The Philosophy of The Good Place - Wisecrack Edition 

Just finished it... same question here.. But he kinda choose the major OF choices itself...

Cause if you are lit enough to think like a philosopher, you know that other majors don't really matter. So, there was no choice.

Chidi is actually 45 years old. He took 13 years to pick his major

They answered that in the flashback in the second to last episode. Chidi gave a lecture to his parents, (professor) about the overall reasons they should stay together, and he used a philosophy book to base his argument. It was pretty clear to me that this had the double effect of destroying his ability to make choices, but also giving him a passion - to find the toughest shit to answer in life, which is moral philosophy. His girlfriend argues theoretical physics at one point, but those do have answers that we haven't yet found. Moral philosophy allows for exploration of the values of daily life, which is where his origins of both a shitty choice maker and a professor came into being. He chose his major because it was a core part of his personality, as much as being indecisive was.

Like, 3 Beramys

But celery adds a lot of flavor to food. The mirepoix is the base of most soups, stews and many sauces. It's diced onions, carrots, and celery that is sauteed to release its flavor, and then the rest of the ingredients are added.

Yoghurt>Ice cream

Karth38 what the fuck is wrong with you

I'm sorry but frozen yogurt is better then icecream.

The

Ew, no seasonings? lol

Counterargument: I'm gonna grab some Camus!

Yes

HOT DIGGITY DOG

Best part was when jason of all people figured out that they are in the bsd place and Michael feels offended that his simulation didn't work

good point.

Also backed up by Eleanor's backstory, where we see that what really set her down her dark path of evil and misery was a deliberate withdraw from the people around her and any mutual ties to them.

Haven't seen the Good Place, but I noticed while reading your comment how perfectly well what you're saying lines up with the themes of Schur's other series.

This is spot on.

A +

The correct answer is to grind on both sets of tracks. -insert heavy euro beat-

Mind field, the youtube red series has a "real life" application of this theory

@@peterDcontact thanks a lot

Idk what I was expecting Mr. indecision to do, I mean, its pretty obvious in hindsight.

Kirk it! I don't believe in no win scenario's...

and how amazingly D'arcy handled the character!

true

“not a girl :)”

yeah but the bad place people will just simply rip it off like an common peasant pilgerist, so they deserve to be in the bad place. u seen bad janet, its pretty much non functioning

I can relate to Jason because he has an dance group called dance dance resolution.

can we reboot this series because its generating way more buzz now then it did in the before times. the networks might want to replace chidi with an white power puff guy. >.

​@@Wolfsbane909what.?

Ive just listened to the Good Place podcast and D'arcy Carden says that she went with one of the writers to a Beyoncé concert and this guy kept criticizing Beyoncé all the time, till they confronted him and he turned to them and said: Ya basic! That's how that line ended up in the show. So funny.

Adrian Perez Ya basic!

That's devastating, i'm devastated now.

I’ve seen it does that mean I’m cool cool cool cool cool

No adrian, ya basic

Vegetarian Soylent-Green Jake Jortles XD

Jason--is that you?

FOOOOOLLLLLLLEEEESSSSS

Go Jags!!!

It's also "throw a molotov cocktail"

And?

What I can't just wax lyrical about my existential dread on a youtube video?? Unless that was extremely dry humour in which case bravo

Chidi is that you

"Despair, doomed, denied even the brief joy,". Why does "is" make you unhappy. Philosophically, you have made a choice to interpret everything as "bad." As Peter Griffin would say, "Stop it, just stop it!"

"...doomed to ambiguity..." There's the problem. Ambiguity isn't necessarily a source of despair. To be human is to live in ambiguity like a fish lives in water. It has limits, but within it, you are free. Life has the meaning you give it. There is no giver of meaning out there that you must conform to. Ambiguity is just another way of saying "Liberty."

I love this. Just a question, was it being good for the sake of being good or being good for the rewards of being good? or both of those, and both are just as bad?

@@danielarossi5437 I think maybe being good for the rewards is worse, but I'm not sure the show makes a distinction. Either way, neither is really authentic, which is why they don't count. For example, look at Chidi, he was always trying to be good for the sake of being good, and that attitude hurt him mostly because all his decisions, or non-decisions, were convoluted and hurt people. Like when he missed his mom's surgery because he didn't think it was right to break promises, even though he had only promised to help someone figure out how to use their phone, and they definitely would have understood and could have rescheduled. But he was so caught up in "being good" that he was actually bad. Probably a lot of times in his life if he'd just been more selfish he would have been better, ironically. Another example could be really out there, like you volunteer to do something just to be good, but your heart really isn't in it, you could accidentally taken a spot away from someone who was truly passionate, so in the greater scheme of things your efforts are never going to be as much of a benefit to the project as that person's would have been, so you inadvertently actually did something bad. Of course, if they're under-staffed, all hands are welcome, but it's just a possibility. Everything is very complicated. I won't be surprised if in the end the show reveals there is no real good and bad place, and it's all some bigger scheme than that, because the whole idea of being able to label people intrinsically good or bad without taking into account everything that went into forming them and their decision processes is silly. Really, all four of them died without anyone to really look forward to being great companions with, aka soul mates, in heaven, so maybe the show is a giant match-making device lols. Not only match you up with a soul mate, but help teach you to actually have a successful relationship and meaningful existence. Just a thought. (Sorry my answer is long-winded, this is one of my favorite shows and topics ever.)

