The Good Place Doesn't Make Sense | Big Joel
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- čas přidán 27. 06. 2020
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In this video I'm OUT THERE talking about the good place. Let's see where i take this.
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Edited by Ben from Canada!
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howdy! I can't believe I forgot to say this in the outro, so I'll say it here! This video was edited by Ben From Canada. You can follow him on twitter and force him to edit for you: twitter.com/BenChinapen. Also, if you liked the video, maybe consider throwing "some money" to me on "patreon"? An interesting idea, I know, but I think someone had to say it: www.patreon.com/bigjoel
Really good points. I felt similarly.
I was forced to give up caring about cohesiveness in art however • cos I DO art & now realise that people - myself included - can't end things properly, neatly...
We humans have too many cognitive biases & are filled with fallacious, propagated & irrational ideologies to take our creations apart and examine them objectively.
This is why everyone lost their collective shit when 6th Sense came out.
Most stuff had such a crappy ending til then (& still DOES)...
MKS made a mathematically & brilliantly Near-perfect ending.
Anyhow - excellent job.
Great points.
I really enjoyed The Good Place, & I also agree with you.
An upside to the programme is it fired up a lot of people to develop an interest in philosophy.
Thanks Big Joel!! (Henry)😁😘😍💗✌🏽
✊🏼🖤❤🧡💛💚💙💜
Are there spoilers for the last season in this video? I havent watched it and want no spoilers.
"torture is bad" is an opinion, not an objective fact. It's an opinion we hope everyone shares, but it's an opinion nevertheless.
Unless you think morality is objective
- in which case you still have to define what good and bad means.
And everyone has an opinion about that.
Which would be an opinion and not an
objective fact.
fact.
The show doesn't seem to work as a literal framework, but it does function as a good argument for prison abolition
I mean... Option A? We see Chidi taking it early on in Season 1. And the dissonance wells up, little by little. We get to see Chidi grow, just like all the other characters!
Season 2? Lets bring up google maps. There's the places, roads, addresses. Like the point-rules. Michael and Janet know *all* these rules, better than any human.
But the reason to use Google Maps? Is the navigation, which Im gonna compare to Chidi's Ethics. He knows all the algorithms that get you from A to B in the best, least harmful, most upstanding way. No matter where you are, Chidi's ethical analysis is *how* to effectively use any "Moral Map".
Season 3? Was a fun diversion, it kinda felt like the writers lost the plot. But they did set use Chidi's moral analysis paralysis to set up a new compelling premise along the way.
By the end? After meeting the Liberal-like "Good Place" Committee? Especially after Michael reboots him with *All* of his memories? Option B takes over entirely, and we see an assertive, no longer Overly-Analytical Chidi. He's presented as a paragon that no longer needs to directly analyze anything, just do meta-meta-meta^meta-analysis - which itself is another problem.
The map of rules is thus entirely arbitrary from the morally abstracted consequences involved in any and every decision. The entirety of Chidi's life? Was spent paralyzed by analyzing these moral implications. Freed from this weight? Here he goes, *rewriting the cosmos WITHOUT HAVING TO THINK OUT THE DIRECT AND INDIRECT IMPLICATIONS?!!!*
Season 4? Was such a letdown, aside from the bitchslap at Liberal morality.
Without reincarnation after walking through "the door"? There is no reason for humans to *need* to get better after death. Nothing helps improve life on Earth, makes living morality more worthwhile... He just reformed Hell into literal Catholic Purgatory. The only reason not to be a sociopath? Is that means more time spent being reeducated after death, to eventually end up in Heaven anyway.
Life itself becomes only special to those who never lived it - the rest of us? Get an eternal party until we opt for existential euthanasia.
Which each character does, in a final episode as numbingly boring as the Heaven Chidi overwrote.
The Judge is a representation of the universe itself - uncaring and absurd. That's why she's been okay with torture and also why she's easily 'convinced' to stop it. She has no convictions.
@@idontevenhaveapla7224 Damn true like God is just a projection of our preferred moral framework, and the world has order just because we need to see it that way.
@@idontevenhaveapla7224 So the Universe is God?
The Incredible Hulk well, sort of? idk it depends on you and your beliefs
@@Anonymous-zd1ow That has been my belief for the past decade. God is not a sentient entity that oversees, punishes or reward other beings. God is the immense ever expanding universe, full of energy, positive and negative. You attract the kind of energy you give to others. One can certainly interpret that as a kind of "reward / punishment" system but that is not how I see it.
"The universe is chaos, but chaos plays favorites"
"how does he still care about his own ethics if he believes in the good place rules" joel he is a moral philosophy professor
The most worthless job on earth
@@matthewjones2095 man shut up
@@r.7530 And who peed in your cereal
@@matthewjones2095 obviously a moral philosophy professor pissed in yours
@@deer0skullz 🤣
"And in response to this dilemma, Chidi doesn't pick a side."
Honestly, that's so perfectly in-character for Chidi that it's hilarious.
Chidi is me (and most of you reading this) -- he's in a place that tells him there's a reason he's so fortunate, that he deserves to be doing great even when others are suffering, but the longer he stays the more cracks appear in that worldview. When I first saw this video I thought, "okay but if you were Chidi, wouldn't you rather believe things were as they should be than deal with the unpleasant notion that you were randomly chosen to benefit from systemic injustice?" And then I was like OH WAIT SHIT
Something I think you’re missing is that the deities of The Good Place have no IDEA that people can improve. The reason Michael’s plan failed all the 802 times is because he couldn’t grasp the idea that people can just change
Then they're punishing people over something they have no control over
@@AugustCrossroads yes… that’s the point of the entire later half of the series
Joel is looking like a good stepfather that fails to establish a connection with his stepson but then he grows to love him anyways
Holy hell ur right
Maybe it's the hat-mustache combo
Yessss. It's so good. Lol. I love his new look. 😊
💗
That is some oddly specific energy.
@@Arrakiz666 Noah Baumbach baby
I'm normally a fan of your work, but I have to say, when it comes to this show, I think you kind of generally missed the mark, both on an in-text level and on a meta-textual level. I'll try to explain my reasoning, but I'm just writing out a comment, it's not going to be thoroughly reviewed and edited, so apologies if it's a bit sloppy.
Part 1: The Beginning.
Chidi's beliefs and actions in the beginning are not a contradiction as you present them to be. A big part of the pursuit of moral philosophy is to determine whether or not there is an objective ethics and, if there are, what they are, and if there aren't, what we should do about it. "What is 'Ethics'?" is as important of a question in philosophy as "What is ethical?" Chidi is in the afterlife, being told by some powerful being that is able to present full information on his life, that there is, in fact, an objective ethics. Not only that, but Chidi won the ethics game! All that work you've been doing studying moral philosophy your whole career?
Well, it turns out, YOU WERE RIGHT! The ethics that you've studied, researched, taught, and (from what we can tell, largely) practiced is enough in line with this objective system of morality that you made it into the good place. Your version of ethics is a good one. There is no reason for Chidi to believe (at this time) that the morality of this system is arbitrary and fallible because there's no evidence to suggest that. It was actually pretty deceptive to include the clip from a later point of Michael and Janet going to a different part of the afterlife, without the gang, well after the cat's out of the bag that Michael's neighborhood is in the bad place, where Michael, Janet, and we as the audience find out how arbitrary a lot of these rules are. These are not the rules shown to Chidi in season 1. The Chidi of season 1 would have every reason to believe that the morality he is teaching Elanor is what got him into the good place. That's Chidi of season 1.
Then we move on to Chidi in season 2. At this point, we still don't have reason to believe that the morality off the system is one to call into question. All we know at this point is that they're in the Bad Place, they were intended to torture each other, but they just got better instead. Again, this at the time can be attributed to Chidi's system of ethics. He's not wrong when he says he knows more about Michael when it comes to ethics because he's still under the assumption that there is a SYSTEM of ethics underneath these rules that Michael cites. Given that Michael is a bad place architect, it's reasonable to believe that he can access this list of rules without knowing what connects them, and Chidi understands what makes the list of rules what it is, even if he doesn't know the exact point value of each thing. Michael can say "This action has this negative points value" but that's it. Chidi can explain WHY an action is a bad one.
Part 2: The End
In regards to whether or not the judge would be swayed by Chidi's argument, I don't think you're being as reasonably charitable as you could be to the show. The judge is omnipotent but, unlike Janet, she is NOT omniscient. She does not, actively at all times, know everything about everyone everywhere at all times. She has ACCESS to all this information, but it's in an external system she has to retrieve. So it's unfair to say that she knows that "people change on earth all the time." More importantly, the show seems to make an important moral distinction between them changing in life, and them changing after life, that you're just discarding. The idea of the system is that, after one lifetime, a human will have revealed who they are, what kind of person they are, if they are fundamentally good or bad. The fact that the gang got better instead of just continuing to be bad was a surprise to basically everyone involved. The argument they had to make to the judge was that the gang wasn't actually special, that nearly anyone would become better when given the structure they had. You also disregard the fact that the judge went to earth as a human to experience the changed world and saw that the current system WAS flawed, which she didn't believe at first. Keeping this out of the video does make her decision seem arbitrary when it was not. You act as if the information presented and organized for the judge were things that she already knew and thought about, but they were not.
Part 3: The Whole Thing
I think you're looking at what the Good Place is trying to say all wrong. You're coming from the perspective that "People shouldn't be tortured full stop" as if it's an obvious conclusion when, to a lot of people, that isn't the case at all. The Good Place is a commentary and criticism of the Christian morality perspective. They try to do some waving off early on to suggest that most religions were party right, partly wrong, but when you look at it on the whole, it's pretty obvious which religions it is criticizing. We have a system of the afterlife with "the good place" where good people go to be happy, and "the bad place" where bad people go to be tortured. We have a system that seemed to make sense far in the past but we now see has been broken for literal hundreds of years because it didn't update to match the changing world. We have a list of rules that are a mix of things that make sense, and a list of things that don't really make sense but probably have some stupid explanation deep underneath it that doesn't fit anymore. You have an all-powerful judge that is the final arbiter of what is right and wrong. You've got a system where people just sort of accept that good people should be rewarded, and bad people should be punished.
