Let me preface this that I had a hard time truly getting into The Good Place, a comedy series about Heaven and morality on Netflix. I felt the main character was too obviously a bad person and there wasn’t much to look forward to. I was wrong.
After finishing the first season and having entered the second season of The Good Place I thought about the four archetypes of bad people that are portrayed in the series. I expect someone has had the same realisations.
Eleanor is of course the most obvious one. She would have the capacity to do good but chooses not to. She’s selfish, inconsiderate, and very much aware of it.
Jason is arguably not as bad, since he doesn’t have the capacity to be a good person because he’s an idiot. He’s not equipped to make the good decisions, even if he wanted to. One begs to question can you really be a bad person if you don’t have the skills or smarts to do good?
Tahina is the one that shows going to The Good Place doesn’t rely on utilitarian ethics. She had the capacity to do good and she did good deeds, however, she did them for selfish reasons. Even though her deeds made the world a better place, her motivation was selfish, as was discussed in the series as well.
Chidi is possibly the most tragic one. He wanted to do good and had all the knowledge to do so but was crippled by his own anxieties. This proves The Good Place doesn’t operate on Kant’s philosophy either, that the mere want to do good is not enough. He had the capacity to do good, the motivation to do good but his actions – or more accurately, inactions – didn’t result in good.
Based on these observations, a person would have to possess the capacity to do good, the motivation to do good, and their decisions should result in good. The Good Place has to be filled with people who are reasonably capable, willing to do good, and fortunate enough that their actions resulted in good things.
This in turn means that The Bad Place is filled with people who are incompetent, stupid, pretentious, indecisive, and unlucky – along with those who are actually evil. What I find interesting is that you don’t have to be evil to end up in the Bad Place – you could’ve just lost the genetic lottery or be haunted by insecurities caused by your environment. Is it not then unnecessarily cruel to lump the people who choose to be bad with people who are down on their luck or lacking the right motivation in their good deeds?