The Good Place is so enjoyable as a sitcom that it’s easy to forget its thorny, highly complicated premise: the question of how to be a good person. The first season saw the once unrepentantly selfish Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) try to earn her spot in the show’s namesake setting; even after the Good Place was revealed as a more creative version of the self-explanatory Bad Place, Eleanor’s studies have continued. In one-time ethics scholar Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), The Good Place approaches Eleanor’s quest through a lens that’s hardly known for accessibility: moral philosophy.
But through its season and a half of existence, The Good Place has done more than upend our expectations of broadcast comedy as devoid of game-changing twists or structural innovation. It’s also managed to render dorm-room dilemmas like the trolley problem (also featured, in a neat coincidence, on the most recent season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) or the merits of utilitarianism into relatable quandaries. This season, Mike Schur and his writers have expanded Chidi’s pupil roster to mediocre human beings and the immortal demon named Michael (Ted Danson) who, up until a few episodes ago, was attempting to torture them for eternity.
While The Good Place works wonders in translating ethics for the casual fan, my curiosity was piqued when I heard about a fan with a slightly more informed point of view: Professor Gideon Rosen, a member of the Princeton University philosophy department who’s worked in fields ranging from metaphysics to moral philosophy. (Full disclosure: Professor Rosen also happens to be the father of a close friend.) Curious how Chidi’s teachings would come off to someone in the same line of work, I spoke with Professor Rosen about The Good Place’s surprisingly dark cosmology, Chidi’s pedagogical skills, and what the show gets wrong—but mostly right—about learning to be a good person.
How did you first hear about the show?
You know, I think I just clicked on it on Netflix. It was a Netflix recommendation.
Had you known about it before?
I came to it completely cold. That happened to me twice, in pretty close succession, because the third season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is also about philosophy. So I watched that with no advance warning at all, and then I started watching The Good Place with no advance warning at all. I hadn’t heard about it; it hadn’t come to my attention.
What did you like about the show?
First of all, it’s just cool to see the names of philosophers constantly coming up in a TV show. It’s really not something you see every day. Philosophy is just not part of popular culture at all. A lot of that is going to be completely strange and unfamiliar to people who haven’t taken a philosophy class, and how many people in America have taken a philosophy class? So that was cool. But it’s not just seeing Plato and Aristotle and the really famous names coming up. It’s seeing contemporary academic philosophy discussed, and that just never happens. Most American academics don’t know who Judith Thompson is, or who Tim Scanlon is! But those names come up all the time in The Good Place. For us, it’s like seeing your next-door neighbor suddenly become famous.
Are there any philosophy Easter eggs a more casual viewer might have missed?
So if you look at the names on the blackboards in the first season and the second season, it includes those names, but it also includes genuinely contemporary stuff: Philippa Foot, Judith Thompson. It occurred to me to wonder where they got all this from—whether the guy who’s writing the show was a philosophy student at some point, or had a roommate who was a philosophy student. I don’t know the answer to that question, though I know they have some kind of consultant.
It’s literally like watching a sitcom on TV and seeing the names of the guys you go drinking with every night on the blackboard.
Do you feel like the show does a good job of discussing philosophy, both in terms of accuracy and in a way that’s accessible?
Oh, yeah. It’s completely accurate! Whenever Chidi gives those quick philosophy lessons and explains what people were saying, it’s always completely right and pretty accessible. It’s not the kind of thing that Eleanor wouldn’t understand. A normal person would understand when somebody tells you that, according to utilitarianism, the right act is the one that creates the most happiness. That’s easy to understand, and they get it exactly right. They told a little historical story: First you get Socrates, and then you get Plato, and then you get Aristotle. All of that’s completely accurate. And when they explain things like the trolley problem—well, they sort of made a mess of that, but in a way that’s harmless and funny. When they have to go on for a bit longer, as they did with the trolley problem—when it’s not just a one-off couple of lines—they muddle things a little bit.
How did they muddle things with the trolley problem?
First of all, the trolley problem is not the question. “What would you do?” That’s a question about individual psychology, and that’s not the philosophical question. The philosophical question is, “What should you do, and why?” The aim is to find some principles governing these hard choices where you can only save some lives by costing others. What they don’t do with the problem is try to elicit the principles. You might think, “Eh, you can always kill one to save five,” but that’s not true. And actually, they do make this point: The simple thing that says “you can always save one to save five” is refuted by a case in which you can only save the five by killing an innocent person and transplanting his organs into the five people who need organ transplants. So once you see those two cases side by side—the regular trolley case, where it’s okay to kill one to save five, and the transplant case, where it’s not okay to kill one to save five—that’s what sets up the problem. Now you need to know, what’s the relevant difference between those two cases? And I don’t think the episode puts that theoretical problem very clearly, but that’s okay
How would you rate Chidi as a philosophy teacher?