It's that final line that I think that should be the central consideration when we examine the show. That's what The Good Place is fundamentally trying to convince people. It's a show presented to a largely western audience in the early 21st century. It's not a timeless esoteric work of philosophy that was meant for people to see and understand throughout the ages once they've already had some level of philosophical education. Think about the American penal system. A lot of people would probably agree that there needs to be some amount of reform to the prison system... but how many do you think agree that it should be outright abolished? How many people in America, today, actually hold the notion that "bad people should not be punished for their bad deeds"? That's a VERY common way of thinking. If you do something bad, you're a bad person, and you should be punished for being a bad person. The Good Place isn't trying to give us this huge understanding of human morality and the ontology of ethics.
"People improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don't?"
This is basically the big takeaway from the show. Yes, if you really wanted, you could look at The Good Place in a very literal fashion and explain why the ethics in it can kinda suck. But I think looking at the show through that lens is a mistake. The show is trying to tell the average American a message that
1. People's actions are largely influenced by their surroundings
2. Sometimes people do bad things because of what they've been through, but
3. Just because someone did bad things doesn't mean they should be punished for it, let alone punished eternally.
My problem with your video here is that you're criticizing the show for arriving at a conclusion you've already come to, when others might not have. Saying that you're upset with The Good Place for no one immediately challenging the notion that "Bad people should be tortured because they're fundamentally bad" would be... kind of like saying that it doesn't make sense to you Sam-I-Am can convince Guy-Am-I to try green eggs and ham because it's obvious that people shouldn't be close-minded, so Guy-Am-I must have some other reason for saying no other than being close-minded for no reason. Like, sure, you can technically correctly have that reading of a children's story, but other than the sake of having a 'hot take' as to why this thing meant to teach a very basic lesson is flawed when you take into consideration more things than that basic lesson, what do you seriously gain from it?
The show is weird to you. I get that. But going back and reading children's books that you've never read before would probably also be weird to you. But if you were to re-examine the show from the perspective of someone that believes that yes, bad people should be punished for being bad, and people do things because they're bad people, the decisions of the show make a lot more sense than someone who hears "This person committed a mortal sin on earth so they're going to hell for eternity" and thinks "How is that a fair response?" The show challenges this idea and, more importantly, gives people the tools to draw parallels and realize that a lot of crime happens because of people's situations and not strictly because of a moral failing fundamental to the person. It lets them see that hey, instead of sending people to prison for selling drugs and just keeping them locked up doing nothing productive, maybe these are people who we should be trying to rehabilitate and improve. Maybe we should focus more on why people do bad things and help fix that, instead of just punishing them once they've already done it, and maybe we shouldn't just take a system of morality that was designed literally thousands of years ago and assume it will work perfectly fine in the modern-day. These are all points obvious to you, Big "Henry" Joel, but to the average middle American that this show is trying to reach, that's still a lesson that needs to be learned.
hit the nail on the head
Thanks for this.
your part 2 explanation is so important! thank you!
Tt
Yep yep yep
Honestly, I think the show was written not as a conflict of “Our Heroes against the Morally Terrifying Afterlife(TM)”, but as a critique of our own perception of the Afterlife. Billions of people on Earth believe “Good men go to Heaven, bad men go to Hell”, and totally fail to elaborate on that.
The show doesn’t really make any strong arguments with the Judge, Shawn, or any other eldritch entity because it didn’t write them as characters, but as personifications of our human beliefs. Humans already believe in eternal torture. We THREATEN each other with it, like that’s something fair. The shows arguments are directed at the audience(duh), and that in part makes them fail within the universe of the Good Place.
Ooh I love this take!
"It didn't write them as characters, but as personification of human beliefs" that's what any good character is, it's not unique to the show, you're just explaining the concept of subtext, it's not really a response to Joel's points
@@buubaku Think of it as this:
Normal characters are personifications of human beliefs AND nature (also they go through growth and all that).
Characters like the Judge are personifications of human beliefs.
is more about life than afterlife, is acritique on why your suroundings afect your life and by yourself even if you try to do good is impossible unles you care for the others, make friends and talk, becaud hell is what we do about it., kinda the samsara and the nirvanna.
@@buubakuUh, what? Good characters absolutely aren't personifications of human beliefs.
It totally makes sense that the judge would be suddenly more merciful. Judges make more merciful and empathetic judgements after lunch. It's really all about that burrito.
"Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics? *exasperated point* Plato!" I love that line
Going through two semesters of philosophy in two different unis was worth it just for this one joke
That made me laugh. Hard.
Me too XD
@@TooFatTooFurious Did you really need two semesters in college to get that reference?
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Plato died before Aristotle.
I feel like the issue with this take is that it’s a very literal look at the good place, which is more of an abstract and allegorical show. The moral and ethical points made by the show don’t make sense if we think about them literally as people trying to build a better afterlife but if we look at it from the point of view that the good place is about how to build a better ethical and moral society the points made make more sense. The judge is an abstraction of the legal system, not a person but an entity indifferent to the pain they cause and following a set of rules regardless of the effect on the humans they serve. Sean is the punitive jail system a almost sadistic entity who punishes those in his care regardless of what they did to end up with him. In a society that punishes people in ways that far out weigh the crime it makes sense for this show to depict how the system can evolve into one based on reform. I don’t think the good place is meant to be taken literally about how to build a better after life but it is making the jump from its afterlife allegory which views heaven as the ultimate justice system to show the flaws that exist in our own earthly society and pose an alternative.
This. It was like 100% a way to set up a bunch of moral philosophical rhetorical scenarios in an entertaining way, not a literal story as such. Nitpicking a bunch of issues with the groundwork without working on the philosophic angle is devoid
Yeah, I spent a lot of this video going "... but that's the point".
Exactly. Its honestly kind of difficult for me to get through this video when it feels like its just Joel refusing to understand metaphor exists or to engage with the show on the level its actually meant to portray, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. I usually really enjoy Joel's work so this was... a strange one.
I agree and honestly I especially take issue with how the judge is presented in the video because like. Most of the Judge's decisions in the show, including the final ones, are made out of either personal amusement or convenience. From their introduction, the Judge is portrayed as someone who is not actively cruel but completely ignorant and indifferent to what happens to humanity.
Their decision near the end of the show pretty much epitomizes all of this. They are given proof positive that the system doesn't and quite possibly has never worked and their response is, rather than work towards fixing or replacing system in place, to flush everything and start over without any actual change.
Big Joel is right that Chidi's speech doesn't affect any of the people listening to it, but that's only because the speech is one that is founded in human compassion and neither of the listeners have any actual interest in humanity. It's also why the group of Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, and Michael are the only ones who can fix the afterlife because they're the only one who both understand and care about all the sides that make up the afterlife and have all the perspectives to make a mutually beneficial system.
@@goldstarsupreme Right. She's not human, it's established pretty immediately that she's more just a deciding force that has not real care or investment. She doesn't play by human rules of empathy, she's indifferent. I saw it more as like the little kid with an ant hill kind of thing, with no real care or concept, and destroying it isn't evil or malicious on her behalf, it's just either indifference or ignorance. Like if you saw two ants battling it out, most folk are more likely to be "idk it's just what they do" than have any desire to split up the fight and discuss their reasoning and emotions behind it because... they're ants, they aren't capable of that right?
But even that take is a bit more literal than I think the show is going for.
This show was incredible with the best ending of all time for any series. I strongly disagree that it’s confusing.
Yess I agree
I was also puzzled when he said it was confusing. . .
exactly this
Yes, I think this show was brilliant as a means for exposing the audience to philosophy and the ideas philosophy explores. I think the confusion is because he was over thinking it.
For sure it was awesome!
I loved The Good Place because the ending made me finally be okay with the thought that maybe death is just it, nothing afterwards, I'll just be... gone. Because if there was something afterward, it would either be eternal hell, eternal heaven (which, as Lisa Kudrow's character explains, is just eternal hell in desguise) or just... more of life with all it's ups and downs
Yeah I espically like that buddhist metaphor talking about life as life a wave in the ocean. It seems to give a sort of grace and peace to the concept of dieing.
Yes, but heaven at least in Christian theology is not dependent on human enjoyment, it is dependent on a relationship with God who is eternal and omnipotent. It's not just do what you want forever, its more like be connected with the creator of the universe forever.
@@strivingcobra The heaven of the show isnt tied to any religion.
@@nickmickky2714 I know, just saying what I know
@@strivingcobra The christian creator sounds like a dick to me so im good
Have you considered that the reason the Judge agrees with Chidi's hypothesis is because she thinks he hot tho dam.
The logic the facts
Correct answer.
She is a bit of a horndog too
The actor William Jackson Harper was in this kid's show I used to watch called the Electric Company (that literally no one around me remembers existed), so Chidi is technically my childhood crush. I was so surprised when I saw him in the Good Place, kind of forgot he existed for a bit lol.
Lissie YOU JUST UNLOCKED A DEEP DARK MEMORY I FORGOT I HAD
Jelani Aurelus Heyyyyy youuuuuu guyssssss 😮 lol I thought I fever dreamed that Pete Wentz was on Electric Company
I just want everyone to know that I suggested this mustache. I made this happen.
Why Jack
Jack haven't you done enough
the allegory of the stache
Prepare to be #cancelled for messing with the lefts enjoyment of Big Joel.
Good call as usual, Jack. Could you recommend a style of facial hair for me?
This video taught me the exact opposite point you were trying to get across. That the show makes a lot of sense.
doesn't happen often for big joel videos. guess this must have been a rare bad one
Great reasons and logic that you provided to counter Joels.
@@7DaltonDoms7It's just an opinion they have about a TV show. It doesn't mean much either way.
the apathic nihilism of the judge is the most entertaining and logically sound bit of plot. if a judge who's watched every TV show ever could be persuaded by an argument about learning or whatever, it would be dull. it's fun and reasonable that it is arbitrary and crazy.
I think it rings truer for the younger generations tbh. Like how my parents find Upload dystopian but to me it seems barely different from current reality.
