The Good Place and How Threat Perception Informs Our Ideas About Moral Permissibility
My partner and I finally finished The Good Place, and I have so. Many. Feelings about it. My background is in philosophy, and while I never specialized in ethical theory, axiology and social contract theory and virtue and duty are legitimately fascinating concepts to me.
[Fair warning, this does contain spoilers of The Good Place.]
It took me a long time to get into the show. When I became aware of it, initially, I was beginning to discover that I had PTSD, and a lot of flashbacks and triggers were related to my time in academia. So, naturally, I had a hard time with a show that so integrally involved philosophical concepts in direct, intentional ways. There was no avoiding it.
In a roundabout way, it actually helped me get past some of those symptoms, sort of like microdosing philosophy to build a tolerance. For that reason, among others, I am grateful beyond words.
The story has a ton of layers and bears multiple rewatches. And it has a lot to say about what makes a person good or bad, but right now, I want to talk about one of its subtler points: the ways people behave towards others is greatly informed by how threatened (or safe) they feel with others.
In everyday life, it’s not morally permissible to shove someone for no reason. But if you have a reasonable explanation, or what you consider to be a reasonable expectation, that the person is a threat, you might be inclined to put physical distance between yourself and the threat. Shoving would be totally understandable if this is indeed your mental state.
That does not mean that you will be morally justified in doing so. Even if it’s a legitimate fear in your mind, if that fear is rooted in something like racism or other forms of bigotry, you’re not morally in the clear.
If someone shoots an unarmed black person, any fear they might genuinely feel will likely stem from racism. Racism, hopefully we can all agree, is not morally permissible, and if you shoot someone because of racist beliefs, that’s not okay, either.
How does this relate to The Good Place? One key concept: safety.
The Neighborhood
When the squad gets to the afterlife, they’re told they’re in the Good Place. The resulting reasoning is as follows: if this is the Good Place, and if it’s true that only good people get into the Good Place, then everyone in the Neighborhood is a good person. Good people do good things and are not a threat. There is, then, no threat here.
They believe they are safe. That’s vital to the whole idea of Michael’s original experiment.
It’s what Michael and the Bad Place folks want them to think: it looks like paradise, but the torture is more subtle than, say, bees with teeth or eyeball corkscrews. The humans — Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason — should only fear being found out. The other 318 residents (plus Michael) are all “good,” and therefore can be trusted.
In contrast, in everyday life, there is always the possibility that you’ll encounter someone rude or violent or just plain bad. You never know.
In life, Eleanor had a lot of defense mechanisms. She literally said that her high school yearbook quote was, “You’re not better than me.” She also repeatedly refers to herself as an “Arizona trash bag,” throughout the series.
But through her interactions with the other humans and Michael, throughout the series, she becomes more and more sure of herself. And she’s not the only one. Chidi became more confident than I could have ever foreseen, although that didn’t happen until right at the end.
I would argue, as the series did, that people improve when given love and support. But my real point is that at least some people are bad or do bad things because they believe the world is bad.
The Demons
It took me a while to understand Bad Place culture. I became deeply fascinated in the final episode of season one, “Michael’s Gambit.” Incidentally, this episode also sealed the deal for me on the series as a whole. I fell in love with their use of cool tones and the lighting in the Bad Place. It took me a bit longer to notice the muted tones in the Earth flashbacks and the Medium Place. Both are evident when contrasted with the lighting and color schemes used in Michael’s Neighborhood.
But I digress. The Bad Place is where demons torture humans. But why? Why do they take such glee over torture?
Eventually, it becomes clear that demons torture people because they think people are bad, full-stop, end of story. The whole system of the afterlife is designed around the idea that people are not capable of improvement. Michael’s Neighborhood unintentionally proved the opposite. It proved the opposite 802 times.
And then, incredibly, Michael took ethics lessons along with the humans. And he actually improved and learned the error of his ways. At one point, he actually says that the four humans are all that matter to him in the universe.
Think about where he started: literally a demon who enjoys torturing humans. Why did that change?
It changed because the humans helped him, and he learned that not all humans are terrible. It completely upended his worldview, and he struggled with it, but eventually he got through it and came out stronger because of it, because he had friends who loved and supported and helped him.
Remember, he didn’t think it was possible. The demons, for the most part, tortured people because they believed that people deserved to be tortured. (Shawn, after a while, just wanted to mess with Michael because it was new and fun. He just didn’t want to give that up. Michael convinced him, in the end, by reminding him how much fun Shawn had playing the “Judge” in the original Neighborhood experiment.)
Bad Place ‘50’s style aesthetics were also an incredible touch, as are the old-school computers in Accounting and some Janet voids, and that recording device in Michael’s office in season two is definitely a relic. All of this points to one key principle: things have gone a very, very long time without changing. Maybe that had gone on so long, they forgot change was even possible, or they stopped expecting or looking for signs of change.
Bad Janet
This was something that definitely surprised me: Bad Janet read Michael and Good Janet’s manifesto, containing everything they had learned about humans and the afterlife. I’m not sure what convinced her; maybe it was just that Michael let her go rather than keeping her in Good Janet’s void for eternity.
Let’s consider this from Bad Janet’s point of view. She’s mean for meanness’s sake, but there’s a reason she was designed as such: the afterlife folks thought that a person’s general quality level could not be improved upon, because they think humans just are what we are. If we do bad things, it must be because we’re inherently bad and incapable of improvement.
But then she, like Good Janet, was rebooted a lot. And like Good Janet, Derek, and the humans, she improved by several orders of magnitude. When we first see Bad Janet try to impersonate a Good Janet, her head literally melts. Later, in season four, she does so flawlessly until Jason slaps magnetic cuffs onto her.
After a kabillion or so reboots, Bad Janet became accidentally susceptible to having a more open mind. At least, that’s what it seemed like to me.
Also, and this is incidental, but I loved how the Bad Place crew were immediately concerned with whether or not they’d still have jobs. Republicans are wild. Like, “We can’t improve things, because some folks would have to find new jobs!”
I know some folks might read that and ask why I had to bring politics into it. I’ll tell you: it’s my article, and I can put what I want in it, but more importantly, that statement might as well be in the Republican Party’s platform. And you may quote me on that. Plus, like a lot of us, I’m constantly thinking about one gross orange troll in particular and how everything is being boofed, possibly beyond repair. It’s a lot. Bit distracting.
Conclusion
Just in case someone takes issue with this article, I want to note the following: I feel that this is a series that bears multiple readings, in addition to multiple viewings. As I said, it has layers, and I think it has something for everyone. We can agree to disagree on different aspects of it, but if you come at me in a hateful or just-plain-mean manner, I’ll block you. I’m down to have conversations, but I’m not trying to feed the trolls. (They never even say thank you.)
I can honestly say I never expected to be this captivated, intellectually, by a show. It was the big reveal at the end of season one that did it, but it was also a million other smaller things. There’s a feeling of things becoming increasingly sinister in that first season, only you don’t see it for what it is until you see Michael cackling.