I think he’s a great teacher! It looks like he’s giving them too much homework with all those books he’s always carrying around, but apart from that, one way to get into philosophy is to give a little potted story of the history of the subject: who said what when, how the later guys responded to the earlier guys, and so on. That’s what he’s doing. And he gives them problems that are relevant and fun to think about. He’s an excellent teacher because he’s very good at conveying what the subject’s about, and why it’s cool and worth spending time on. Who knows whether he’s good at getting to the next stage.
The next stage, you try to get the students to see that these problems are not just paradoxes that you’ll never solve. They’re things you can make progress on. Some theories of these things are better than others. The TV show never gets to that stage.
How do you think he’s done at the admittedly difficult task of schooling an immortal demon?
[Laughs] You know, it remains to be seen whether he can make a dent on that guy.
One premise of the show, and this is something that was just discussed on an NPR blog by a psychologist who’s quite interested in philosophy named Tania Lombrozo, is that you can become a better person by reading philosophy. And philosophers have traditionally thought something like that; that was part of the justification for the subject. But there’s a lot of evidence that it’s not true—that people who study philosophy don’t get better. So if the show suggests otherwise, the show is being overly optimistic about the value of reading about philosophy and talking about philosophy for moral education. So who knows whether it’ll make a dent on Michael, but it is a great philosophical question: whether you can convey an interest in moral philosophy to someone who is immortal, invulnerable, and didn’t have normal human emotions and instincts. How much of moral philosophy depends on human nature, and how much of it should be addressable to any rational creature at all, no matter what his nature is? That’s an ancient philosophical question, and in a way, the show is putting it in front of us, though not explicitly raising it.
Philosophers like Kant thought that morality is accessible to any being capable of rational thought—instincts, emotions, that sort of thing doesn’t really matter. Whereas there’s another tradition, going back to Aristotle, that says no, morality is for human beings; it takes human nature as its starting point and gives us a way of thinking about our lives that makes them better, but it doesn’t speak to beings with a completely different nature.
Even though the show is optimistic in that way, it’s also very dark—in this cosmology, only the narrowest fraction of humanity earns the right to not be eternally tortured. That’s pretty harsh, morally.
No, it’s absolutely true. That actually occurred to me this morning as I was walking to work. First of all, it’s got a completely brutal view of what the afterlife is like for almost everybody. Basically decent people like these guys would have been boiled in oil forever if it hadn’t been for this little experiment they’re running. Any setup that allows that to happen is deeply, deeply horrible, and unjust as anything could possibly be. And then you think, “So who put that in place?”
The amazing thing about this show is that it’s a show about heaven and hell without God. God is never mentioned. There’s no God in the picture. There’s just the bureaucracy that runs the show. But if you start thinking about this with theological glasses on, you wonder instantly, “How could a just God possibly set up this kind of afterlife?” For the vast majority of people: “Isn’t that sort of God a fiend?” This show completely blocks that question by never mentioning God at all.
I suppose there’s a whole field of religious philosophy it just leaves off the table.
Mhm. And common sense religion! It doesn’t have to be philosophy. Most people, when they think about the afterlife, think about it as the realm in which God does justice. This world is ridiculously unjust; everything gets sorted out in the afterlife. This show takes on half of the myth without its rationale. It’s absolutely amazing. Really daring, I think.
Chidi, the ethicist character, is paralyzed by constant indecision. In your experience, is this a common problem with real-life philosophers?
[Laughs] No, it isn’t. There’s a stage when you’re learning philosophy where you just roll around in what everybody has said. At that stage, philosophy only makes things worse. It makes you more confused than you were before. But people who stick with the subject for a little while, for better or worse, find themselves accepting some views and rejecting others. All the graduate students in philosophy, all the philosophy professors, they’re uncertain about all kinds of things, but I think they’ve learned something about philosophy from studying philosophy. And that can make you more decisive. It can give you some principles for making decisions in hard cases where otherwise you just have to wing it.
Are there any philosophical issues you’d like to see the show explore in the future?
One question will be whether they actually start talking about the people who are being punished for real in the other parts of the Bad Place. If that doesn’t come up later, then they’re not learning enough from their philosophy. That oughta be on their minds.
I guess what’s gonna happen, my prediction, is that as Michael becomes friends with our heroes, he’ll start to see the point of ethics. [Editor’s note: This interview took place before last week’s airing of “Janet and Michael,” in which Michael refuses to kill his omniscient assistant because of their friendship. On top of being an accomplished academic, Professor Rosen isn’t half bad at predicting TV plots.] That’s a philosophical claim. Ethics is often presented as starting with completely general principles governing how any human being should interact with any other human being, but that’s not where moral life begins. Moral life begins in the family and with your friends. That’s where most of the action is. The idea that you begin to see the point of ethics when you see how it works out in the context of small-scale personal relationship—that’s an interesting idea, and I suspect that’s where they’re going. He’ll be moralized as he becomes friends with human beings who are in the business of interacting with one another on moral terms.