Replace "the afterlife" with "prison" and this video is entirely about prison abolition
YES I SAW THIS 2
glad i wasn't the only one to think this lmao
Yeha that’s the vibe I got from the start glad it wasn’t just me
Chidi does briefly make that analogy, that going to prison harms a cannabis smoker more than the harm the prisoner did to anyone by doing drugs
It still makes the argument Chidi provided FOR THE DEMON right, a lot of people wouldn't argue for "abolishing prisons", as some sort of punishment or rehabilitation must be available for whatever we decide to name "criminals", so yea, locking up people in confined spaces and feeding them badly for long periods of time isn't inherently good and would even be considered bad in a lot of situations from a purely moralisti standpoint, but our social structure today requires this model of "punishment" to exist, so the best we could do is reform the punishment system to make it about reforming it instead of removing it, since it convinces the people involved in it who wouldnt take change any other way. Making prison/hell about reform instead of purely punishment and succeding at it is better than trying to abolish it and fail at it, its even explained that doing so would make the hell's residents lives better, since they would no longer be burning in hell for all eternity; they would be trying to solve the moral conundrums presented to them as "tortures" by the demons.
My take is that the Good Place is a light educational serial disguised as a sitcom. The idea being, that by presenting a wide array of philosophical ideas, backgrounds, and concepts, that the viewer may, in turn, decide to study or examine some of these questions themselves.
@@99sins You're really overthinking it. It was a silly fictional show. Take your neckbeard ass back to reddit or 4chan mister brain genius.
Yeah it absolutely sucks at that
The Good Place made me question God and the afterlife so I guess it makes some of us think critically
You mean the Good Place is designed to make you think and isn't meant to be taken literally? Nah, I'm going to make a 15 minute video nitpicking character motivation. -Big Joel
^^^The Good Place is really bad at being thought provoking though haha
I think the Chidi stuff makes sense in the context of how people in universities behave in the face of incomprehensible injustice. I'm currently serving on a committee addressing the use of police in mental health crisis intervention within the university, and the question we were asking was basically "how should we use police in the process of forcing people to check into hospitals?" I thought my basic position would be "we shouldn't use police for that" but after digging into the literature my actual position is "we shouldn't force people to check into hospitals because there is basically no evidence that's in their best interest." One of the people serving on that committee said that it confronted her with a reminder that systems are not necessarily doing good things, and starting with the assumption that whatever they system is doing is generally fine doesn't give a big enough picture to address the fundamental problems.
I shared the same critique with one of my clinical instructors and her response was "if this is true it's disturbing," with the implication that it probably isn't true.
I think this is the case for many people when faced with the complexity of decision-making in a world where oppression is the norm because of gigantic, often esoteric cultural systems. Chidi literally spent his whole pre-show life exploring morality for fear of making the "wrong" choice and causing suffering. Nonetheless, he does seem to simultaneously understand that the objectivity of the afterlife system is false while believing in the objectivity of the system enough to dismiss whatever guilt he might feel about the existence and apparent necessity of human suffering at all. I think it's also notable here that the beings upholding the system (the judge, the accountants, etc) can all be read as personifications of human beliefs about the afterlife. All of this to me seems like Chidi experiencing cognitive dissonance surrounding the importance of human-driven ethics in the face of a system that initially seems completely unchangeable by human-driven ethics, right down to the beliefs it's rooted in that he may have internalized.
I've always related to Chidi, being an autistic person who wants to optimize every choice for "goodness" and struggles immensely because of it. This dichotomy between passivity in the face of an unchanging system and simultaneous understanding that the system *isn't* actually unchangeable is one I feel often, being just one person in their throws. I almost think the show writers wrote Chidi this way on purpose, and it is sorta confusing that Joel seemed to miss this. It that makes the moments where the afterlife system is able to become more ethical (these personified belief systems which we thought were immutable actually are changeable and able to be reasoned with) even more satisfying to me.
"Hell is bad and wrong" would probably be too controversial for a largely Christian audience.
Actually many Christians agree with that. Some believe that hell is a temporary state, some believe it is simply non existence, and some believe nobody goes there. This is not the majority of Christianity, but it's a sizable chunk of it.
@@josephsmith2682 i mean in the og bool there's absolutely no mention of hell it was put in to get more followers
@@sinsoftheswamp8346 i think "if you are bad you just die" wasn't enough to convert people, i bet some would rather just stop existing instead of live forever
@@josephsmith2682 so christians just make up what they want to believe based on whatever sounds best to make god seem reasonable to them?
@@BrianaLynn7 That's literally how religion survives in secular world's.
I think what works so well about The Good Place for me is that Judge Gen's decision does not make sense because it's not supposed to. The concept of The Good Place, that the afterlife is a large and corrupt and funky bureaucracy that's just as bad as the ones on Earth, extends the whole way through the show. On Earth, one powerful person eating a burrito in a bad mood will absolutely ruin your life if they want to, for no reason other than they want to (see the American justice system). The Good Place transposes this to a much bigger scale, all of humans forever controlled by one sassy Judge. The emotional growth the characters go through in becoming better people and understanding that everyone can become a better person, is important to THEM and not Judge Gen. They accomplish their long term goals working within the beaurocracy to change it into something they can tolerate, but they can only do that once they become the best versions of themselves.
Also to someone like the judge humanity literally doesn't matter. It's an ants nest at most. She can choose to wipe out humanity and reset it at a whim without an real care or thought into the lives of an individual.
Eww, when you say it that way it implies that the show is anti-revolution. Working within the system after "earning it" is a lie we have been told since the dawn of humanity.
The show starts with a basic amalgamation of things that its audience already kinda goes for christian heaven/hell paradigm combined with an objective utilitarian underpinning, and then it tears that idea apart, exploring one moral philosophy concept after another along the way. We start in a world that assumes humans can be separated into good and bad and each given their just rewards. The entire show is a persuasive argument to the audience not only that the world shouldn't work like this, (a thing you already believe) but that such a world can not work at all.
What utilitarian underpinning are you talking about? The very existence of the bad place is the worst thing imaginable under utilitarianism, and as the video discusses, this is basically never challenged.
@@littlekeegs8805 the very authority of the judge is never called into question, just placated with consensus.
@@littlekeegs8805 Condemning bad people to eternal damnation and torture so that the rest could learn and be on their best behaviour all the time is the utilitarianism.
It doesn't work of course due to unforseen consequences to everyone's actions.
@@balvarine8709 no it definitely isn't, it's actually just really deeply evil. Trust me I'm a utilitarian lol
A utilitarian afterlife would have everybody go to the good place so that they're happiest.
@@littlekeegs8805 And in such a case, anyone's behaviour on Earth wouldn't matter. Because why behave morally and ethically when you could get to the good place as soon as you die. Why bother with living when the afterlife holds more promise where you can get anything you want at zero cost?
But "people can get better" isn't really the ending. The ending is the realization that without change and ending perfection would be a different arbitrary torture. Living in the good place or having your penis flattened for eternity would ultimately end in the same mental state. Meh.
Depending on who you ask the penis flattening was always the good place.
@@kylegonewild "The good place was in the bad place all along!"
Jason was always right
In every way
That is the stupidest thing ever. The whole premise of eternity is that it isn’t something we can get bored of. It’s the exception to the rule.
It’s a constant state. It’s beyond human. It’s stripped away from time.
It’s like how anything that exists does. It wouldn’t drive you mad. It would just be bearable and normal because that’s the reality. Our monkey brain and desires wouldn’t mean literally anything in heaven or hell if they exist. Because they wouldn’t simply exist there. Everything we love, everything we want, everything that makes us are a construct of limited time. So we wouldn’t need change, Change is the constant thing about this universe. It belongs here because it’s the reason and result of this setting. That way of thinking is like looking for fish in the sky. Or trying to see ultraviolet rays with your bare eyes.
@@ty-zz9ic If your brain or some approximation of it doesn't exist in the afterlife, there is no afterlife. Because whatever exists after wouldn't be YOU anymore, it wouldn't have your human desires or think like you did in life, or experience emotions like you did.
@@ty-zz9icThere are different interpretations of eternity, and the show's interpretation is that you continue to change in the afterlife and eventually your mental state will collapse, so life has to end at some point. You can criticise it, but it's not the "stupidest thing ever". I can criticise your interpretation by asking how we are truly living if we can't change? If we're really living, we must be having experiences and forming new memories, and a person can only handle so many experiences, right?
We can't know which interpretation is correct. How consciousness itself even works is something we still haven't figured out, and might never figure out.
I think what you miss is when the judge actually goes to live on earth. She then gains some level lol empathy that could help Chidi's argument actually make sense. I think before going to Earth, she sees thinks as more black and white. So if people choose to be evil then they should be punished for it. But, if being good is actually complicated and difficult to accomplish, maybe punishing people for not being good doesn't make as much sense anymore.
I FORGOT THE BIG JOEL'S NAME IS HENRY THAT FREAKED ME OUT OMFG
HIS NAME IS HENRY?
Also forgot his name's Henry.
"It's a real mind-scrambler"(weird science).
WHAT?!?
I was today years old....
yeah you'd think his name was joel, I feel bamboozled
I think Chidi's argument is targeting the demon Sean, not the Judge or the audience. As you said, the Judge was already onboard, Sean was the sticking point. If Chidi flat out said, "torturing people forever is inherently bad, I rest my case", Sean would've just said "screw you". But by framing his argument in terms of "we shouldn't torture people forever unless we're really really sure they deserve it", he at least has a shot at getting Sean on board. It's a worse argument overall, but it's a better one for the purpose of convincing Sean.
And since they established there was some existential desire or need for some of the beings to be tortuous, the idea that some people could still be ultimately fed to them forever establishes this is ultimately some sort of concession to that.
I never quite got how that convinced Sean but Im ok with that because Im no good at rationalizing with dicks that are all-important and high (low?) and mighty like that. After everything that happened Chidi broke Sean and thats all that matters.
"You put the peeps in the chili pot and mix them both up,
you put the peeps in the chili pot, and add the M&M's,
You put the Peeps in the chili pot,
and it makes it taste *BAD* !"
This is why Chidi uses the argument he uses. It doesn't matter if chili tastes good or not, it doesn't matter what the cows and beans think of being boiled for your satisfaction. The only argument that could convince Sean to change his mind was the idea that things/people that are sweet/good naturally ruin a dish/afterlife that's meant for savory ingredients/Bad People. Chidi knows he can't convince Sean to stop eating "chili" made out of human torment and suffering, but MAYBE he can stop Sean from putting "good" people in hell because they ruin the Schadenfreude of hell like M&M's ruin the savory flavor of chili.
