How Do You Make the Afterlife Fair?
A critical look at “The Good Place’s” point system
(Editor’s note: spoiler alert if you’ve never seen the show before.)
In the third season of “The Good Place,” reformed demon Michael realizes that the point system, which determines whether humans are taken to eternal paradise or torture after death, is broken.
What do we owe to each other?
I know the feeling. I was in college when I realized my belief system of evangelical Christianity was missing the mark with its gauge of who was in and who was out (of God’s favor and heaven). For example, my church said abortion was a sin but turned a blind eye to the influence both poverty and access to healthcare had on the demand for abortion. The illusion started to unravel. Before long, the whole tapestry of rights and wrongs unwound.
It begs the question: If there were an afterlife, how would people’s fates be decided? Or, without an afterlife as incentive, how do we decide between right and wrong, or as “The Good Place’s” moral philosophy professor Chidi, asks — “what do we owe to each other?”
The book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” by Jonathan Haidt, sheds some light on the question of ethics. The author explains that the afterlife serves as a convenient motivation for members of social groups to treat group members well. The group is better off, evolutionarily speaking, if its members act in an altruistic way, which ultimately makes groups with morals more likely to survive.
Though we may claim our morals are based on rational values like fairness and avoidance of harm, what really happens when we make moral decisions is we go with our gut feeling, and then rationalize them afterwards. The author offers the example of a family’s dog that dies instantly after being hit by a car. The family then carries the dog inside, eats it — and nobody else sees or knows. While most people’s gut reaction is that this is (gross and) wrong, Haidt argues it doesn’t actually bring harm to any person or animal.
Haidt boils our “gut reaction” morals down to six foundations:
- care/harm,
- fairness/cheating,
- loyalty/betrayal,
- authority/subversion,
- sanctity/degradation, and
- liberty/oppression.
The author shares research that shows everyone, regardless of culture or beliefs, will be immoral — if they think nobody is watching. This is why an all-knowing God (or point-analyzing accountant a la “The Good Place”) is so potent.
In “The Good Place,” the one human who is aware of the point system while still alive is Doug Forcett, who discovers this cosmic truth while on drugs. He proceeds to live in a remote cabin in Canada, where he grows radishes, drinks water filtered from his own waste, and does laundry for a pre-teen bully who ridicules him.
Anyone who’s tried to be a good Christian and wound up becoming a good doormat while endlessly excusing and sometimes facilitating the bad behavior of others, can relate.
“If I make him happy, I get the points,” Doug says, and according to the television ledger, he is right.
Anyone who’s tried to be a good Christian and wound up becoming a good doormat can relate
That is exactly the problem. A point system that incentivizes making others happy at one’s own expense is rewarding unhealthy behavior.
Tahani, a beautiful British woman who raised money for charity but more for her parents’ approval, attempts to be a better person in the Good Place and help her friends resolve an issue. But, she finds her actions make matters worse.
“Every time I do something nice, it backfires,” she confesses to Michael. “There are so many unintended consequences to well-intentioned actions. It feels like a game you can’t win.”
This is the big breakthrough for Michael. It explains why no human has made it to the show’s good place in more than 500 years: the world is too complex. Every action we take has a ripple effect, and even the most altruistic actions can directly or indirectly cause harm. If you had to verify that no human rights or environmental violations were involved in the production, delivery, or sale of every single ingredient you eat, you wouldn’t survive. If I sewed my own clothes just to be sure I wasn’t unknowingly purchasing clothes made by child labor, I would have less time to volunteer at an after-school program. If I bought and cooked only locally-produced organic foods, I would have less money to donate to charity.
A point system that incentivizes making others happy at one’s own expense is rewarding unhealthy behavior.
Doug fears that slipping up will send him to hell. “What if I relax and do something and lose just enough points to keep me out of the Good Place and I’m tortured for eternity?” he says. “It’s the only rational way to live.”
But even he isn’t going to make it to the Good Place under the current point system. None of us would.
Michael brings up the issue to the head “accountant,” who denies any error, claiming his department runs a purely rational, mistake-free system. Next, Michael goes to the highest leadership in the Good Place, who come off like your most stereotypical Christian friends: cheerful and well-meaning without being willing to take action that would help people in harm’s way, because they’re too focused on the rules.
Finally, Michael makes a deal with the judge: They’ll set up a new experiment with four new humans. The humans don’t actually have to hit a standard of goodness — they just need to become slightly better versions of themselves, once removed from the world and put into a fake good place without the complexity and unintended consequences. If it works, it will save humanity from eternal torture (or at least — Michael, his robot-assistant Janet, and the four humans from the original experiment).
I’m reminded of the verse: “Love does not keep score.” I don’t think we actually owe anything to each other. There will never be a perfect point system.
This season, I wonder if the characters stumble upon a new moral code to manage entry into the Good Place, or will they destroy the Bad Place entirely? When I was an evangelical Christian, I believed in hell. But the more I considered the idea of a loving God, I couldn’t accept that any action, no matter how atrocious, was deserving of eternal torture. I’m hoping they shut the place down.
In the meantime, it’s enough resolution for me to grow comfortable with the idea that our actions are complex, that it’s not always enough to simply reduce harm or even try to do good. We might feel good about ourselves if we walk for weeks to donate $85 to a snail charity, like Doug. Both good deeds and positive impact hold value, yet neither is enough on its own.
I’m reminded of the verse: “Love does not keep score.” I don’t think we actually owe anything to each other. There will never be a perfect point system. What’s miraculous about humanity is that altruism feels good, so we keep doing it, and it perpetuates. The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. It’s a good place.
Read my book, Shameless: How I lost my virginity and kept my faith