The Forking Trolley: An Ethical Journey to The Good Place - Softcover

Russell, James M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786750791 ISBN 13: 9781786750792

Verlag: Palazzo Editions Ltd, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Holy Motherforking Shirtballs!

The madly popular sitcom The Good Place, has propelled ethics and moral philosophy into the 21st century mainstream. The story of Eleanor Shellstrop, who has accidentally been sent to the Good Place after her death, continually challenges us to ask what makes for a 'good person'?

Taking inspiration from the show, this is a guide to 'doing the right thing'. Using thought experiments, from the trolley problem to the balloon debate, as well as modern dilemmas like the etiquette of texting and 'selfie' culture (you're going to the Bad Place), here is (nearly) everything you need to know about being in your own 'good place' in life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James M. Russell has a philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge, a post-graduate qualification in critical theory, and has taught at the Open University in the UK. He currently works as director of a media-related business. He is the author of A Brief Guide to Philosophical Classics and A Brief Guide to Spiritual Classics. He lives in north London with his wife, daughter and cats.

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The Forking Trolley

An Ethical Journey to the Good Place

By James M. Russell

Palazzo Editions Ltd

Copyright © 2019 James M. Russell
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78675-079-2

Contents

Introduction, 
Everything is Fine! An Overview of Moral Philosophy, 
Somewhere Else Calculating the Consequences, 
What's My Motivation? Following the Rules, 
The Trolley Problem The Trouble With Thought Experiments, 
What We Owe to Each Other Rights and the Social Contract, 
My Best Self The Ideal of Moral Virtue, 
Existential Crisis Alternative Approaches to Ethics, 
Team Cockroach The Ethics of Behaving Badly, 
... Someone Like Me as a Member Moral Particularism and Egoism, 
The Leap to Faith Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Other Dirtbags, 
Everything is Bonzer! Medium People and Their Consciences, 
Conclusion Being Good, 
Glossary, 
Further Reading, 
Acknowledgments, 

CHAPTER 1

Everything is Fine!

An Overview of Moral Philosophy

Imagine you are gliding high above the field of ethical thought (and have succeeded in dodging the flying shrimps and the exploding turkeys along the way ...) Beneath your wings, you might see something that looks a bit like the map overleaf which shows the terrain.

OK, there are an awful lot of 'isms' in there, so before we launch into considering some of the practical ethics that are thrown up by The Good Place and by life in the 21st century in general, let's take a quick tour of the basics. Bearing in mind that everyone hates moral philosophy professors, I promise we will keep this brief ... but a brief overview at this stage will make it easier for us to avoid getting too bogged down in those 'isms' later on.

Meta-ethics (the top layer of the diagram) is the study of the fundamental properties of ethical statements, attitudes, and judgments – the question of what kind of thing ethics even is. In other words, when I make an ethical statement, what am I actually saying?

There are various possible meta-ethical positions. A non-cognitivist theory is one that claims that when we make an ethical statement, it is really an expression of something else: for instance, a prescriptivist would regard the statement "Lying is wrong" as being equivalent to saying "You must not lie"; emotivism is the idea that we are actually just saying "Hurrah for honesty and boo to lying". And a quasi-realist would argue that when we say "Lying is bad" we are merely projecting our personal emotional attitude towards liars as though it is a real thing in the world.

By contrast, cognitivism is the idea that when we make an ethical statement like "Lying is wrong" we really are saying something meaningful, which can be either true or false. Cognitivist error theory starts from this point but then dismisses all ethical statements as being false. Both non-cognitivism and cognitivist error theory are dead ends in the diagram as they don't naturally lead on to questions of how to be good. However, cognitivist realism takes the truth or falsity of ethical statements seriously and does lead to questions like "how can I be a moral person?" and "what does it mean to be good?"

This takes us to the second layer, which would contain a large proportion of moral philosophers ancient and modern. This is normative ethics, the branch of philosophy that attempts to define how one should act and what it is to be good ... While this isn't indicated in the diagram, cognitive realists can broadly be divided into moral realists (who believe a moral statement is objectively true or false) and ethical subjectivists or moral relativists (who generally think morality is a real thing but is judged subjectively by individuals or society). This suggests that saying "Lying is wrong" is closer to saying "I do not like liars".

Subjectivism can seem woolly, but there have been attempts to make it more rigorous, for instance by suggesting that the moral course of action can be defined with reference to the ideal observer – in other words the right thing to do is what a neutral person watching you would believe you should do.

However, at this stage, a more useful way to classify the ethical theories in the diagram is by the basic method you use to judge whether something is good or not – for instance, should our ethics be based on our actions, our intentions, our character or the outcomes of our actions?

The question here is what defines moral virtue. There are three main starting points for this. A deontological view is one that looks for definite moral rules that we should always stick to, whether they be based in principles, duties or rights. One example would be if you believe in divine command – in a god or deity that has set the rules for humans in stone. Another would be Kant's categorical imperative in which the idea that you should only do to someone else something you would want them to do to you is treated as a natural, unarguable starting point for all ethics. The idea that morality is grounded in either the social contract or social conventions (where society collectively sets the moral rules) gives us another way of interpreting rights and duties based on how people actually live their lives, while intuitionists believe we can directly perceive good when we see it, in a kind of "A-ha!" moment of recognition.