Super high quality comment, well worth scrolling down. *high five* 😊
👏 Well said. Big Joel presents his argument out of context, which is a horrible way to make the argument that something was done for plot convenience.
I feel like you're so close to getting the big picture, but you didn't get there yet. The Good Place doesn't have all of the moral answers. That's kind of the thesis of the show, that there are no fundamental moral answers. It's doing the best you can, working to get better over time, and discovering the truth about morality in the process. Eleanor's final philosophical breakthrough in the final episode is from What We Owe to Each Other: "Working out the terms of moral justification is an unending task." It's something we do, not something we are
I think the show also fails to address the question, "why is morality important at all", which is closely linked to, "why are we alive at all". The show remains pretty surface level for all its philosophical references.
@@DhruvMongamorality has nothing to do with why we are alive.
@aolson1111 yeah, I didn't get this point either?
@@aolson1111because we react to and care about it naturally?? obviously? again, babys first philosophy class
@@megarat1777there are a lot of weird entry level takes in this comments section honestly
i think your first argument is missing 1 important fact about Chidi: he loves authority. Chidi is someone who never feels sure of himself and who studies philosophy in hopes of finding the One True Moral Authority that will tell him the Right Thing to do. argument from authority is his favorite rhetorical strategy, half his sentences start with "Kant says,"
with this in mind, i think his reaction to finding out about the good place makes perfect sense - at first hes psyched to find out that there Is an afterlife and an Objective Morality and a Real Moral Authority that can tell him the Right Answers. and then that absurdist horror you described plays out, where he slowly comes to realize that what he thought was the ultimate authority in the universe is actually just as clueless as he is
(i think him telling michael "i know more that you [about human ethics]" is a reflection of both these things: "in the classroom i am the Teacher and the Teacher is Authority and you must Respect Authority" and "whatever moral system this place operates on is so far removed from real human life that Human Ethics is its own thing here")
imo this all resolves really well at the end when he becomes Confident Chidi after he comes to understand that there is no Ultimate Authority besides that which you build with the people you love
Big Joel looks like a dad who says, "good job sport" and I feel somehow entirely comforted by this
"you'll get em next time buddy"
@@kauswekazilimani3736 "Are you winning son?"
Hey son! Want to play catch?
I guess somehow he manages to look like an old dude and a child at the same time
@@kauswekazilimani3736 "here's 10 bucks, sport, don't spend it all in one place!"
“Even if people can’t actually always get better, that doesn’t make it okay to burn them in hell forever” it’s brushed over by the comedy aspects but now I’m shocked that nobody in the show brought that up
Right? Even the worst person who ever lived doesn't deserve literally *infinite* punishment, for what was neccesarily finite moral transgressions. I also think there's a decently good case to say that there isn't much sense in working out whether people "deserve" things anyway, and we should just do what benefits people overall - which torture clearly doesn't do, infinite or not.
I'm pretty sure it's a pragmatic argument - The Bad Place can't be swayed by "torturing people is bad".
Yeah @Iain Cameron ! But the issue is that the show is a comedy, so it can’t afford to suddenly take butthole spiders and lava monsters 100% seriously. So the big ethical questions have to exist within a goofy universe, and won’t fully translate to the real world. But it’s still fun to think about. And depressing...
I always thought it went without saying, but that the higher beings would never accept that so Chidi is trying to explain it in a way that offers a solution/new system.
I mean, it kind of points out how disgustingly cruel the concept of a Christian god is, and that might not be the easiest pill for the intended audience to swallow :D
To be honest, this is one of my favorite shows in the last 5 years, precisely because of the fact "The Good Place doesn't make sense". The show presents a fundamentally absurd afterlife because, as you said, it has absolute rules. Atheist, Religious, any viewer will see that this system is almost certainly not true in our Universe, because Christians will see there isn't a God per se in this Universe, and Atheists because it's an afterlife, and whoever you are, it's clear that whoever judges our morals will not use a "point-based" system, we'll either not be judged, or be judged holistically.
In season 1: This offers a great introduction to morality and the world of this Universe, and its clearly meant to be absurd. Chidi I think presents "rational morality", ethical systems worked out by humans. The thing that turns this show into my favorite one in a while, is the end. "Our morals are not only absurd, I made this small version of hell just because I got bored with normal torture!" I love it, not only because the twist is so well-acted, but because it shows you this world is cruel beyond what you ever thought IRL hell could ever be (or the average viewers perception of hell anyway).
In season 2: I agree, the show introduces the problem of "Morality is absurd in your universe because its laws are seemingly arbitrary, yet enforced by hyperintelligent beings", but turns on its heel in this season. This is by far the messiest season, not just because it uproots the morality of a demon, and the judge of a Universe, but because its plotting is deeply unclear. It makes sense that the "Jeremy Bearimy" meme came from this season, since the timeline is so hard to follow, its almost a lampshade of that fact. However, the amazing tour of ethical systems that's essentially a crash course for NBC viewers is remarkable, and paves the way for the next 2 seasons.
In season 3: They have a goal, the plotting is fixed, and the moral cause is made clear (basically that eternal cruelty is bad, duh). They go through their desperate attempt to save their own skins, and in the end, totally breadpill their audience with, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" but using different words. Love it.
In season 4: The emotional ending. The answer to the most ethical afterlife. It's all here. In the end, the absurd, cruel, and unjust system is swept away. The plots all get resolved. The absurdity from the laws of the immortal beings has been tempered by the humans. The last episode of a show usually makes me cry, but rarely does it make me feel peace in the way this show did.
The wrestling between this show's absurd pretense and Chidi's rational argument + the gang's introduction of an uncruel system, is precisely why it's good. I think the main problem in your video is that if you suspend your disbelief that such a silly afterlife can exist, you find a truly powerful story and real, practical moral lessons. I still love you Joel, but I think you could stand to give this another shot.
I feel like the argument that "none of the eternal entities running the universe would care if people could get better" is addressed in the text by the number of times bad place workers explicitly say the reason they are okay with the torture is because they believed the point system only let them torture people who deserved it, and once they doubted that they stopped being okay with torture.
really good video big joel but i was confused when you stopped being the judge and referred to yourself as """henry"""? I've watched the whole show and don't know who that is
I am subscribed to your channel and the big joel, I find your videos very interesting. Nice
How do you feel about the trend that good content creators have names that start with J?
oh my god its THE jacob geller, creator of all the good videos on youtube
I think he thinks his name is Henry. But it is obviously Joel. I don't know what is happening.
Ah Jacob, the only CZcamsr to make me regularly cry in a good way
Jason is objectively a flawless human being
A true himbo
yes
Yes
@@CocatGaming wrong hes from flordia everything wrong with the united states in one spot
@@matthewjones2095 wrong. At least we’re interesting
the good place is a show about life, death, grief, loss, the afterlife, uncertainty, and more. it may be nonsensical at times, but never have i seen so many points being made so effectively in such a heart-warming way. the good place is the best show i have ever watched.
It wasn't perfect... but it was spectacular.
I've always had a similar approach to the show as you. I didn't analyze it as profoundly, but I was always stuck thinking it was messy and that it didn't give a good answer to the dilemma. But as Chidi's note to himself said "There is no answer" I feel like that phrase made the mess make sense to me. The illusion of meaning is what we get, and that is what we have to deal with to be a better person.
I like your background, but I feel like you need another portrait of a creepy girl with a white cat.
Yes, but in different paintings
Yeah there's a big blank space in the middle behind his head
Maybe a giant white cat and a small creepy girl
😂
Just BØNY , i need this now
It's the.future calling. He has 3 now.
I love the first season of the good place immediately I was like "The twist is gonna be that they're in the bad place" but they faked me out so well that by the time the twist was coming...up until like that episode, I really thought they were just going with a "Heaven is incompetent" route...which they also kinda ended up doing when we got to the actual good place.
I know right! I was so sure in the beginning, but then the show convinced me so I was actually shocked by the twist. So shocked I thought it would be a double twist and they weren't in the bad place, and this was all a test.
I knew they were in the bad place as soon as I saw “Minions” there
when i tried to rewatch this show with my dad, this was one of his absolute FAVORITE shows ever in Season 1. but, i could tell there was a steep drop-off in his interest level after the big plot twist. we only got through a few episodes of Season 2 before he said he was starting to feel disappointed and we ended up not watching more.
i think he wanted it to be a "Heaven is incompetent" story and about how you can't judge morality using a points system, rather than a "haha see this is Hell, gotcha!!"
but, of course if he had kept watching, the "Heaven is incompetent" is exactly what it ends up being. i might tell my dad sometime (w/o spoilers) that i think if we started watching again and he could get through S2, he would enjoy the show again.
I think the only reason why it doesn't make sense for us humans why the omnipotents are convinced by Chidi's argument, is because we have different points of views. All the omnipotents want is todo their job. Regardless of goodness or not.
The only reason they were swayed is because the formula stopped working, thus, they started to do their job wrong. If the Judge truly wanted goodness to prevail, she wouldn't reset the universe just because the world is now bad. The only reason she resorts to that is so that the system is changed where their jobs make sense again.
Hence, why Chidi's argument worked, because it shows that they can do their job without overhauling the entire universe for the saking of tweaking the point system, which will inevitably end up having the same problem, albeit having a higher point threshold than the original universe.
The humans' side was about emotions, but the practicalities behind their defense was enough to sway even the omnipotents
I feel like Big Joel's takes on fiction can come off as philosophical cinemasins.
this, comes off as just a lil too cynical.
My problem with this take too. But to each their own
yeaaaaah and I've never seen him address it.
Gen did actually have a reason she attempted to change things. She used her powers to become human and lived her life on Earth enough to actually experience what human existence is like. While it's weird then that she goes for genocide instantly when the system was proven wrong, there was a reason for the first lesson to stick
Right, she's a powerful person who's so insulated from the real world that she doesn't understand the effects of her decisions.
I mean erasing people from existence is better than torturing them forever. They undermined the existing system but without a just replacement for that system the plot was still unresolved.
