Premiere of season 4 of The Good Place: in the moral philosophy lessons of the series

The only time I remembered feeling like a piece of culture was designed for me, it was precisely when I watched the premiere of The right place.

The NBC program, whose fourth and final season begins Thursday night, is committed with all his heart: it's Michael Schur, one of the original authors of Office who then created and directed Parks and Recreation and co-create Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The rest of the editorial staff was that of the funniest writers for The parks and some other extremely funny people, and if that was not enough, it featured Kristen Bell and Ted Danson.

Until here everything is fine. Then, roughly in the middle of the first episode, my university advisor was mentioned.

Eleanor Shellstrop (Bell), on her arrival in paradise (technically nicknamed "the right place"), is paired with a "soul mate": Professor of Moral Philosophy Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper). This is handy because Shellstrop realizes immediately that there has been confusion between her and Eleanor Shellstrop. She has been confused with a different Eleanor Shellstrop, ethically superior, if she is misguided. ("I'm pretty sure I was not a death row lawyer who had collected clown paintings and rescued orphans," she told Chidi.)

She asks Chidi to teach her to be a better person, and he immediately gets angry, wondering if it's even ethical to break Good Place rules by protecting a badly assigned person like Eleanor.

This is the original scene of this screenshot:

NBC / The Good Place

Below, just below John Locke, is "Scanlon" for Tim Scanlon: eminent ethicist, inventor of the moral theory "contractualism", and the guy who endured my quirks about moral philosophy for a solid year as a student undergraduate adviser.

But that's not all! The same picture brought to light Peter Singer, the utilitarian ethicist who contributed to the birth of modern animal liberation and effective altruism movements, and Derek Parfit, Oxford's moral philosopher whose books Reasons and people and On what counts totally dominated the college years of philosophy students of my generation.

NBC / The Good Place

As soon as I finished watching, I emailed Scanlon, asking him if he knew he was mentioned in a sitcom on the NBC channel. Not only was he aware, he replied, but the sixth episode of the season would have been named after and What we need from one to the other. For three seasons, the show has covered everything from Jonathan Dancy's theory of moral particularism to the ethics of Aristotelian virtue, Kantian deontology and moral nihilism.

In a recent conversation, Michael Schur told me to expect a reference to the late political scientist Judith Shklar and his essay "Putting Cruelty First" in an upcoming episode this season. "I read that during season three and I thought to myself," This is part of our final game here, "Schur said." This test really shook me, in the best way. "

It's … not typically the way viewers think they end their shows. But nothing on the ideas behind The right place is typical. The right place presented a surprisingly sophisticated moral vision deeply inspired by academic philosophy – a vision that puts learning and testing at the center of attention. During this process, Schur and his team followed their own moral learning process, just like the one the characters they created went through.

What we need from one to the other, explained

NBC / The Good Place

If the show has something that looks like an ur-text, that would be Scanlon's job. What we need from one to the other.

According to Schur, the book forms the "backbone" of the entire show, "the book we keep coming back to." Sometimes it's a literal accessory. Eleanor tears a page and writes a note ("Eleanor, find Chidi") in the finale of season 1. Michael (Ted Danson), "the architect" of Good Place, and Chidi mention the book (while comforting an Eleanor erased from memory in a bar in tribute to the role of Danson in the role of Sam Malone on Cheers, and Chidi at a conference, Eleanor views on YouTube) in Season Two finale.

At an event hosted by Colby College philosophy professor, Lydia Moland, at WBUR's CitySpace in Boston, Schur stated that he had heard that "people are sneaking into libraries and going out. [Scanlon’s] book on the shelves and writes, "Eleanor, find Chidi". "

The title of the book, says Schur, was in itself a source of inspiration. "The title, What we need from one to the other, stuck in my head and was a radical idea, discreetly, because it started from this presupposition, which is: we owe things to each other. It's not, "Do we owe things to each other?" It's "It's what we owe to each other."

What we need from one to the other is a protracted and sometimes technical defense of a theory that Scanlon calls contractualism: in short, the idea is that to act morally, it is to abide by principles that no one can reasonably to reject.

The meat of the theory appeals to Schur. "What he says in the book is a controversial position, but that I found very controversial, namely that you have to devise rules that could not be rejected by the people with whom you have to share the world, "he explains.

