The Good Place.
As stated in a previous post, if I’m not doing school work or at work you can find me and my wife watching a good TV show. We find ourselves continuously going back to some shows like How I Met Your Mother and The Good Place, but today I’d like to talk about the latter. The Good Place introduced me to different philosophical concepts. Many of which that I’ve grown fond of.
Going into the Good Place, I had no expectations, or idea of how a comedy show would change how I saw the world. What I thought would be a quick watch and a laugh turned into a love for philosophy seeking more of it. Without doing any spoilers, for those who still haven’t watched the show, The Good Place follows the protagonist Eleanor Shellstrop, as she faces the fact of her recent death. Eleanor realizes she has been sent to “the good place” by mistake knowing she lived a less than exemplary life. Unbeknownst to the rest of the good place community, she must now learn to be a good person and earn her place into their Utopian society.
Throughout her journey, she obtains help from characters like Chidi (a philosophy professor), Janet (a walking database), Tahani (a young billionaire philanthropist), Jason (a “Buddhist” monk), and Michael (the architect of their Utopia). Although these characters were important to her growth, the characters that stood out to me the most are Chidi and Eleanor. In her quest to become a good person, Chidi was there to guide her by using philosophical concepts from philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and Aristotle to name a few.
While watching this show and hearing about these different philosophers. I decided to take a deeper look into their concepts. The one that stood out to me the most was Jeremy Bentham and Stuart Mills’ concept of utilitarianism, which promotes the answer with the best outcome. They argued that people should live their lives to seek pleasure and avoid pain. When we think of this concept the best way to explain it is the trolley problem. A quick example of the trolley problem is should you sacrifice one person to save five, or sacrifice five people to save one?
By pondering questions like the trolley problem seen above, I have been able to take a deeper look into philosophy. It has now become a mainstay in my life.