No, I really appreciate the long answer! It's so unusual to have a nice chat in the comments section. The four of them are so interesting characters, the part of the heart not being there is what sent Tahani to the bad place, and the lack of empathy and caring sent Chidi there. Jason maybe the controversial one? because he's basically a walking hydrangea (you know: pretty, decorative, useless, and potentially toxic if ingested); so being an absolute dumbass that can't fully grip the difference between good and bad is enough to send somebody to the bad place?

@@danielarossi5437 I agree, it is very unusual to have a nice chat in comments, usually my comments all get ignored lols! This is awesome. A walking hydrangea, that's hilarious =) If we are to believe the show's premise, he's there simply on a point based system. However, to me he's one of the best examples of potentially it being more of a learning opportunity. Plus he and Tahani are kinda perfect for each other. He's simple enough to basically worship her, while also kinda bringing her down a few notches to reality. I think they can really help each other grow, she's over-educated and he's under-educated, but when it comes to having a good time he's more educated then she is! And he wants to be a DJ, and she loves to throw parties, it's great. Also, his childlike way of seeing everything is a great foil for all the character's, because it kind of tests their goodness by giving them opportunities to react. Sometimes I think maybe the show is also a metaphor for the fact that if you're living a "bad" life, you are already in a bad place. I mean, for example, Jason's stupidity repeatedly landed him in bad and painful scenarios, such as suffocating in a safe. So he doesn't need to become that much smarter really, he just needs to have better friends who've got his back and will help him keep from "shooting himself in the foot." The natural reward for this is that they get to enjoy his spontaneous excitement about reality, and his great knowledge of hot-wings and music. Thus, being "truly good" is a natural reward, not in big mansions or magical rewards like the "good place," but in meaningful moments that genuinely feel good to have experienced with the people you were with. No matter how nice a life you have, it can still turn to dust in your mouth if you don't spend it with the right people, which is evidenced by Tahani. She had everything anyone could reasonably wish for, but since she had no concept of true love or friendship she tried to fill that hole by competing with her sister, falsely believing that somehow being more and more "successful" would bring her fulfillment. She always name dropped, or number dropped, or achievement dropped, but she never had any really poignant memories of a moment spent with another person that was just special. I mean, maybe there are portions of hell filled with butt spiders that are reserved for the truly evil (if they can't be deleted, I sometimes find it hard to imagine the universe wasting space on the truly irredeemable, but since I'm not God and can't see the entirety of anyone's existence who knows what they can do with people's souls), but I think since this show focuses on four fairly benign characters I can safely suppose that they aren't truly destined for the "bad place" and potentially never were. They just didn't have anyone to hang out with, and had a lot of growing left to do in order to be able to have happy existences.

Awesome comment, OP!

HypeR BF Hey could you list the other 9 shows? Thanks

I expect at least another Michael Schur-run show, The Office or Nine-Nine, on your list.

Same

@@TuanNguyen-ko9wz Well it's on my list lol

i noticed that anyone who ever watched the good place says that its a masterpiece/ its one of the best shows ever. Its a shame that many people don't even know it.

Actually you are Jordan.

Hi I'm elfo

I'm Aigis

I am Spartacus!

Not just a Janet anymore :)

yes

and i thought my metaphor for capitalism was apt

Pick your battles

Great explanation and perspective on this topic, well done.

Thank you for this comment :-)

what kinda fucked up place turns away refugees? there's one

Only poor understandings of utilitarianism could be used to justify a ton of terrible things.

@@romanski5811 Poor understanding doesn't deter people from doing bad things 🤷🏻‍♀️

@@jjescorpiso21 Yeah, but that's exactly _my_ point.

And it was!

Which is why I don't like utilitarianism after learning about it in college.

2

Okay, but the points system only counts positive actions taken with no exterior motives, and Jason did a ton of bad shit no matter where his heart was.

Clara Kolterman, The points system could be entirely made up since we don't know exactly how the real good place works. We do know that intention matters, though, since Tahani's positive actions weren't counted because she was doing it for the wrong reasons.