Interestingly, this is sometimes used as an explanation for god being less cruel in the new testament compared to the old; he didn't really understand what it was like to be human until he became Jesus. That said, I'm not a Christian, and even if I were, I don't find that argument very compelling for a wide variety of reasons (He's supposedly omniscient, so how did he not know something? And this doesn't excuse the cruelty still present in the new testament). Still, it's an interesting parallel.
@@ragunral That assumes there were only two options.
She wants to delete mankind and start over because that's what you would do if your computer started acting wonky; to the judge humans arent actual persons or entities she cares about, we are datasets that amuse her, like one would delete an app and redownload it she would delete humanity and restart it.
I do have a slightly different take on how Chidi's argument works even when it shouldn't:
So, Joel established that the universe in The Good Place is indifferent to human suffering and punishment is, effectively, arbitrary and inevitable. Chidi has this deeply human desire to impose some sort of framework that makes sense onto that universe. Do you see where I'm going with this?
The point of the ending is not that humans can become better, but that humans can create a system that is meaningful to them, where none existed previously. This may not have been intended, but I still think it's there. Humans get to decide how to make their existence fulfilling and meaningful.
re:kindle perfectly worded!
I agree with this, and it fits in well with the existentialist influences on the show (the first season being essentially an adaptation/tribute to Satre's No Exit.)
I kinda thought Henry was implying that at the end. "If the illusion of meaning is all we can get, then I guess that has to be enough." It didn't sound like he was just talking about the universe of the show.
@@leighsmith1769 I kinda got that too, but I guess I don't think meaning created by people is an illusion, or more of an illusion than some sort of cosmic meaning imposed on us by some external power, if that makes sense?
The whole point of SPOILERSPOILER chidi being in the bad place is sort of the point too, I thought. That his philosophising makes others around him miserable, but also sets him with a sense of moral superiority. He's put trust into the system and it's decided he's good (he thinks), and so he can use his own sense of morals to work with that. Once they all come to realise they're 'bad people' is when there's finally time for reflection. Humans are very good at covering for their own flaws, that's why even the bottom of the barrel racist pieces of shit can justify their actions in their own mind. We are the heroes of our own story.
Ok but "Obviously the Earth is cancelled" is kind of a mood
The Medium Place is an example of someone (Mindy St. Clair) changing their behaviour on Earth to sway the Judge to not torture them. The show phrases it as "do the points count" but it was the Judge's decision, and in the next season the Judge initially decides to put the group in their own medium places because of their improvement so there is evidence that the Judge's opinion can be swayed by someone changing their behaviour.
The judge believes what she believes because she is a fictional character. I mean that not as a flippant dismissal of your points but rather I am highlighting something.
This is what a lot of humans believe: that there is an afterlife where the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. This idea collapses under scrutiny because it's dumb. I see the show is a mockery of that dumb idea. No one deserves to be tortured.
This is a really important point that I kinda feel invalidates the last third of this video. The Judge experienced being human, and that's what changed her mind.
The fictional character does not compute in this case. What makes a real judge "real"?
But the show never /says/ this. If this is the tact that they were going for (and I agree, it would be a reasonable tact), then they... kinda need to say as such? The show wears it's ethical declarations on it's sleeve, the fact that it never talks about the fact that hell is a fundamentally unethical creation by any reasonable definition of morality is never stated in the text.
@@tsawy6 who's to say morality belongs in nature? That's a more appropriate question, I believe. Why should there be an afterlife and, if there is one, why should it conform to the precise ideas of human morality? And if there is such a thing as the concept of human morality, what are the not human moralities? What are the moralities of the wild? The morality of the divine, and so on?
@@tsawy6 I mean... it's pretty explicitly stated that this is the reason the judge changes her mind. There's an entire episode dedicated to this argument being made: Season 3 Episode 11 "Chidi Sees the Time-Knife".
Your interpretation is very different from mine, and I find it hard not to feel that you've missed the point of the show entirely. I think that this isn't really a show about morality with a grand message that says "People can change, and get better". The Good Place's story lines center around systems, the influence that systems we live under have over our lives, and how we can and should strive to make our systems better because no system, no matter how long its operated for or who it was designed by (even immortal entities with vast numbers,knowledge, and experience) is infallible. The plot in season 1 culminates is driven by and culminates in Michael's plan to improve the Bad Place torture system, and the ultimate failure of that project. Eleanor and Chidi's plot of teaching ethics is really only a set up for this reveal. The next seasons all deal with the main cast re designing systems and succeeding at doing so. Even the real "Good Place" ends up being a flawed system that needs redesigning as well.
The good place is not a show about philosophy and morality and what makes a good person, at least not on any layer other than its surface. The good place is about our world, how we have no control over the system we are born into, and how we should all work to make that system better for the next people to live (or die) in.
Well...why not both haha? Imo the show suggests that one's morality is linked to the system one is a part of, at least to some extent, so the question of how to be a good person in such a context -- whether that's possible, even -- is more than a surface level one, I think. It is just that the conclusion from the show about how to be a "good person" seems to be more about, as you say, making things better for the people who come after you than it is about some internal property of individuals.
I wrote a similar response. From the show it's clear that the system, who goes to _The_ Good Place and The Bad Place, actually worked but there were several flaws especially when global imperialism started in the 1500s.
@@sweetpeabee4983 I think that in the context of real life you're correct, the question of how to be a good person and get better within the context of your system is a deep, multilayered question. But in the afterlife world presented by the end of the show, ideas of "good" and "bad" people have really broken down. There is no bad place, only an education and then a graduation to the good place and eventually, nothing. The people undergoing "the system" as its referred to in the last season aren't there because they're inherently bad people. They are in that place because they aren't ready to co-exist with other people without harming them. Tahani has a line in the finale where she refers to her parents having "gone through the system" and so she's hopeful about finally seeing them since she expects them to be considerably more kind and loving than in their time on earth, in a way I suppose we could call this becoming a better person but the show seems to put forth the idea that people were never really bad in the first place, just uneducated.
@@alexricky87 well sure it did allow some people to get into the good place, but the good place was revealed to be not quite as good as everyone hoped. The entire bad place was abolished as well indicating that the show believes the system was flawed from the start not that it was at one time a reasonable and functional system
oh i forgot that the entire show is entirely made up of a 20 minute part of 4x10 and therefore they didn't spend 4 whole seasons actually addressing the system and trying to fix it
Dude. This show isn't perfect, but your argument against its objective morality is flawed too. If there were a list, obviously that list would be too large to store in a human brain and too impractical to act on. To solve this, we need to develop principles to simplify things. This is what Chidi studies. Kant's categorical imperative is literally designed to help us do this, and prevent overloading ourselves with decision making pressure.
Hell doesn't make sense, but to make an argument against its existence early in the show would obviously ruin the ending, which does solve this problem.
I love the show, but the real criticisms of the show should include:
1.) Complete failure to understand and represent the concept of utalitarianism.
2.) Chidi's character should be vegan.
3.) Inconsistency between when motives are corrupt and when they are not.
4.) A Kantian should not have decision making meltdowns. A utalitarian totally could.
If anything this show is too simple, and doesn't dive deep enough.
Definitely agree with 3. 4 I think only takes into account the nature of the philosophy itself, and not the fact that there’s a human underneath(which chidi kinda also forgot about philosophy lol)
I have always thought Chidi should be vegan. The fact that he's so concerned over almond milk but not eggs or other animal products doesn't make sense to me.
Yeah, if Chidi was real, he would NOT have liked Kant. He talks about agreeing with Sartre and Foucault so it's highly unlikely he'd be down with Kant's absolutist philosophy.
I think for number 4 the implication is that he was poor at decision making so he tried to become a kantian to make it easier but it inevitably failed
@@plugshirt1762 Fair enough. So in this, he wants to be a Kantian, but can't stop thinking about consequences. Yeah, that pretty much fits him.
I was a philosophy major in college. Even though I hated moral philosophy (maybe because of it) I LOVED this show. I liked ethics in high school, but in college, I gravitated to the better grounded areas of metaphysics. I really enjoyed the philosophy of mind in this show. I remember thinking at one point "oh, like Derek Parphit"... and then they mentioned his name. That was fun for me personally. He's fairly obscure.
joel loves that print of the girl holding the cat so much he has 2 of them.
Joel, please stop saying your name is "Henry", it's very disturbing, and honestly it's disrespectful.
Joel...
He scares me when he says it
I think one big thing is that... they're not human. Michael, Shawn, The Judge, they're not human. They don't have a morality. It's like asking the waterfall to be right or wrong. They're just cogs. Cogs that can learn and be more than cogs, but cogs.
"When people do bad things they deserve to be tortured forever"
"There is no ethical system that would lead to that conclusion"
This pretty accurately describes a lot of christian talk about heaven and hell though.
It’s also a Greek idea. It’s not a Christian or Jewish idea at all.
It’s become a Christian idea. It’s just not what they originally believe.
@@conradkorbolthis has nothing to do with the comment you’re responding to
I'm gonna have to disagree on a few of Joel's points here.
1) Chidi confronting the meaninglessness of the points system doesn't mean he believes there is a different divine moral system in place, it's that he believes in his own morality constructed through his own study. He is a moral philosopher he doesn't have to rely on the idea of a universal law of morality to believe you should do good and to have is own ideas about what good is.
2) Just because Chidi and the other characters fight to change the system doesn't mean that they assume that the system is inherently good but glitching in some way. They can recognise the system as bad and want to change it just because of that.
3) Big Joel's critique of how Chidi's argument doesn't end up doing much is more fair, (and the characters' victories throughout the show tend to feel weaker as the show continues because of what I feel is a lack of being able to ratchet up the tension despite the situations technically having bigger stakes.) But I feel he's treating that one argument as the thesis of the show when it really isn't held up as that much more important than any of the episodic moral situations the show poses. While the show is serialized its kinda episodic in how it has a different moral question every episode and I don't think any of those questions were the show's one goal. The show's goal was to be a serialized comedy about moral philosophy, and it succeeded at that.
Re 1, I think there's strong evidence that Chidi does think his ethics hits upon the universal law of morality though. He's a Kantian deontologist after all, so he does think there is objective fact re morality which can be expressed in terms of general principles, even as these principles are discovered or expressed by human beings.
