Philosophy of The Good Place, Part 1
Suppose you are walking through a park and notice a small child thrashing about in the shallow pond beside the path. She surfaces, goes under, surfaces again, and the intervals are getting precariously longer. If you wade in, you save her life. Your shoes and clothes will be soaked, and cleaning them will cost about ten dollars. Should you wade in?
Most people say yes, obviously. Some would go further and say that anyone who lets a child drown rather than ruin a pair of shoes is a moral monster. Why, then, have you not given ten dollars to charity to save a child dying on the other side of the world for want of clean water? The only difference between that child and the one in the pond is physical distance.
Michael Schur’s The Good Place opens with Eleanor Shellstrop waking up somewhere she does not recognize. She is on a sofa in a quiet waiting room. On the wall in front of her, in cheerful green lettering: “Welcome! Everything is fine.” A moment later a white-haired man in a suit opens the door of the adjoining office and calls her in with a warm smile. He introduces himself as Michael, waits for her to sit, and says: “You, Eleanor Shellstrop, are dead.“
Eleanor had in fact died in a supermarket parking lot on her way out from a shopping trip. She dropped the bottle of Lonely Gal Margarita Mix for One she was carrying, bent down to pick it up, was shunted into the road by a runaway train of shopping carts, and was hit by a truck advertising erectile dysfunction medication. What she has arrived in is the afterlife, the place mortals usually call heaven: the Good Place, reserved for those who lived genuinely good and ethical lives. Michael runs it.
The trouble is that Eleanor’s life on earth was neither good nor ethical. She sold pharmaceuticals in Phoenix, Arizona. She was good at her job, too; except her employer’s business was selling fake medicine door-to-door to the gullible elderly. Her impressive track record doesn’t stop there: she rigged the draw to get out of being designated driver, picked fights with strangers collecting signatures for environmental campaigns, and openly mocked her boyfriend as a do-gooder for suggesting they stop going to a coffee shop run by a barista in the middle of a sexual harassment scandal. Nobody’s model of anything.
Eleanor soon works out that she is in the Good Place because of a clerical error. For reasons unexplained (but explained later in the show), the system has her recorded as a human rights lawyer who campaigned against the death penalty and did human rights work in Ukraine. If this comes out, she will be deported to the Bad Place, where the tortures are inventive and one of them involves being eaten alive by a bear with two faces. After some thought she hits on a plan: confess to Chidi Anagonye, the soulmate assigned to her and who taught ethics and moral philosophy while he was alive, and ask him to teach her enough moral philosophy to make her the sort of person who belongs there. That is where the series properly begins.
But something is off about this Good Place. There is, for one thing, an unreasonable quantity of frozen yogurt: several froyo shops on a single street.1 Stranger still, almost nobody gets in. According to Michael, nearly every artist who ever lived failed to make it, Mozart, Picasso and Elvis included. Every American president except Lincoln went to the Bad Place. Florence Nightingale narrowly missed the cut. At which point you start to wonder what a person actually has to do to get in.
The answer arrives when Eleanor meets the neighbours at a party. One of them spent half his life fighting for women’s rights in North Korea and the other half fighting for gay rights in Saudi Arabia. Another defused, by hand, a thousand landmines around an orphanage in a war zone, mines the UN had declared unclearable. Another gave both kidneys to a man he had just met on a bus and died doing it. When a steel dumpster falls on one resident’s head, he laughs it off: it’s fine, nobody can die in the Good Place anyway. Eleanor shakes her head:
Look, I might not have been a saint, but it’s not like I killed anybody.
The Good Place, season 1, episode 1
The pond story at the top of this post is a thought experiment from Peter Singer‘s “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” usually called the Drowning Child.2 Most people think of themselves as more or less what Eleanor thinks of herself: no saint, perhaps, but no murderer either, and on balance a decent enough sort. Singer says flatly that this self-assessment is false. Most people, or at least most people living comfortably in the affluent West, are not living anywhere near as well as what morality demands.
On Singer’s account, there is no morally relevant difference between wading into the pond at the cost of your clothes and giving ten dollars to a relief agency that will save a child’s life. If a person who lets a child drown to protect a pair of shoes is a moral monster, then a person who does not give the ten dollars deserves exactly the same verdict.
Yet most of the people who accept the former proposition do not give ten dollars, or even one dollar at that. And it’s not like they put the savings to anything remarkable. They buy a drink, or a YouTube Premium subscription because they cannot stand the ads. Is that worth as much as the life of a child on the other side of the world? Of course not, Singer says. So it is not enough to give what we can comfortably spare. We are obliged to give away the whole of our disposable income except what goes to things as important as saving a child’s life, such as keeping ourselves alive and giving our children a decent education.3 The principle runs:
If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243.
Which means that if you spent ten dollars today on a drink, on YouTube Premium, on a novel, on ribeye instead of the cheap cut, you are not a decent person who merely happens not to be a saint. You are a moral monster who let a child die, and you belong in the Bad Place.
Well doesn’t that sound unsettling. It makes me uncomfortable too, and even Singer concedes that it is indeed uncomfortable. He is unmoved all the same. Our intuitions about first-order normative judgments, he thinks, are in many cases not reliable. That a conclusion faithful to a moral principle leaves us squirming is no evidence that the principle is false, any more than the discomfort of medieval Catholics was evidence against Copernicus.
