A Companion to Public Philosophy

20Popular Ethics in The Good Place and Beyond

TODD MAY

Why in the world would you want to create a popular television show about morality or ethics?¹ And if, for some reason, you decided to create one, how would you do it? It doesn’t seem very easy to do, after all. Not only do you have to read a lot of books whose way of addressing you fall into the “This is going to hurt a lot more than it really needs to” category, but then you have to figure out how to present their ideas to an audience for whom that kind of hurting is not on their entertainment agenda. And if you want to do all this as a sit‐com, well, what then?

The first question is easier to answer than the others, and its answer should remind us philosophers of ourselves. It starts with a problem and an opportunity. Both the problem and the opportunity were offered to the creator of The Good Place, Mike Schur. For those who haven't seen the show, The Good Place is a television sit‐com about a woman who goes to what she is told is the Good Place after she dies, a place people go when they’ve been good during their lives. As it turns out (spoiler alert), this is not the real Good Place but instead a special version of the Bad Place, created so that deeply flawed human beings can torture one another. The rest of the show follows the trajectory of her and her friends (including a philosophy professor) as they try to figure out how to get into the real Good Place.²

So here’s the problem. While driving in Los Angeles – seemingly ...