Many TV critics have acknowledged the show’s unconventional embrace of ethics.

But
few have delved into what makes The Good Place’s depiction of the discipline so
refreshing, yet effective, as both comedy and an informal educational tool. As a
bioethicist who teaches a class on ethics and pop culture at Fordham University,
I’ve integrated clips from the series into my lectures for a few reasons. While
other shows have discussed moral principles, The Good Place stands out for
dramatizing actual ethics classes onscreen, without watering down the concepts
being described, and while still managing to be entertaining. By spending multiple
episodes building on the subject, the sitcom offers a thoughtful and humorous
survey of a wide range of concepts that rarely get explored before a mainstream
audience.
Most episodes in Season 1 feature, at some point, Chidi rolling out a chalkboard.
He breaks down complex ethical frameworks for Eleanor, gives her reading
assignments about Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative and Thomas Scanlon’s book
on contractualism, What We Owe to Each Other, and encourages her to take the needs
of others, instead of just her own, into account. Fortunately, the show has only
grown more confident in Season 2. After the twist in the Season 1 finale—where
Eleanor and Chidi find out they’re actually in a version of The Bad Place cleverly
designed by the celestial architect, Michael (Ted Danson)—it seemed like the ethics
lessons might wane, if not stop altogether.
In fact, the opposite happened, and Chidi finds himself with a new student:
Michael, the immortal demon whose goal is to find creative ways to torture “bad”
souls, but who claims he now wants to help his victims get into the real Good
Place. The newest episode, which aired Thursday, may be the most revealing example
yet of how The Good Place keeps deepening the way ethics gets portrayed in pop
culture. Despite its emphasis on morality, The Good Place waited until its second
year to even address the most famous, and perhaps overused, thought experiment in
the field: the trolley problem.
You don’t have to be an ethicist to have heard of the following hypothetical
conundrum: You’re riding a trolley that’s barreling toward five people on the
tracks. Doing nothing will result in their deaths. Alternatively, you could pull a
lever, diverting the vehicle to another set of tracks, killing one person instead
of five. What do you do? As Lauren Cassani Davis wrote for The Atlantic in 2015,
“Puzzling, ridiculous, and oddly irresistible, this imaginary scenario has
profoundly shaped our understanding of right and wrong” over the last 40 years.

It’s no surprise the trolley problem has become a fixture in ethics intro classes.
The experiment helps newcomers to the field examine two important ethical theories:
utilitarianism (taking the action that results in the greatest amount of good for
the largest number of people) and deontology (trying to do as much good as
possible, though the actions you take to get there matter more than the actual
results). But the trolley problem and its spinoffs work on a more intuitive level;
they don’t require you to dig into more abstract concepts like what it actually
means to do the “most good” or weighing “intrinsic versus instrumental” value.

Netflix is particularly fond of the trolley experiment, which was featured in the
most recent seasons of two of its original shows this past summer. In the
penultimate episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s third season, the protagonist
Kimmy takes a college philosophy class, learns about the trolley problem, and
becomes obsessed with utilitarianism. Similarly, in a Season 5 episode of Orange Is
the New Black—not so subtly titled “Tied to the Tracks”—a character uses the
trolley problem to explain the “classic deontological dilemma” of whether to
sacrifice one woman for the greater good.

The episode allows the experiment to surface in multiple forms; there is, it
suggests, no single correct answer.

Where other shows’ direct discussion of ethics might begin and end with the trolley
problem, The Good Place notably refrained from using t
his pedagogical crutch for the entire first season. After the finale aired, Maureen
Ryan at Variety suggested that the show’s first 13 epis

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dilemma has become virtually synonymous with ethics as a whole.