When someone is just so ... simple? ... is it wrong to condemn them to the bad place?

Doug Belt...as Clara points out "... but the points system only counts positive actions taken with no exterior motives.." which is in itself a meta critique of Utilitarianism. So essentially the determination of of destination i..e. Good Place or Bad Place is only contingent on the outcome of your actions. However, this is undercut when Eleanor only gains points on that stopwatch thingy, when she realises that her motives ARE being taken into account. This is a bit of "Having your frozen yoghurt and eating it"

@@cjboyo Yeah, obliviously and without thinking of consequences

Word. You should come to the Good place discord and we can talk philosophy XD

Damn I just watched the show cause Kristen Bell is hot

They started to get into that at the end of last season, going to the accounting department and disputing how the point system works. I think we'll see more in the season to come!

@@UOweMe I'm quite excited to see how it all wraps up

I hope the ending of the show was enjoyable for you i had similar questions wondering how could the system be so hypocritical. I loved the ending and how they gave everyone the benefit of the doubt allowing them to retest over and over until everyone finally belonged in the good place. If there is an afterlife/creator of some sort I really hope this is the most accurate depiction of it.

Ajavisk totally agreed. It’s a real gem

explain

Yeah, explain. Also, not an almost robot.

and then created another of her own but inferior for reasons she cannot understand

Not Hermes Bouza, but there's a lot of good writing going on with the almost-robot: Janet is an embodiment of The Objective Lens, through which any quantitative question can be answered. But she's limited (as is that lens) to which questions she can answer. The show asks us, while considering meta-ethics, about which questions can't be answered objectively. E.g. "Why do I find this beautiful?" is a question Janet shouldn't be able to ask: she shouldn't carry a bias. And it's a question that people struggle with in rational objective terms. If what's beautiful to us cannot be explained in rational objectivism, then how we pursue beauty may not be visible through The Objective Lens. The Good Place is asking us to consider the limitations of quantitative analysis for the characters: Janet's memory is reset, and her memories with Jason are removed. Yet she's irrationally sad when Jason is set to marry Tahani. Michael and Janet can objectively correlate her glitches to that relationship, but there's no rational reason for this to happen -- unless only quantitative memories removed every wipe. Janet, with subjective memories and tastes, is now more human-like. And Janet's process is the same as the humans: Eleanor isn't behaving differently because she, pre-wipe, could recite Kierkegaard and Kant. It's because she learned to love Chidi, and what he loves.

You could also not be a dick and just say it and be helpful instead of essentially not saying anything at all.

Agreed, she killed it.

Just an FYI i binged before watching this(watched about 1min) and your video is on point.

and i was just re-visiting another video essay on The Good Place when the notification bell rang! wisecrack is the best.

plz

Need Jared back first my dude.

holy shit its out, thank you for reminding

bill nyen Calm does it just came out.

Miss read the comments as the the wise crack video came out but you all meant bojack I binged that as soon as it came out.I loved it

"What is 'ethical' even supposed to be in this case?" That question is the very concept of metaethics. It's not about how to be a good person, but rather it's about trying to decide what it would even mean to be a good person. There is a wide variety of answers and people will probably be arguing about it for as long as at least two people exist. "Following any moral philosophy and sticking with it regardless of how valid it is?" That's probably not what they were going for in the study. It's hard to believe anyone would take a metaethical theory like that seriously. "I wonder what the definition of moral actually was in the study cited in the video." All the important metaethical theories have much in common. Any theory that said it was good to steal or murder would be fairly rejected by almost everyone. You don't necessarily need to pick a favorite theory in order to determine whether people are behaving morally. The more difficult question is how they measured which people were behaving morally. People aren't usually open and honest about their immoral decisions.

But they can't measure how people behave ethically when the very concept of ethics is the unanswered question itself. You can teach someone any ethical theory but you can't say whether they act ethically because we haven't even established what "ethical" is in the first place. Let's say we teach someone utilitarianism and how to apply that to the trolley problem by sacrificing one person to save the larger group on the other track. Sacrificing one for the many is "ethical" in the utilitarian sense but also not in the deontological sense. Deontology (like the categorical imperative) might be the next ethical theory they learn. So if that same person were to go out and behave in whatever way, any of their actions could be justified by any ethical theory. So you can't really say whether they behaved more ethically or not after learning ethics because it hasn't been decided what constitutes an "ethical" action. Therefore if the philosopher conducting the survey were to say people didn't act more ethically after learning ethics it would either assume that one ethical theory is more "ethical" than the other, or that the the person was only taught one ethical theory and their actions were only considered "ethical" if they only acted according to that specific ethical theory. Either way the study is biased. Once again, I'm not talking about metaethics as a whole. I'm talking about the study that was cited and how its design may have some problems (only because the video didn't clarify).

