What The Good Place Teaches Us About Justice

The Good Place is a funny show, but it also teaches us some important lessons about justice. In this video, I take a look at how the show answers the question "What is justice?" and how that changed over the course of its four seasons.

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[MagicalGirlMarina]

"The point is, people improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don't?" - Michael

[SatireFire]

I just watched the finale! The ending is so satisfying. Thanks for the vid. Great analysis and editing :)

[katherinemorelle]

There really aren’t that many shows that are both funny and deep, rich with meaning and philosophy. That really teach people while they’re watching it. And hopefully the show itself will make people think a bit about what it is to be good, and to support restorative justice over retributive justice.

[hettyscetty]

While I know it isn't very realistic, justice systems around the world could learn a lot from this show. Justice isn't about locking someone up and throwing away the keys. It's about retribution for doing something wrong, it's about allowing someone the opportunity to do better. That's one of the reasons the ending of the good place is so satisfying because we've seen these characters grow and we know that they've done everything possible to give people the opportunity to do better and make it into the good place and we get to see them enjoy themselves and enjoy the outcome if their work. We all can learn from this show.

[professorariel]

I'd say the show even indicates the judge, demons and the other supernatural beings themselves have personalities and can get better. They're conscious beings with their own will and history just like us.
Also, I think the show is an example of how people can easily disagree and judge with any proposal of an afterlife and ask how's that moral, but can't when the same thing is said about their religion, and their idea of Heaven, Hell, Samsara, Hades, etc.

[rosadiamonds]

I've been binging the show for a third time by now. It's such a fucking good show and I'm literally recommending it to everyone I talk to

[pythonjava]

Hands down one of the best shows of the decade!

[pythonjava]

Paradise for the few and hell for the many sounds a lot like earth

[RDisGD]

My one problem with the show is that it fails to adress the point it raises in season 3: That life on earth is "too complicated" for anyone to actually be a good person. Every actioin has unintended consequences, and so even an act of kindness like buying flowers for your mother has a negative impact on the world. With this point established, personal improvement isn't sufficient anymore: canonically noone in hundreds of years was good enough to make it into the good place. It all but stated outright that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
And the solution offered by the show is hardly one we can adapt for us. We cannot simply restart society to get rid of the unintended consequences. Instead we have to change existing society by actually adressing issues of systemic discrimination. If we simply adopt a model of restorative justice, the unintended consequences (wich really are consequences of systems of discriination) wouldn't automatically be rectified. By outsourcing it's solution to the afterlife, imo the show ignores the conditions that by its own admission constitute the problem in the first place. This isn't to say that the show is wrong in what it proposes, but rather that it is incomplete.


Still love this show though. Rarely do you see a show utilise it's concept so well to make a point, have amazing characters and also ends before it starts to drag on. It has been a while since a piece of media resonated so much with me, in the final episode I cried tears of joy and sadness at the same time.

[julie]

enjoying your videos on this fantastic show!! it quickly became one of my favourites of all time and the finale really cemented that

[mehlover]

Loved this show and your essay! I'm hoping these two will encourage people to consider more of restorative justice system

[BSR-zyso]

As much as I liked the show, I feel like the solution they came up with still had some flaws. In particular, it felt like the moral system used to measure the progress of the humans was very subjective, as I would argue that any moral system is. I could reasonably argue that many of the actions that the system deemed “bad” were actually good from a different ethical lens, and vice-versa. Forcing individuals to eternally participate in a test until they adopt your morality seems immoral to me and is akin to brainwashing.

If I were designing the system, I would have included an option to live in an Earth-like plane minus the mandatory death and with the Euthanasia option designed for the good place if they decided against being tested. Also, I would be more interested in seeing people develop their own moral philosophies, rather than forcing my own on someone. I would have testing participants reason out their own moral philosophy before the test and judge them based on how closely they followed their moral precepts. At the end of the test, they could alter their philosophies based on nuances that they may not have considered before. In which case, they would be tested again based on their new moral system. They would be permitted to decline testing at any time and return to the earth-plane once an individual test was completed. If the person found a moral code that they were able to live by and be treated in accordance with, then they could go to their own heaven plane and create biological copies of loved ones. They could even enter another’s heaven plane with permission. Their world would be governed by their morals, but they could go through testing at any time to create new moral systems or even return to the earth plane.

I know it’s not perfect, but I feel that it’s a better system than the show ended on. This system wouldn’t dogmatically assert a universal “good” and “bad, ” which I think oversimplifies morality as a whole. Also, it would give each individual the greatest amount of autonomy possible.

[KarolMarcjan]

I've finished the show so I could watch this without spoilers.

So here's one for the algorithm.

[Hou]

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.” - Bryan Stevenson

[moonstarstories]

1:21 What if I'm curious what blowing my nose like that sounds?

[MeryRodVar]

I wish you could make a video essay about anne with an e feminism (or any other topic about the show). Your video essays are amazing.

[Luna_Christine]

Great show on the Philosophy of Morality

[moonstarstories]

Justice is actually a topic in my tutoring class! It's pretty interesting to see it here.

P.S When you mentioned William Shakespeare, I thought of that what humans consider a good person may be different.

[UshioKiss]

Excellent break down. thank you for the video!

[epicmonkey]

This would be my afterlife system when you die before you get to go to a good place you experience any unjustified emotional or physical suffering that you've caused to others and you experience their emotional pain for as long as they have had to live with it and any physical pain as well so if it take somebody 12 years to get over a violent burglary that's how long is that person who caused the pain would experience it for and that's just one person there's a whole list of people who's pain that some people would have to experience it might even take them decades to reach the good place it really depends on the person and the life they lived