@@jonahdunch4056 Chidi seems to be big into contractualism which is a costructivist framework (which kantianism arguably is, too.) Though I think the close parallels between contractualism and kantian deontology make the line a bit too fuzzy to draw.
They're both universalist, but don't necessarily claim objectivity.
I think there's 2 alternative explanations that I haven't seen anyone mention yet that reconcile divine utilitarianism with Chidi's own view:
1. Divine morality is simply wrong.
2. Divine morality is right, but humans should act according to another moral system as a heuristic because they're fallible.
@@jaakkovuori9616 sure, he could be a constructivist universalist, and so believe in universal intersubjective ethical norms but not objective (in the sense of non-natural) ethical facts.
Just because the Judge and Demons look like people they're not people, and, therefore, trying to ascribe human morals to their actions seems foolish.
If the Judge and Demons were tasked with "try to make the Humans better humans" and that the punishment in the afterlife is meant to blackmail living people to be better, then it's perfectly cromulent that they adapt to a new way of doing things.
You need to tell humans on earth about the afterlife though
Except that if their goal was to make people better their actions still make no sense, given that people on earth not only don't know about it, but within the system they designed, if they did it wouldn't count. Blackmailing someone inherently doesn't work if they don't know you're blackmailing them.
@@Waouben one of the major things they explored in the show was how knowing about the afterlife would have made their "motivations corrupt". You can argue whether that's true or not but it was basically the Prime Directive of the show, lol.
You say that the judge and bad place peeps are amoral actors, and yet it is their system that created the point system all humans must live by. Therefore, even as they exact the punishments in the system, they are still part of that system of morality.
There's no reason to think human and non-human morality would be different. They're all living, thinking creatures.
It would still have to be explained why that task is good!
You know that the "everyone can be redeemed" idea was not about the in-universe diegetic logic, right? It was about rehabiliation over punishment in justice, in our real world.
And in a kind of interesting way, its diegetic irrevelancy mirrors the fact that unless the actors who hold power in our current system want to change the system for any reason, that idea, true and good as it may be, will be coincidental to any change that might happen.
This is why the injustice of the system felt so familiar to me! Because I live in the US...
This video leaves me with two important questions:
Part One: Are you being willfully obtuse for the sake of a “hot take”?
Part Two: Do you deserve to be tortured forever for it?
The philosopher himself who advised for the show has said that he was implicitly endorsing a type of virtue ethics. Chidi was a deontologist, most of the situations in the show (including the good- and bad- places) explored consequentialism(s).
edit: I just want to state on the record that it's been a while and I had to look it up, and the philosopher whose work was mostly used to inspire the show is Jonathan Dancy. I initially had him mixed up with Pamela Hieronymi, who was also a part of the show, but in a slightly different capacity. And as a commenter below also notes, so was Todd May. Credit due where credit is due. :)
I tend to find discussions of Consequentialism by non-consequentialists seem to assume that it's bound by non-consequentialist logic. For instance, as is relevant here, the question of moral responsibility and dessert.
One famous criticism of Utilitarianism for instance, is that it ignores intention, for instance if someone tried to develop a poison for their enemies and instead accidentally discovers a cure for the plague, have they done a good or a bad thing?
Similarly a common criticism of Rawls's A Theory of Justice(It's not 100% consequentialist, arguing for consequentialism only when it doesn't conflict with things we intuitively value that can't be reduced to maximisable variables), is that it ignores "Just Desert", and assumptions that we should maximise wellbeing for everyone overlooks that some people deserve happiness and some people deserve punishment.
The problem with this kind of arguementation, I personally find as someone very much sympathetic to consequentialist ethics, is that they are still fundementally rooted in non-consequentialist thinking. Assuming that people can be judged as good and evil on the basis of intention and action, whereas a Consequentialist wouldn't really be interested in giving a person what they 'deserve' or judging them as individually good and bad, they'd be interested in maximising positive outcomes and uninterested in a person's individual character.
And that's the problem with assuming The Good Place is a commentary on Consequentialism. Assuming that an individual deserves to be punished or rewarded based on a points system of the consequences of their actions is not Consequentialist. Consequentialism would be saying that the Consequences of their actions are inherently good and bad even when divided from the individual who carried them out.
A Consequentialist wouldn't be interested in judging someone as a good or bad person and treating them accordingly, unless doing so had some greater benefit. Everything in Consequentialism has to be justified through Consequences, so ironically a judgement system based on the consequences of your actions, would itself have to be justified through the benefit of having judgement in the first place. The Good Place is Consequentialism as seen through the lens of someone who assumes ethics is inherently about individual character, and not Consequentialism through the lens of Consequentialists.
@@jogeran4955 The danger of consequentialism that most non-consequentialists struggle with is that it's driven by a need to constantly evolve one's ideological guiderules. If your beliefs are inherently fallible and the actions you take are quite probably ignorant and counterproductive, then how do you ever know when you're doing the right thing? Consequentialism is the philosophy of failure and apologies.
If the Good Place was about consequentialism at all, then it would talk about how bad people don't deserve punishment. But the whole point of this video is that the show doesn't talk about this, right?
@Broderick Bunnell
I can give a quick answer since I was just procrastinating on youtube. Got to get to work after that, though. :)
A way to look at consequentionalism (and deontological metaethics as well) is indeed that they are "action oriented", i.e. they judge specific actions by their morality. Virtue ethics based metaethics take a different approach. Anyway, consequentialism(s) (and utilitarianism is indeed a type of consequentialist metaethics - specifically a type that defines some utility, or good, that is to maximized by each action) can fall into the pit of untractable calculation(s) (of consequences, or utility) which can, in practice, render them either too abstract or impossible to implement in one's life, or just intractable in general. The most common critique of consequentialism(s) are, however, the many sorts of "repugnant conclusions" you can get at (Parfit gave the example of the paradigmatic repugnant conclusion, but consider them a family), i.e. undesirable conclusions one arrives at when following the consequentialist logic to it's end (one can then either bite the bullet, i.e. accept it, or look to modify their ethical framework). We saw all this in the show as well: the good- and bad places, and the situations the characters often found themselves in, never worked out quite right, did they? Either they had to admit that the situation was always somehow "too complex" (e.g. it ignored some important dimension of human interaction or ineffable criteria for happiness/the good life) for the consequentialist solution they came up with (the first type of critique I mentioned) or they ran their solution to a point where they discovered that they didn't get quite what they wanted (or got "too much" of what they wanted) because again, the consequentialist calculus heartlessly just tallies up the morality of the specific utility and spits out solutions. And this alludes to the point you yourself brought up - when does the calculation stop, if you go that route? Our characters should have kept "getting points" after they died, in the good- and bad- places, to ultimately judge the effects of their actions. Intractable.
And Chidi was the evergreen deontologist (Kantian mostly). He always thought that actions are good in and for themselves. He was very principled and always wanted to do the right thing, which again, made him run into walls throughout the show. That was basically his whole character. He also had to learn that the hard deontologist road he tended to take was not an optimal practical ethics to go by.
And so the show, during it's run and in the end, settled on a type of (mostly Aristotelian-) virtue ethics. The very rough essence of virtue ethics is that they are not action oriented, but character oriented: you object of morality are not the specific actions you do, but you yourself - your character. You aim to live the good life by cultivating your virtues and thrive for excellence. It gets all more involved than this, of course, but I think I'll have to stop commenting now (getting rambly already), because as I've mentioned, I'm procrastinating on my work, haha. :)
Todd May also advised the show. He even did some video shorts for them and he is a consequentialist.
Joel looks like a kid pretending to be his trucker dad for Halloween
Oh boy okay so at 12 minutes Joel makes a statement that is just outright wrong. He says that there is no reason why the judge should have changed her mind, however he seems to ignore that The Judge is a wholly detached aspect of morality which does not exist within the system.
The Judge from what I have seen never interacts with the system and never even learns about humanity.
The central node is never attached to its internal workings as so the end results is actually much more about "Perhaps it should be a responsibility of a ruler to be involved with its subjects".... funny enough like the end result of the good place is to call God itself immoral because it doesn't get to know its people.
This,
But Chidi broke several times throughout the course of the show. His jormey wasn’t so much about philosophy as it was about learning that his dissertation could have been about 2,000 pages shorter and still been excellent. Choices between two different things are not going to break anything if you make the ‘wrong’ choice. I really appreciated the education his character brought to the show but I think that was also his big issue-he didnt need to stuff all of the philosophy ever made into his dissertation and he ultimately needed to find the right combination of words yo break Sean’s chokehold on the situation.
This whole thing broke Chidi, like LOT. And thats the most important thing about his character.
Peeps chili and Jeremy Bearimy forever, motherfucker.
good angel man DESTROYS bad angel man with FACTS and LOGIC
this is a jerma tier comment
Manu god, your comment gives me life
Never seen a quicker summary of an entire show in my life! Well done!
This isn't a show about the afterlife, it's a show about people. It doesn't bring up the idea that infinite torture is wrong because it really isn't talking about infinite outcomes, it's talking about what we can do while we're here. Hell, it doesn't even bring up the idea that torture is wrong because that idea isn't relevant. Sure, it could be more logically cohesive if they brought it up, but is that a satisfying moral for the show? That torture is bad? Raise your hand if you want the final season of the show to end with the moral that torture is bad.
@IntrepidFinch is that really all that much better? What we got is a call to action in some sense, rather than just depressing existentialism.
@IntrepidFinch I don't think "having a message you don't like" is a valid criticism of the show.
@IntrepidFinch alright, fair enough, but I still contend that the story serves the message, not really the other way around.
✋
To be honest I kind of took it as an allegory for old moral systems and prison. Like, what you said wouldn't "necessarily" be wrong, but the omnipotence of the characters is kind of limited/abstract, but if we were to be more literal with it; Janet is the only one that truly knows everything, and she changes pretty easily. Bad place Janet, the most knowledgeable cruel being, switches on a dime after a manifesto. The humanity is deprived from the system they previously constructed, because it existed from a period of time where morals were less confusing. The Judge is "cruel" because she is divorced from the system to stay impartial (and again, she changes her ruling despite her billions of Jeremy Bearimies as the judge), the demons are cruel because this was the role they were given off a "simple" solution to an approaching complicated system. They are recanting the system after experiencing humans for the first time honestly, and even some of the demons change as well, realizing that they aren't torturing unchangeable evil machines, but people.
