Day 3 - The Good Place
How will you be judged in the afterlife?
Last week, my sister finally convinced me to watch The Good Place, an HBO comedy about the afterlife. In this world, each action you take has an attached point value based on some unclear mix of consequences and intentions of the action. So, remembering your sister’s birthday is +15 points, but ruining the opera with a boorish attitude is -90 points. Then on your death, if your total points are over a threshold you enter the good place for your personalized heaven, but below that threshold, you are permanently tortured in a personalized hell.
The basic premise is a playfully horrible woman is mistaken for someone else and ends up in The Good Place. So she works with her soulmate, an ethics professor, to learn how to be a good person to fit in and avoid eternal damnation.
Besides some great comedy, the show fundamentally explores the ideas of what it means to be a good person. It implies a world where your actions on earth matter. This attracted me as I have spent much of my life caring deeply about being a good person.
In later seasons, the characters get another chance back on Earth, but they can’t know about the good place or their intentions will be corrupted invalidating their points. One character over drinks says, “the problem really with being a do gooder [is] no one cares”. The other character says that is believing in the concept of moral desserts, where you deserve a reward for good actions. Instead, he offers the internal reward of quieting the little voice in your head that knows you are doing bad things.
I literally came to the same conclusion a few years ago. A perhaps large part of my motivation to be a good person was to be liked and accepted by my peers and society. My understanding was it’s not just about being liked by a peer, but an imaginary ideal person with complete knowledge of your intentions. In other words, I conceptualized it as adhering to an omniscient judge of the cultural ideal which is very similar to the concept of listening to God.
But NO ONE CARES if you try to be a good person internally. Or rather the effort required far exceeds the social rewards. People judge much more how you make them feel and what you can do for them. Trying to actually do good instead of just following social customs is often an impediment to getting people to like you. One of the main reasons is it’s actually an impossible question.
The ethics professor from The Good Place is comedically indecisive because despite years of study the system by which you should weigh actions is as unclear as the unpredictable consequences of your actions. Properly judging an action like the accountants in The Good Place would require so much knowledge and understanding of actions it’s impossible to do in practice. The big Effective Altruist caliph Eliezer Yudkowsky has worked for over a decade preventing AI risk, but actually dramatically accelerated it.
Effective altruism probably correctly identifies longer-term risk as essential, but it felt like basing your life on the long-term consequences is such a high bar. Maybe we do not understand enough.
This is why EA-branded consequentialism can be so life-eroding and bring me sadness. In some ways, I am not strong enough to take a constant questioning of the value of my actions. I am pushing myself to instead take a more virtue ethics understanding of what it means to be a good person. It’s more about your interactions and relationships with other people instead of large questions about what is the best action to take for the world every day. Instead, it’s a valuing of how you handle the individual actions you are faced with. Local solutions to local problems instead of the larger harder questions. Hopefully, this will give me enough of a happiness base to build off of. But, unfortunately I probably won’t make it into The Good Place under their system, but I didn’t need dessert anyway.