@Jamyang Pelsang YES. THANK YOU!!!

Well this problem was actually confronted in the bad-place-museum-opening scene (S2E10), where Eleanor pokes holes in Chidi's adherence to Kant's strict prohibition of dishonesty by bringing up Johnathan Dancy's Moral Particularism which is the vehicle by which Chidi temporarily escapes the Kantian prison to which he sentenced himself to, and had been the foil to every convenient choice he had turned down up until then. It suggests that what is ethical is a fluid concept that takes into account the happiness and preferences of others, even demons, and by consequence the integrity of their joint plan to get through the bad place to reach the Judge.

The Good Place does not have a point system based on ethics of individual behaviour but rather results in a decision to introduce a system of reward for ethical behaviour which is actually the opposite. This makes the show bad for communist countries now. Sorry mate.

Munjee Syed damn! Now i wanna know too... Is Doug Forcett a real person? Or just a play on our feelings?

Did he predict the good place being the bad place

It would be pretty random if he was made up. I think he existed.

@@camdensparks524 Probably not. If we are to assume that Doug Forcett's predictions are real and not something that Michael just made up, he couldn't have predicted something that isn't a thing yet. Michael's good place switcheroo is first of its kind. And there's probably a million of good place neighborhood that is not secretly the bad place. If Forcett predicted it, Michael would be just copying Forcett's idea. When Michael was pitching the idea to other demons, there's no mention of Forcett. Could go either way tbh, there's plenty of ways to go around it coz there's not much to go on. But my bet is Forcett didn't predict it and switcheroo is solely Michael's idea.

@@casualpotato44 I'm worried for your health

Like China? Or the Orville?

my dude my main guy the indecisive love of my life

I was looking for this comment and was not disappointed. Thank you ;)

Yup, that is the only thing I think of when I hear "mouthfeel" now

Question: WTF is a mouthfeel? I can take a few guesses, but I would bank on missing the mark...

I might be a fool, but personally, my first exposure to the word "mouthfeel" was in a documentary about traditional Chinese cuisine, especially how it differs from what you might get from, say, a "Chinese take-out" restaurant here in the west. One of the things mentioned was that, in contrast to the west, where most of our interest is on the flavor and presentation of food, China traditionally has a larger focus on interesting "mouthfeel," basically referring to different textures, many of which are unpopular in the west. This was used an explanation for why more traditional Chinese cooking isn't as popular in the west, with what we do get being severely westernized. The documentary is on Netflix, I think it's the first episode of a Netflix Original series of food-based documentaries, but I forget the name. The quote, however, is about the difference between masculine and feminine penises.

DreamsDragon98 -First, TY. Well defined. Second, I definitely was off the mark...

Speaking of Good Omens, am I the only one who thinks that Crowley and Micheal would really get each other? The whole idea of “The Good Place”, is exactly Crowley’s style of evil.

@@megelizabeth9492 -- As soon as I realized that Michael's big idea was "hell is other people" the show never told another joke that made me laugh harder. I think the Crowley from Good Omens and the Crowley from Supernatural would BOTH get along great with Michael.

That would be fantastic

Go Team Venture!

C Trouble I mean they do a video for every freakin Rick and Morty episode.

You're half-right (which puts you way ahead of most.) Moral intuitionism is more than empathy, but moral intuitionism is impossible without empathy.

I'm not educated in philosophy but I think you're right. Maybe empathy with action, specifically action that helps. Not sure how unintended consequences get counted. Goodness me this is complex, I'll stick to science for now.

No, the Golden means is an intuitive theory and it doesn't require empathy, but empathy helps. However, in some cases, too much empathy can end up supporting and tolerating jerks who will take advantage of your empathy by taking power or trolling you, or you might just end up trying to help through others struggle even when they clearly don't need your help, or worst, they might be worst off by not confronting their struggles. Empathy has limits too

Brony Philosopher -Neato, good to know. Moral of the story? Everything and anything in an extreme is bad?

Technically moral intuitionism can actually be better without empathy, as empathy is restricted in many ways to a concern for the individual whereas grand acts of moral right may sacrifice the individual for the greater good. At the same time a restricted empathy can actually help you prioritize your actions to act morally to those you value more, and as a result decrease how empathetic you are in order to be a better person.

they really need to do Death Parade. It's so good.

That movie is already a mind f, I'm pretty sure Wisecrack's philosophical breakdown of it would turn my brain into a warm gelatinous puddle of goo

I love it when people frame comments like letters, it is so forking cute

thiago s bird up

That calls for some RANCHHHHHHH

Yes Eric Andre's philosophy would be wild!

I'll drink to that

Spoiler alert bruh

I'll bite , what does your ex have to do with this show ?