Which all ultimately leads to the point, that there is no real answer for anything, no infallible being or system, anything can break over time, and the solution to the system being malleability and reform. The afterlife was indeed needlessly cruel, but the afterlife wasn't really made for "humans", just the warped, kind of bio-essentialist view, of what humanity is, of what a human is.
(Plus again, anyways, it felt like the show was pretty much just to discuss ideas of how people treat morality with black and whites and view people as unchanging evil beings, which is a problem with our society and a lot of the institutions we live in)
I’m a minute in and you talking about the show being confusing already doesn’t make sense - it’s very clear and incredibly well structured for a series that follows a long term story yet has a major change in every season
perhaps some critics are in such a critical mode that it blinds them and they pick and dig into things to find faults that aren’t really there
"there's no ethical system we can come up with that says torturing people forever is okay"
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaave you met Religion?
*laughs in abrahamic religion*
Late to the party, but yeah this was my immediate thought and I feel like it kind of negates the whole premise of the video. One needs only to be the slightest bit familiar with the Judeo-Christian canon (probably veering most closely to Roman Catholicism) to know that God is portrayed as highly punitive and that falling out of God's grace will end in suffering or torment either on Earth, or in an afterlife. Hundreds of millions of people believe this. While The Good Place universe avoids subscribing too closely to any particular branch of faith, the broad brushstrokes are pretty unmistakable. Even most people who believe you are "saved by faith," if they're really honest, probably have a deep feeling that some people are "good" and deserve eternal reward, and some people are "bad" and deserve damnation.
In my mind the whole show is kind of refutation of this kind of thinking, that one could ever deserve eternal torture or that such a system would ever be just, that even the worst of us is worthy of finding redemption and that most of us are just medium people trying to get by in a complex and morally fraught universe. I don't see how this is confusing or conflicting.
@@henkhenk4396 well, in christianity and islam
@@erins.6524 Not pedantic, and point taken. I wasn't trying to claim that everyone is on the same page, even within a given umbrella of religion. Certainly there are vast differences in belief among those who call themselves "Christian" and the same can probably be said for most any faith.
When I used the term Judeo-Christian it was not meant to imply that they're more or less the same thing, merely that there is an overlapping tradition and familiarity with those "old testament" stories. Whether you take those stories as fact or as parable, or believe in a spiritual afterlife or think of the afterlife as something more metaphorical, those stories are still central to the culture of a broad spectrum of people in both faiths. At least there is more in common between them than, say, Judaism and Hinduism, which evolved far longer in isolation from each other.
Yes, correct. That's what the show and this video are both saying is bad. The ethical framework of religion that says that torture for all eternity is moral is illogical and immoral.
"dive deep into this crunchy-ass show" is an excellent phrase and I will be shamelessly stealing it
Except he says it "crunchy ass-show" which has a completely different meaning!
@@Nphen pretty sure he says "crunchy-ash show" which is how they say "ass" in the show
I was going to construct a logical argument, but I'll just say it makes plenty of sense that Chidi knows he can't easily convince someone that torturing bad people is bad, but that he can convince them that there is no such thing as a permanently "bad" person. It's weird that you don't see this.
Congratulations, you took the simplest, most basic themes of the show and presented them as if it took more than half a brain to understand them. The things you talk about in this video, the show's themes and messages are consistently explored throughout the whole show and are its focal point, there is nothing confusing about what you're talking about, all you did was present it as such by overanalysing scenes that bore very little significance just to facilitate your convoluted reasoning.
Adored this show for its writing alone, my favorite part is how nearly every episode has a specific philosophical question at its heart.
Yeah, the good place was awesome
I took the the character of the judge to be a pretty simple allegory that says that the entire concept of justice is lazy and that a judgement doesn't really solve anything. That is why the judge is distracted and not very involved in caring about figuring out if the formula works or not. To me it was a statement that the moral universalism that our legal system and religions are based on are irresponsible and inadequate.
As far as the characters holding onto their beliefs despite the reality of the afterlife they live; I think the show does a pretty good job at pointing out that the system of the afterlife is flawed and incomplete. Michael's entire neighborhood is an experiment and there would clearly be no reason to experiment if things were perfect. In this way, the characters of the afterlife know something is wrong with the afterlife without being able to name it.
On the whole, I think the point the series was trying to make in the end was that the standards of morality our society is based on have been outpaced by the complexities of the modern world and we need to catch up
I think the judge is a metaphor for the collective apathy of society, 'I don't really care, I'm just gonna watch tv shows' is something we've all done at some point
For Chidi, he doesn’t know the exact right answer. He never had his own divisive, concrete beliefs. He talked himself into circles to where he wrote an entire second paper, arguing why his thesis paper could also be entirely wrong. So when he gets to the afterlife, and this great being says ‘this is it, this is the correct answer, you did the right thing and now you can actually begin living.’
I believe that Chidi is the embodiment of those who spend their lives worrying about if they’re doing the right thing to get to an afterlife. We don’t truly 100% know for sure what happens after you die. You can wait your entire life and hope that you did the correct thing to go to the place that you want to go. You could also be Chidi, carefully scrutinizing each of your decisions on earth, and still end up in a place you didn’t want to be.
Chidi's argument is not just that people get better, but that they get better with appropriate social support. And that providing them with ample support to prove their moral worth in the afterlife, is the appropriate way to give humans what they really want: justice that's tailored to them. For the bad place, who sees the people who make "bad choices" as deviants, waste, the solution is punitive: it's the classic penal system, isolate them and take away the things that make them happy. It won't make the person they murdered come back, but it'll make their wife feel better. CLASSIC penal, conservative view of justice. Based on vengeance. The view the other employ is clearly more restorative: given the chance to see where they went wrong, or given the appropriate environment, would these so called "bad people" make the same choices? If the answer is no, then it's not JUST a matter of personal choices by flawed people, deviants. It's a sociological argument for morality. The final "Good Place" is the ideal of what humans want to have for themselves, not some system designed for them by some external judge that isn't in essence even human (forget not, Chidi knows human morality better than Michael because Michael can only ever experience it through them, as he is not himself in fact human). It's the ideal of modernity, of a self-determined society that gets to set its own moral compass through laws known and accepted by all, through democracy, with transparency, not some obscure doxa dictated by some know-it-all judge or enforcer, instructed by some transcendant principle handed down from Who-Knows-Where. The way it was done at first made no sense because it was just "bureaucratic" and "tradition", just doing what you're told because it's what you're told... The first time they get to the "offices" of the Good Place, it's obvious that all due process of justice or fairness or assessment of the system in place has left the building, conservative through and through, everyone is just pushing paper and not caring in the slightest that the deck is obviously stacked... It's order for the sake of order, 1% style... "They just have to work harder, no? More pie for me...!". It's all based on some ideal past or status quo, trust in the "meritocratic system", faith in the idea that there's good people and bad people, and it's just about individual choices... not some ideal future to build together, like what progressives (Chidi and the gang) want, but one that's stuck, that refuses change or adaptation to new realities, because they're so out of touch with real people.
What they inject into this moral picture in the end is not just happy thoughts about people being good, it's a sociological argument for adaptive social justice and democracy. It's a lesson in solidarity and how important it is in order to succeed AS A WHOLE. Together. Chidi wouldn't have made it in the end without Eleanor, Jason and Tahani and their different skill sets. They are all radically different, but complementary, like modern society: in a specialized world, we are ALL more interconnected and interdependant than ever, and so we need to be less selfish and hard on each other: our differences is our strength in the end. They couldn't change society in the show directly, per se, but they could change the "afterlife" system, which was always an allegory for the real world anyways, not a test design for a new view of the Final Judgement... it says don't just take the world as it is and let tyrants torture you, make it what you think it should be, together. We're a social species, and need a social justice system.
Cool video. Gotta say I disagree with your thesis. It just seems that based on the narrative and the mechanics of the show's debate that the premise of their argument isn't: "people can change/get better" and the conclusion doesnt really seem to be "so dont torture people for eternity"
The Premise they seem to be arguing to me is that, "the current system is not good, efficient, or catering to the needs of the universe." The conclusion the show comes to would be "the system needs to be reformed based on the dynamism of the human condition." The statement "people can get better" is more of a piece of evidence as to why/how the system should change. I really think this argument develops in phases in the 3rd and 4th seasons because they first have to persuade the Judge that there's even a problem. It just seems to me you're narrowing the show's thesis to one thing about that thesis that rather than involving the context of how the show actually developed that thesis narratively as an argument.
Also absurdist philosophy is how you explain no one caring about learning about the universe's nature. Considering the writers and showrunners I'm willing to put money on that.
Yeah - I completely disagree with essentially everything he's saying. I agree with your take on the premise. The system = bad, and no one thought to examine it. It's essentially saying 'well it worked for us in the past, so let's keep it that way.'
I completely agree with this.
Isn’t the point of Chidi’s character that he’s always contradicting himself and changing his mind? Of course, that trait shouldn’t be used as an excuse for mistakes in writing the show but,,
It wasn't really a mistake though, at the point he said that he believed the system of ethics he studied is what brought him to the Good Place and was therefore correct
Yeah, I always saw it as a deliberate character flaw of Chidi's; he knows about all these ethical systems, but he can't decide on just one, so he's stuck unable to come to any single conclusion because the systems he's using contradict each other and he refuses to make a choice between them.
@@argenteus8314 Exactly - his non-commitment is shown to constantly have negative outcomes on him and his circles while simultaneously breaking the theories he studies so much.
@@argenteus8314 I honestly found it infuriating because he (and the show) always presented it as a false dichotomy (well more than two) where he would need to just accept the full package deal of ethical concepts instead of do what is the whole point of knowing so much ethical theory: break down the values he holds and build ethical principles using what he knows of the flaws of other ethical systems. I found the whole 'picking a side' narrative as something someone like Chidi would not do in real life since picking a side is usually reserved for those who lack the knowledge to actually 'build a side' by examining their own core values.
