What We Owe Each Other

We just finished a watch of The Good Place here in the Lau household.

For a comedy television show, The Good Place also offers a pretty fun (though brief) exploration of some key ideas in moral philosophy, perhaps one of the most prominent that runs through the breadth of the show (and plays a powerful role in its culmination) is the question, “What do we owe each other?”

As referenced in the show, the question of what we owe each other is also the title of a book by philosophy T.M. Scanlon, which one character in the show is introduced to and then completes before discovering that she has her own answer to the question that changes everything for her at the end.

Questioning what we owe each other is a powerful way to frame moral philosophy.

Through the main ethical frameworks discussed in Western philosophy (such as virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and utilitarianism), the question of how we ought to act really in many ways is trying to assess what we owe each other. How should we treat each other (as well as other beings and other things)? Even as young children in kindergarten we are asked to think about how others will feel about our actions, and we try to instill in young people a thoughtfulness about how they treat other individuals.

While The Good Place is just a comedy television show with a little tinge of moral philosophy, I also think it’s also a great way to introduce some people to more complex ideas in ethics without making them feel overwhelmed by the learning process. Mike Schu (creator of The Good Place) really tapped into something deeper in his show, perhaps especially as the current state of affairs in our world may just be enough to bring more people to the table of considering whether our current social and governmental structure are really doing well for the majority of people.

I probably won’t watch The Good Place again for a while (on to other books and television shows and such), but it was fun to revisit the world of moral philosophy thinking within the stories of the characters from the show. If you haven’t watched it, definitely do. And maybe even take up a book or two on moral philosophy afterward.