owner hates orphans. So we might say “Sure, there are a lot of unintended side effects of any action we decide to take. Some of these actions will be good, and some will be bad, but on average they will cancel each other out. So what’s important to focus on is just the outcomes of your actions that you can reasonably predict.”

But we don’t see this “canceling-out” effect in the afterlife points system. If we did, we should still see some people making it into the Good Place. Maybe they would be people who just got lucky, because the apple they purchased happened to be the one apple that saved the company from going out of business and saved all the apple farmers in some community from losing their livelihood. But we don’t see anyone making it into the Good Place. The fact that we don’t means that in the afterlife points system, negative externalities are given more weight than positive externalities. And the characters reject this points system as unjust as a system of morality.

This can be seen as a kind of argument against the idea that the most important moral command is to do no harm. If you believe that in the trolley problem, it’s wrong to divert the train so that it kills one person instead of three people, then you probably believe that it is more important to avoid hurting people than to help people. You don’t want to divert the train because then you would have killed a person who would not have otherwise have been killed, which is bad. The fact that you saved 3 other people is good, but not good enough to make up for the bad thing that you did. You can’t just sum up all the harms and goods that you’ve done in order to decide what the right thing to do is, because somehow the moral need to avoid doing harm is more important than the moral need to do good.

You would need to believe in something like this in order to design the afterlife points system that is in place at the start of The Good Place You would have to believe that because people are doing accidental harms with their actions, then those harms will almost always outweigh the accidental goods they are doing. By rejecting this points system, the show can be understood as saying that we shouldn’t necessarily give these harms any kind of special weight, and that the accidental good and bad we do by our actions really do end up cancelling each other out.

Argument #5: Follow your conscience and be a better person

This is probably the most straightforward argument the show is making: We all ought to try to be a little better every day. Michael argues over and over again throughout the show that people have the capacity to improve. Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason all become better people throughout the course of the show, and are meant to serve as an inspiration to those of us watching the show.

Under this reading, The Good Place can be seen as a source of practical advice for how to live rather than a rigorous logical argument for what ought to be done and what ought not to be done. It is more like Confucius (offering different advice to his pupils based on their personalities and the context) than Kant (making a structured rigorous argument for a system of morality with defined rules). The show tells us it’s important to take morality seriously, but not so seriously that you have decision paralysis like Chidi. It’s important to think about the outcomes of your actions, but you can’t always predict all the harms your actions might do. Don’t be too self-centered. Forgive those who have hurt you.

None of these are not hard and fast rules for how to live, but they are moral guidelines that most people know at some level. The purpose of the show might just be to bring these ideas to the forefront of our minds, so that we are a little better tomorrow than we were today.

Argument #6: Your relationships with the people around you are of primary importance

This is the final argument I’ll explore here, and I think it’s The Good Place’s biggest and boldest claim. This is the claim that my relationships with the people around me are what is most important from a moral standpoint. If we are to be good people, we should above all focus on caring for those around us as opposed to trying to maximize the good we do in the world or follow abstract moral or religious codes.

The show is far more concerned with how the main characters behave to the people around them than to how they follow abstract moral rules. At its core, the show is not as much about saving humanity as it is about 6 friends learning to care for, rely on, help, and forgive each other. The reasons each of them were bad in their first shot at life was because they had terrible relationships with the people directly around them — Eleanor because of her unwillingness to form connections, Chidi because of his indecisiveness, Tahani because of her envy, and Jason because of his petty crimes.

To the extent to which the show focuses on the ways we influence people far away from us (because of the interconnectedness of the global world), it actually argues that the way we affect these distant people is so hard to determine that it can’t be a basis for morality (see Argument #4). It’s significant that when Eleanor walks through the doorway at the very end of the show, the magical dust she turns into encourages someone to be good in a way that helps Michael. She doesn’t turn into an abstract force of morality that helps everybody in the world indiscriminately (or if she does, we don’t see that). The abstract force of morality she turns into helps a person she loves.

Of course, this is a very natural moral claim for an NBC sitcom to make. A sitcom is naturally about interpersonal relationships, because relationships are dramatic. And a relationship-focused morality is not going to offend anyone. It’s a comfortable kind of morality that a lot of people would like to believe in anyways. It feels nice to care for the people around me, doesn’t require too demanding of sacrifices or too much thinking about the externalities of my actions, and having loving relationships in my life will actually make me happier anyways. But I still say this is a big claim, because the idea that direct personal relationships are of primary moral importance is not what is taught by most major religions, or by most philosophers.

Throughout these two posts, I’ve tried to articulate 6 ways you can read what The Good Place says about morality. I’m not sure what exactly the creators of the show wished to say by making the show they did, but to some extent that doesn’t matter. What matters is the effect the show has on the viewers, and what lessons each of us draws from watching it. I think all of the above are reasonable lessons to draw from the show. But there are countless other lessons that you could just as reasonably draw, because the show is not didactic. It is an exploration in what it means to be a good person. And hopefully all of us who have watched it are now better people than we were before we watched it.