He's also a massive over thinker
big joel: calls himself by his name, henry
everyone watching the video: 👁👄👁
You know, I'm glad you talked about how the Good Place is a bit of a horror; even from the aesthetics, that's what I thought it would be. It's very...aggressively modern American. It always creeped me out
I assume it’s because NBC probably nixed their “ we need to kill god!” storyline?
rubberlover666 I wish it had least been floated by a character
What? Really? They had thought of going there? On an American tv show? They wanted to go all His Dark Materials? In the land of evangelists? Truly? I wish they had dared.
@@leilam-k9569 I'm assuming this is a refernece to joels series on the "god is not dead" films.
@@idontevenhaveapla7224 A revolution can be a form of victory. The same way that you can be happier without a King or your colonists. If the humans had gotten rid of the God of their world because she is unjust (I am assuming it's the Judge), they can learn to rule themselves according to a moral system that they think is fair rather than hope that the Judge/God in power becomes ethically just, staying forever dependent on her mercy.
Supernatural did that didn't they
Big mustache for a big Joel
The show writers had certain goals throughout it and one of them was to introduce a philosophical concept and have you think about it. It's not telling you how to think but it's telling you to think which is exactly what they did. Which is why it works
The way I took the theme of the show was not that it was trying to prove that everything "gets better", but that everything *changes* . The ending of the show, and even throughout, when Chidi literally says "the problem is that its *final"* , showed that *permanence* was what was not working. Bad or good place, neither was happy. The people who "got better" weren't happy. So that wasn't the point. The problem was that there was no change. You either stay happy forever, or miserable forever. Thats it.
But the ending of the show proves my theory in my opinion. The ending of the show doesn't say "they got better and that's it", it says "they changed". When they got tired of the afterlife, or at least felt accomplished enough, they had the *option* to leave. To change, and in that, to change others. The whole point was that the cycle of life, death, and afterlife was incomplete. It just halted at the end. The show solved that problem. So I believe the show was satisfying, in that it set out to do what it wanted. It completed the cycle. Change overcame permanence.
hey just thought of this; we're talkin about the good place, but Big Joel's got the Good Face that i like to look at
ooo, shit!
:^)
Here is my take. In the beginning, Chidi believes he made it to heaven based on his morality which had been based in his foundations in philosophy; therefore it would only stand to reason that he would conclude that human philosophy is a pathway to Eleanor becoming a better person. Now, after he discovers he is in the Bad Place, it was explained to him that it was not his philosophy but his manic behavior that damned him, so he has no reason to think that his philosophy was the problem and feels it will help Michael become a better demon. When they find out that human morality wasn't the issue, but a problem with the rating system of moral actions, and then he is more confident that his moral system was valid all along.
With the subject of torturing being morally wrong. Eh, yeah. But we already know there is a cosmic system of justice is completely broken and amoral because it was designed to deal with life forms considered lesser and insignificant to the greater powers.
Now consider the stick and carrot system of the Christian god as if it were real in the world of the Good Place and the characters were just having to deal with the system they were given. We know it is an immoral system, and that human moral philosophy is better, but try telling that to some dispassionate angelic social works who work for the deity who created the system in the first place. Honestly, I don't think there would ever be a resolution that is found in the series, but that would not be so satisfying.
Man, I love your videos. I feel like you got really hung up on the sitcom format, though. There are two particular points that serve as constant fuel for one-liners. These are (a) the excesses of punishment in the Bad Place (penis flatteners), and (b) the trivial sorts of poor taste that cost people points on Earth. Those one-liners paint a picture that would be hard to defend on a nuanced level, and seem to undermine the show's underlying critique of the afterlife as a permanent consequence for mistakes in life. But it's a sitcom. There's an underlying story, and the dialogue is constantly riffing off that to create constant small comedic payoffs, because that's the form.
Also: the start position for the Good Place and the Bad Place is a clear satire of Christian morality (just as other aspects of the show will go on to parody utilitarianism and deontology). You get hung up on how unfair it is to punish people for trivialities with endless torture, but that's not something the show came up with. That's straight Calvinism.
Anyway, great video, but also the first of yours I find myself almost completely disagreeing with.
The Good Place keeps breaking its own rules as a punch line. It makes fun of its own absurd concept and ridiculous setup. But it also does this to deliver a sensible message. I love this series!
'part 2..'
"oooh lets see where this is going:)"
'.. the end'
"haha.. wait what?:("
I was watching, but I replaced “The Good Place” with “Capitalism.”
I never really considered that until I heard Michael's line in season 3 about the point system that went something along the lines of "say you go out and buy an apple, that's neither good nor bad you're just bying an apple, but the money you spent on that apple will eventually end up in the pocket of a racist, sexist, evil billionare CEO, and by supporting them you actually end up losing thoudands of points."
It can be a placeholder for any civilisation with arbitrary beliefs sprung from the relations of production
i think Upload tackles "Capitalism" and "The Afterlife" a lot better and more overtly.
Oof
@@JeniJustJeni Wait...what? Did accidentally shade The Good Place?
A few years ago I was reading Greek Mythology, and I was struck by how cruel and arbitrary it was. Somehow humans still had a form of ethics even while having this view of the universe. I just went through a major tragedy in my life, and I thought about how the people that wrote these myths lived in a world that was far harsher and more difficult than the present. It's a difficult thing for modern people to fully understand or appreciate.
The judge changing makes sense because she goes down to earth to experience it herself.
She does that and then proceeds to agree that infinite torture is a main option on the table. Like, such an option that one person out of four getting a little worse in the experiment is enough to default to torture. Also, option b for that option a is the elimination of all life. And the new world created after will presumably also have infinite torture. It's a lot.
I just want you to know your argument breakdown was really painful. You used the premises of two separate arguments and didn’t even talk about the evidence. Sloppy
U talking about “premise one: people change. Premise two: therefore we should help them change, allow them to grow, and not treat them poorly” That seems like it’s what chidi says.
@@BigJoel the part where you claim the show never says "torture is wrong" when they said that all the time and the people they were trying to convince didn't care. And also you seem to weirdly think that people on earth haven't ever come up with like... the concept of hell that the show is based on? like "there's no system that could try to justify torturing people for eternity" when hell is... literally what the show is based on.
@@QuikVidGuy The real video was on the comments all along
For me, the solution is pretty simple: The Judge grew. Why she grew is less important than that she grew.
The fact that they convinced HER to live on earth for awhile probably helps. Kinda reminds me of a certain interpretation of Christianity that explains how much more cruel god was described as being in the old testament by him having not really understood what it's like to be human before having become Jesus. I've always found that argument rather weak though considering he's supposedly omniscient and thus he shouldn't really have ever had anything new to learn, along with other reasons.
Cuz plot progression. Lazy writing.
@@Onoesmahpie Nah. She actually went out and lived a human life and that changed her perspective. That's sensible writing that a being who was not and never was human before could be swayed by actually experiencing what it means to be something they aren't. But even then she didn't truly get it.
I think you completely misunderstood the Judge character, the point is that she doesn't care, even after the resolution she doesn't care, and it's funny bc she can do with humans whatever she pleases.
I think the different contradictions you point out in the story kind of balance themselves out? Characters like Shawn and the Judge can't be swayed by the moral argument for human happiness, so they are swayed with the argument that it makes their jobs easier. These two digressions from the central theme (humans demanding the universe treat them better) come together to make the plot coherent and believable while still ultimately making the human element about the capacity to improve and our deserving of it.
I also wanna say that while Chidi doesn't linger on the "cruel and permanent" problem, it still is addressed in that his solution abolishes the over-the-top tortures in favor of the ones that will be constructive to self-reflection and improvement.
I just pretend I know whats happening, just like in Game of Thrones!! :)
It's still one of my favorite shows of this decade
A couple of thoughts:
(1) "Why would Chidi lose time with human moral philosophy, if the Good Place has an infallible formula for good and evil? Why doesn't he look at that instead?" I think, because (a) he spent his life diong human moral philosophy, and he isn't going to throw that away and (b) formula may even be too complicated for humans, even dead humans, to understand, and (c) in view of (b), teaching Eleanor about morality has to start with something more accessible to her (which also happens to be what he is used to do -- (a))...
It simultaneously feels like you know the moments you reference in intimate detail, but also didn't see any part you didn't talk about. Particularly in regards to themes, where you say the show doesn't include a message that it explicitly does, right around the point you referenced for a good chunk of the video, and framing "people can change" as what's the argument being made to the audience. It's not, it's just the argument constructed to convince characters who think people deserve torture for being bad. The show is entirely based around how the torture would be wrong even if people couldn't change. It's what every season of the show is based around, and it's part of the solution at the end, to do away with the torture. You just said "no, it doesn't do that, now onto my point." And you claim the judge knows people change on earth when several episodes and many conversations and gags are dedicated to how she literally hasn't experienced anything from earth besides popular media. She has a very famous scene where she goes down to earth for the first time in forever and is blindsided by fucking BASIC facts
Like... bad argument, man. Especially since you start off saying you're not really going to be making a clear-cut argument and decisively talking about your opinions.
I think the show was about exploring the concepts we have about the afterlife and how we live in a world that cannot live up to any dreamed up standard because of capitalism.
Also, that the afterlife would suck.
Er, you're just seeing what you want to see. It was about the complexity of an interconnected society, full stop, not just capitalism. NO ONE in 500 years got into the good place. None. This includes every single person living under every ideology. Though, this does present a plot hole where tribal people likely should have still been able to get in if they were nice enough.
I feel like the implication from the last season of the good place isn’t about Fixing Everything, but is about duct taping a system until it functions in a satisfactory way, and they’re gonna have to duct tape the system and remake the system and change the system again over time to improve it, and I think that’s
Neat.
(I think watching characters that have become our friends effectively committing suicide on screen in the finale is Less Neat but that is going to be dependent on the mental place of the person watching it)
This is just a fundamental misunderstanding about chidi. He's definitely a moral realist. He believes there are moral truths, he just doesn't necessarily always know what those are. Moral realists concern themselves with the process of finding and articulating those truths.
The 'rulebook' is an abstraction. A perfect set of rules is unattainable. Putting the book in the show is kinda a jab at that.
As for the ending I mean eh. I predicted in the first season that elanor and jason were actually in a reform system and it wasn't really the good place. So, sorta close I guess