It seems immediately applicable in a show like The right place. The show is based on four people – Eleanor, Chidi, Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto) and Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil) – who must form a society together in a future life that they know is not fair enough . It's not fair because Eleanor and Jason (a small drug dealer from Jacksonville, Florida, who has been confused with a Buddhist monk named Jianyu Li) have both been misplaced, suggesting that something is not right. do not go. And it's not fair because they are all turned into a heap of worry and doubt at the end of the first season.

So, all four – and their non-human comrades, Michael and Janet (D & C Arcy Carden), a supernatural personal assistant ("Not a robot!") Who knows all the information to know in the universe – must build their own kind of moral system of life, a system that does not necessarily respect the rules imposed by the authorities that govern the afterlife, but that is born of the sense of duty to one another as a human beings (and superhuman).

Pamela Hieronymi, professor at UCLA, a former student at Scanlon and a proven contractual scholar who Schur consulted periodically after emailing her for advice, was brought in to talk to authors before seasons two and four. She argues the contractual roots of The right place occur most vividly in the flashbacks of Eleanor's life on Earth. Her behavior is at its height when she is free: promising to serve as a designated driver to his colleagues, then drinking anyway, for example.

"She fails to live according to contractual reasoning," Hieronymi concludes. It does not respect the rules that no one can reasonably reject. And it's really at the base of Why what she was doing was wrong.

The purpose of morality, from this point of view, is not to accumulate points of kindness, as in the points system developed by the organizers of Good Place and its corresponding Bad Place to determine who will go to whom at moment of death. It is to live up to our duties to each other.

Do you want to kill someone so that five can live?

The characters then undertake their own journey to find a moral theory that works. This plunges them into the heart of philosophical literature – including one of the most famous thought experiments in the field.

In one of the most memorable episodes of season two, the characters find themselves conducting realistic reenactments of trolley problems, a well-known series of philosophical thought experiments initiated by Philippa Foot. Trolley problems ask in which situations it is acceptable to sacrifice fewer people to save more: is it acceptable, for example, to activate a switch so that the truck strikes and kills one person instead of five?

The original carts problem, Schur told WBUR, is "one of the most entertaining scenarios you can imagine. It's comic writing on a level that I hope someday [attain]. … She says, "You're a doctor and five people need an organ transplant, a healthy janitor has just swept in. Are you killing that person and harvesting his organs?" "What's going on in this city?""

After the event, Scanlon told me that he thought Schur had in fact left out the funniest part of Foot's journal. Foot, noting that the death of a person is not something that the turner must directly need to achieve his goal of saving five lives to be satisfied (while the death of the janitor would have be necessary). Foot insists that the target person could survive, a possibility that makes the moral action: "Maybe he could find a foot on the edge of the tunnel and hang while the vehicle was going to full speed."

Then she adds: "The driver of the tramway do not then skip it and cash it with a crowbar. (The italics are Foot's, trying to emphasize that the readers of the Oxford Review are not at the head of random passers-by with iron bars. Some of the strangest and most dynamic fictional novels of our culture can be found in the final pages of the ethics reviews.)

The journey of Chidi and Eleanor through the tram problems followed Schur's own path. Schur invited Hieronymi to guide his writing team to solve streetcar problems, and he also deepened his reading. In his speech on WBUR, he spoke of John Taurek's famous argument, "Should number count?", According to which one should not act to save more people than fewer people, but instead to throw a coin facing such compromises.

"This man argues that you have to throw a coin. It basically says that numbers do not matter, "said Schur. "You must value individual life individually, not as a mass of human life but as an individual life."

Make the right place on earth

In college, I learned Taurek's paper as a kind of strange curiosity, a useful argument to illustrate arguments about saving lives, but it is totally wrong. The dismantling of Taurek by Derek Parfit was entitled "Innumerate Ethics". The objection is simple: Of course save more lives, it's better. To properly value humans, we must value humans equally, each life counting for the same. "Everyone counts for one," wrote Parfit. "That's why more counts for more."

But other philosophers, notably Kieran Setiya and Michael Thompson, have a more positive view of Taurek's argument; Setiya even decisively declares that Taurek was right, that there is something unpleasant about simply counting lives.

Setiya and Thompson both work in a philosophical tradition claiming that morality does not derive from duties to others, but that she lives up to what she's like to be a good human being, by cultivating and reflecting deeply human virtues. You can (very, very largely) qualify this tradition of neo-Aristotelianism, or ethics of virtue.

Lately, Schur has said that he feels more affinity with this philosophy, and this has been reflected on The right place. "Scanlon's book was a sort of backbone of the whole series, but I would say that what we might call the traditional ethics of Aristotelian virtue has supplanted it in terms of the overall statement of the series on the world, "says Schur.

"The idea Mike keeps coming back to is that you're trying, you're not always going to succeed, but you're trying," says Todd May, a Clemson professor who started counseling. The right place in the following seasons after Schur met his book Death (which supports the finiteness of life gives it meaning). "He says we're going to try, but we're going to fail and the key is to know you're going to fail."

Many moral theories take a somewhat Yoda-ish approach: you follow a reasonable set of rules, or you do not; you maximize the good in the world, or you do not do it – you can not try. By focusing on the culture of virtues, personal growth and development, an Aristotelian approach puts the test in the foreground.

Schur suggests that contractualism and the ethic of virtue do not necessarily have to be in conflict – they could simply be different ways of accounting for the same moral truths. The ethics of virtue explains our duties to one another in the existence of humanity as a social animal; Contractarianism gives priority to our social life as a community, before turning to human nature. But they could come to the same end point.

It's a familiar idea in philosophy; Derek Parfit compared different schools of moral theory to mountaineers "climbing the same mountain from different sides". Hieronymi and Scanlon, meanwhile, are open to the possibility.

How good can the right place be?

The right placeThe last season is not the only writing of the Schur release this fall. He also wrote the preface to a new edition of the 2009 book by Princeton utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. Life you can save, an argument that citizens of rich countries need to do a lot more, including charitable donations, to help people in developing countries, to help animals and, more generally, to improve the world.

It is a book that helped launch the effective altruistic movement and an argument that had a transformative influence on my own life. I doubt I donated a kidney or tithe 10% of my salary to GiveWell's main charities (to which Schur also donates) if I had not read Singer's "Famine, wealth and morality.

I totally disagree with Singer, and Schur also has his differences – he willingly offers "a lot of things [Singer] said are pretty crazy. "There is even a character on The right place Doug Forcett (Michael McKean), a man who successfully predicted the afterlife on a magic mushroom trip and pursued an almost impossible life of altruism, inspired in part by Singer's follow-up book. The greatest good you can do:

NBC / The Good Place

But instead of giving meaning to her life and securing her a place in the right place, Forcett's quest for a perfect life apparently deprived her of all happiness. He travels to Edmonton for miles and a half from his cabin in the woods of Alberta to "donate $ 85 to a charity on snails." He only eats radishes and lentils and drinks his own filtered urine. He is taken for a neighborhood son by a boy from the neighborhood and has a graveyard for each dead animal he has encountered, up to a deer tick.

"It was an attempt to say, if you indulge too much in one of those theories, if you go too far in one direction, you're in trouble," says Schur.

During the third season, the idea of ​​lack of mastery, according to which the consequences of our actions are so many, unpredictable and impossible to account for – a constant concern for contemporary ethics raised by writers such as as James Lenman and Hilary Greaves – also gaining strength as critical moral theories very demanding. At the end of the season, it becomes clear that Good Place's entry criteria are too high: it strikes people excessively for damage they would never have anticipated.

The exhibition shows an example: in 2009, Douglas Ewing of Scagsville, Maryland, gave a dozen roses to his mother and lost moral points to the Good Place count – because the flowers had been picked by exploited migrant workers, cultivated with pesticides a cell phone manufactured in a clandestine workshop, delivered in a process emitting an excessive amount of greenhouse gases, and benefiting a delivery company that exploits a racist sexual stalker on behalf of his CEO. Each moral action has spiral consequences that are difficult or impossible to anticipate.

It leads The right place towards sympathy for more flexible moral views; William Jackson Harper, who interprets Chidi, said that while reading Scanlon's book, he was attracted to the idea of ​​a "set of subjective motivations" of Bernard Williams: l & rsquo; Idea that one must understand the moral behavior of each person as the result of motivations and beliefs internal to society. their.

But this kind of tent does not lead the show to collapse in relativism or nihilism – although Chidi has a brief moment. The right place, and Schur, are convinced that as difficult as the process of moral learning is, it can also lead you to a better life.

"You do not have to live [like Doug Forcett] for the concept of effective altruism to play a role in your life, "says Schur. "You just have to think about it. You must constantly reflect on what you are doing and the opportunity to do something a little more, a little better, a little differently. "

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