Other philosophers disagree with him, and not merely because the conclusion feels uncomfortable. Their objection is that Singer’s principle is too morally demanding. It asks that nearly all of our time, money, attention and life go to reducing the suffering of others, which is intuitively excessive and, for most people, close to impossible to comply with. If that is right, there must be a flaw somewhere in the argument, and philosophers have tried to locate it in different places.
Travis Timmerman argues that the Drowning Child case does not logically support the principle the way Singer believes it does.4 The wrote a paper with a charming title: “Sometimes there is Nothing Wrong with Letting a Child Drown.” He twists the original case into a variant he calls Drowning Children:
Unlucky Lisa gets a call from her 24-hr bank telling her that hackers have accessed her account and are taking $200 out of it every 5 min until Lisa shows up in person to put a hold on her account. Due to some legal loophole, the bank is not required to reimburse Lisa for any of the money she may lose nor will they. In fact, if her account is overdrawn, the bank will seize as much of her assets as is needed to pay the debt created by the hackers. Fortunately, for Lisa, the bank is just across the street from her work and she can get there in fewer than 5 min. She was even about to walk to the bank as part of her daily routine. On her way, Lisa notices a vast space of land covered with hundreds of newly formed shallow ponds, each of which contains a small child who will drown unless someone pulls them to safety. Lisa knows that for each child she rescues, an extra child will live who would have otherwise died. Now, it would take Lisa approximately 5 min to pull each child to safety and, in what can only be the most horrifically surreal day of her life, Lisa has to decide how many children to rescue before entering the bank. Once she enters the bank, all the children who have not yet been rescued will drown. Things only get worse for poor Lisa. For the remainder of her life, the hackers repeat their actions on a daily basis and, every day, the ponds adjacent to Lisa’s bank are filled with drowning children.
Timmerman, T. (2015). Sometimes there is nothing wrong with letting a child drown. Analysis, 75(2), 204–212.
Structurally this is the same as the original case, except that there are hundreds of ponds with a child in each. If Singer is right, poor Lisa spends the whole day hauling children out of the water while she watches the bailiffs put stickers on her house, her car, her dresses, her iPhone and her dishwasher. Most people think she is under no such obligation. Walking past the ponds entirely because she does not want to lose two hundred dollars would probably be wrong; but being required to keep pulling children out until there is nothing left for anyone to take from her is unfair and excessive.
Timmerman’s point, in the end, is that Singer has overlooked the difference between the one-off and the repeated. Singer assumes there is no morally relevant difference between failing to save a drowning child and the failure of comfortable citizens of rich countries to give to relief agencies, but the first is a single extraordinary event and the second is a series of events spread across an entire life, and the difference is not irrelevant. The Drowning Child case therefore does not support Singer’s principle as he claims, and Drowning Children gives us positive reason to reject the principle itself.
Look closely and Singer’s moral universe begins to resemble the Good Place’s. In the show, every action a person takes on earth is assessed. Ethical acts earn points; bad acts subtract them. The scoring is administered by a cosmic system more impartial than anything else in existence. Anyone above a certain score at the moment of death goes up, anyone below it goes down. Had Lisa acted on Singer’s principle, diving into pond after pond and saving hundreds of children while her house and car and dresses and iPhone and dishwasher were carried off, she would have qualified for the Good Place beyond any doubt.
Set her beside the people who actually got in and the inference grows stronger. Lisa gave up every good thing in her life to save hundreds of children she had never met. One Good Place resident gave away the organs he needed to stay alive to a man he had met on a bus ten minutes earlier. Another walked into a minefield the UN had abandoned and defused a thousand mines with her bare hands (to be frank, the show doesn’t actually specify this detail). Every one of them displays self-sacrifice at a level ordinary people cannot begin to fathom.
They have one further thing in common: they are strange. The show does not hide it. The people Eleanor meets at that party are depicted not as sublime moral beings but as odd, faintly unsettling figures, the sort you never encounter in real life and would not much want to sit next to if you did. Watching the man who gave both kidneys to a stranger on a bus, the viewer does not marvel at his moral grandeur. The viewer sides with Eleanor, shaking her head in exasperation: Look, I might not have been a saint, but it’s not like I killed anybody.
That is a deliberate plot device, but it is also a scene that raises a deep philosophical problem. Timmerman’s argument goes no further than identifying a logical flaw in Singer’s argument. The question the party scene presents to us is more fundamental than that. It is not whether Singer’s argument suffers from this or that flaw, but what a human life comes to look like once his principle is accepted, as in:
Is a maximally morally good life a desirable life? Do you want to live one? Do you want to be the sort of person who gives his organs away to someone he has just met on a bus?
(Continued in Part 2.)
- The joke runs roughly along the lines of “why eat that when you could have ice cream.” I assume it reflects the writers’ tastes. ↩
- Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. ↩
- More precisely, we must give until we reach the point of marginal utility at which what we lose by giving more is equal to the suffering that the gift would prevent. ↩
- Timmerman, T. (2015). Sometimes there is nothing wrong with letting a child drown. Analysis, 75(2), 204–212. ↩
Examined Life 
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