The second branch of this layer is consequentialism. This means that rather than looking to the absolute rules of deontology, we need to consider the practical outcomes of particular actions – so what is good depends on the context, and this is how we should decide what to do. Eudemonism was an early example of this kind of theory – it suggested that happiness or well-being is the main goal of virtue, but we should judge a person by how well their actions maximize happiness. Versions of this idea are mentioned by the great Greek philosophers – for instance, the thinker Epicurus is mainly remembered for his claim that happiness is the ultimate goal in life. And Socrates, Plato and Aristotle taught you should pursue virtue, partly because they also taught that it would lead to happiness (or a good life).

From the 18th century onwards, utilitarian thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill revisited this way of looking at virtue. Classical utilitarianism basically suggested that you could develop a kind of calculus by which you measured how much happiness and pain a given action would cause, and that the most moral action was the one that scored most positively. Welfare utilitarianism is a more economically specific branch which tends to identify happiness with economic well-being.

Utilitarianism is based on how actions contribute to society – for a more individualistic way of thinking about outcomes you can look to various types of ethical egoism (which suggests our primary aim should be our own happiness, but still allows for ways to condemn actions that clearly hurt others), altruism (which inverts this way of thinking, placing the needs of others above individual needs) and evolutionary ethics (which looks at ethics primarily as a biologically driven way of thinking).

The final branch of the second layer is virtue ethics – rather than being based on rules or outcomes, this defines morality through character or personality – the suggestion is that we should work on being honest, caring, kind, brave and so on, and then we will tend to make moral choices without requiring rules. This was the main way that the ancient Greeks (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in particular) defined virtue, and their approach was widely adopted for many centuries before being revisited by recent philosophers who felt that systems based on rules or outcomes have too many loopholes. Virtue ethics also focuses on the idea that it is possible to practice being a good person – Chidi quotes Aristotle, for instance, comparing virtue to playing the flute, something you get better at when you practice it. So, in Aristotle's view, character is voluntary, and you are responsible for improving yourself.

So, that's the whistle-stop tour, and we will return to look at many of these ideas in various guises through the book. However, the next obvious question to ask is what kind of ethical theory is at work in The Good Place.

Fun Fact: Doug Forcett Won the Closest Guess

In their first meeting Michael explains to Eleanor that, when it comes to ideas about ethics and the afterlife, each of Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and every other religion guessed "about 5%" of the truth. Humanity's biggest exception turns out to be a stoner from Calgary, a kid called Doug Forcett. One night, when he was tripping on mushrooms, a friend asked Doug what he thought about the afterlife and he started ranting on about what he expected: during the course of this spiel, he astonished Michael and his colleagues by getting "about 92% correct". Michael is proud to have a portrait of him on his wall, with the subtitle "The Closest Guess".

The Ethical Framework of the Good Place

It's tricky to pin down exactly where the Good Place's ethics actually come from (and probably intentionally so, as the show aims to discuss many different aspects of moral philosophy). In the first episode, Michael explains to the newcomers how and why they have qualified for the Good Place, something that is reserved only to the most exceptionally virtuous people. He explains that throughout your life, every time you have made a decision about whether to cut someone up by driving in the breakdown lane, eat a sandwich, read a trashy magazine, or whatever, you have been watched and accrued a points total. Bad acts give you a negative score, good acts give you positive points.

On first sight this seems like a deontological setup – it is clearly rules-based as particular actions have particular scores. You could also see it as being akin to karma, in which good acts gradually accumulate, leading (in several Asian religions) to the person winning release from the cycle of life and death.

On the other hand, Michael also says that the system is about "how much good you put into the universe" which feels closer to a consequentialist viewpoint, in which the key thing is the outcome of your actions. And this is reinforced by a freezeframe inspection of the list of good and bad things and their points totals on the screen as he gives his talk. If fixing a broken tricycle for a kid who loves tricycles is morally better than fixing one for a child who is indifferent to them, then it seems that outcomes must be part of the calculation as well as intentions. This would take it closer to a utilitarian viewpoint, in which we can (theoretically) calculate the exact positive and negative effects of an act we are considering, and choose accordingly.

But let's not forget this is a comedy drama: the list of items also includes some notably arbitrary things which we can either take to mean 1) the writers are having a bit of fun with us here or 2) they want us to question how consistent the ethics of the Good Place really are, and consequently whether something may be askew. On an emotional level you may be able to see why being loyal to the Cleveland Browns gets you positive points, while supporting the New York Yankees is a no-no, but it doesn't make much moral sense. And while it's easy to see why stealing wiring from a decommissioned military base, ruining an opera by behaving boorishly, or "telling a woman she should smile more" are "bad" it seems less obvious (but funny) to include overstating your personal connection to a tragedy that isn't connected to you, or using "Facebook" as a verb. And no matter how you feel about French people, how can stealing bread be worth -17 points while stealing a baguette is -20, simply because it's French? (The demons of the Bad Place have a real downer on the French ...)

The same applies to the list of "good things" – hugging a sad friend or remembering your sister's birthday are clearly kind and decent, while planting a baobab tree in Madagascar is a worthy act (even if it is only available to a lucky few). But other items seem to be based on idiosyncratic personal bugbears, such as the reward for maintaining your composure in a queue at the Houston water park, or for ignoring a text message while talking to an actual person.

The picture gets murkier when Eleanor complains to Chidi about not being able to swear properly (the Good Place will only allow her to say words and phrases like "motherforking", or "son of a bench"). He replies that cursing is prohibited in the neighborhood because a lot of people don't like it (to which she replies "That's bullshirt.") This sounds a lot like contractarianism (see p. 94), in which, to paraphrase, people within society have a veto on rules they don't like. This is a version of the social contract, which takes us back to an approach based on rules rather than outcomes, since it is about how we establish a moral code that everyone accepts.

Chidi himself mostly takes a Kantian view on morality – Immanuel Kant argued that morality is based on the categorical imperative. This is essentially an update of Jesus's golden rule ("Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.") Kant uses a complex philosophical framework to claim that this rule gives us an objective, definite underpinning to all morality and that we need to start from there and derive all moral rules from it. On this basis Kant defines certain actions (such as lying) as being simply wrong (because we couldn't possibly want to live in a world where we could never trust others not to lie to us).

Of course, this kind of rigidity creates a lot of moral quandaries. In season 2, when Chidi must briefly pretend to be a demon in the Bad Place, he is initially paralyzed by his reluctance to tell a lie, no matter how good the outcome of that lie might be. (He eventually finds a way to soothe his own doubts and go along with the pretense by advising his "fellow demons" that the best way to torture their chosen victim is to make them constantly read philosophy books, which he describes as "thinking outside the bun", in a reference to the Taco Bell advertising slogan).

Another complication is that Eleanor's journey in the show is about simply becoming a better person rather than learning a set of rules or basing all moral judgments on outcomes. One tiny moment of moral progress comes when she is excited to realize she has waved the person behind her in the frozen yogurt line through so she doesn't hold up the line, rather than taking as long as she could to spite anyone who might complain about her (as she would have done in her mediocre past). Any further progress she does make is often based on the most basic of moral decisions – try to see the other person's point of view, try to do the right thing, and act for the right reasons instead of in the hope of getting something in return.

If the world of The Good Place wasn't so explicitly based on a set of rules and points, this might lead us to conclude that the real aim here is for Eleanor to learn "virtue". At the very least we can suggest that when she attempts to learn from Chidi how to "be good", she is following feebly in the footsteps of the ancient Greeks, who saw personal virtue as being the path to happiness and a better life in general.

So, in the end, there is a bit of everything at work in the ethical universe of The Good Place – and that is probably for the best. The purpose of the show isn't to give us a prescriptive idea of morality, but to talk us through dilemmas and problems and to encourage us to think for ourselves about those issues. Chidi's lectures, and the books referenced by the show may provide us with a few hints as to the writers' own opinions, but on the whole, this is a show that asks questions more than it provides answers.

Is This a Simulated World?

Some viewers have noted that the closest comparison in our world to the points system used in the good place comes in video games. Games such as BioShock and Mass Effect award points for actions – for instance a player may be given negative points for killing an innocent character in pursuit of an in-game reward. This creates a philosophically flawed, but reasonably effective way of creating an internal ethics for a simulated universe. This observation (together with moments in episodes such as The Trolley Problem where Michael instantly conjures up an alternative simulation) has led some viewers to question whether the world of The Good Place is supposed to be a simulation. On the other hand, it's not difficult to find scientists, geeks and even entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk (whose underwater mansion Tahani has, of course, visited) who have advanced the idea that our real world may be no more than a Matrix-style simulation, so maybe it's best to just see how the story develops ...

Rock, Paper, Scissors

We've already seen how complex the field of ethics is and how many different approaches to the subject there are to choose from. One of the reasons that "people hate moral philosophy professors" is that the subject of ethics rarely provides us with definite answers – more often it just raises insoluble problems. Chidi is the stereotypical academic philosopher – he has strong moral principles, but they often leave him in a state of hopeless indecision in practice. On page 1000 of his unfinished, unreadable book about philosophy he starts an entirely new section with the words "Of course the exact opposite might be true ..." As a child he could waste an entire recess failing to choose a single player for his soccer team. He never chose a name for his dog – when it ran away he had to put up posters saying, "responds to long pauses", he can't even make a choice in a game of rock-paper-scissors, instead having a panic attack because there are so many variables to think about.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Forking Trolley by James M. Russell. Copyright © 2019 James M. Russell. Excerpted by permission of Palazzo Editions Ltd.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Palazzo Editions Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786750791
• ISBN 13: 9781786750792
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar