Warning: Spoilers for The Good Place Season 1-3. Seriously, you do not want this show spoiled.

Imagine the following scenario: you are crossing the street, and you see a car racing toward the intersection. You hear a high-pitched screech as the world slows down around you. Suddenly, everything fades to black.
You jolt awake, look around, and realize that you are in a waiting room. You pick up the pamphlet lying next to you. You examine this tacky brochure and read the golden text: “Welcome to the Afterlife! Glad you could join us. Your judgement awaits soon.” You breathe a sigh of relief — It turns out that death was not the end! Unfortunately, what used to be your existential dread concerning oblivion gradually morphs into a newfound anxiety. Which religion was correct? What afterlife is this?
A short man with broad shoulders opens the door and leads you into a courtroom embroidered with golden statues. A trial is in the middle of its proceeding.

“Order in the court!” The judge shouts with a righteous indignation as he pounds his gavel, “we are gathered here today to determine the eternal fate of Mr. John Fredrickson. In his life, Mr. Fredrickson killed a man in a fit of passionate anger. Luckily for Mr. Fredrickson, we have a copy of his emotional life following this event. As you all know, we judge evil not only on the outcome of a person’s actions, but also on their emotional responses to said actions. Fortunately for Mr. Fredrickson, he exhibited tremendous guilt in his lifetime. In fact, guilt consumed his emotional life and informed all his decisions following this regrettable event. Because Mr. Fredrickson lived with immense guilt, he cannot be considered evil.” The judge pounds his gavel once more and Mr. Fredrickson disappears.

The same short man escorts you up to the judge. Your anxiety subsides – surely your actions do not compare to murder. You lived what you consider was a quietly uneventful life: yoga in the park, your daily Starbucks cold brew, all punctuated by your life’s soundtrack blaring through the latest model of AirPods. The judge looks at your report before furiously shaking his head, “Your emotional history paints a dire picture. The lack of guilt in your emotional life illustrates the banality of evil. You have lived under a willful ignorance – your spending, consumption, and lifestyle has led to ecological crisis, human trafficking, and the suffering of children and animals. Your lack of guilt in your life proves that you are guilty in this afterlife.” The judge pounds his gavel one last time, and you plunge into a flaming pit. You hear screams as you descend into your new eternal torment.

If this sounds like a bizarre conception of postmortem judgement, then you might question the implications of Robert Solomon’s view on evil and guilt. Solomon defines evil through our emotional responses. Although Solomon’s view is intuitive in cases of explicit evils, I will argue that his understanding does not account for how we typically experience evil. Indeed, most of us confront evil within the quiet and continuous hum of our consumerist lifestyles rather than within the newsworthy and disconnected moments of mass shootings and genocide. In an effort to avoid implications that we must be perpetually guilty, I will argue that we should disconnect our understanding of evil from our emotional lives.

If my opening story sounds familiar, then you might have seen NBC’s The Good Place. This comedy explores the implications of our actions in a globalized society – our 21st century consumerist lifestyles can have far reaching unintended consequences. The Good Place puts a mirror in front of our contemporary culture and asks us to reconsider our seemingly innocent actions. Even if we are not murderers, our complicity in a capitalist system may imply we are just as evil. Although we may not feel perpetual guilt, our actions may indicate we are culpable in widespread, systematic cruelty. More importantly, our willful ignorance may reveal an even more disturbing implication: we partake in a collective psychopathy which rejects guilt in the face of evil.

Before I return to questions raised by The Good Place, I will first explore this connection between guilt and evil. In True to Our Feelings, Robert Solomon defines guilt as a “social emotion … [having] to do with violating authority and breaking the rules” (97). In this way, Solomon understands guilt as our emotional reaction to blameworthiness. When we experience guilt, we become aware that we have done something wrong. Indeed, the warrant for guilt relies on contentious assumptions posited by various moral theories. However, for the purpose of this blog, I will define the warrant for guilt within our ordinary moral intuitions. When we perform an action which breaks a moral code or norm, we ought to feel guilty.
Within his discussion of guilt, Solomon briefly explores the notion that “we are all guilty … but we just do not realize it” (97). Our actions have consequences, and we can unknowingly perpetuate evil and suffering. Even if we do not recognize our harm, it does not remove the warrant for guilt. If we ought to feel guilty when we knowingly cause harm, then we should also feel guilty when we are ignorant of the harmful impact of our actions. While this claim is certainly controversial, I will not give an argument for this position. Instead, I will focus on the implications of this view. Solomon acknowledges that the “cruel irony is that the more self-consciously and righteously we live our lives … the more guilt we are prone to feel” (98). Presumably, the more we become aware of our complicity in this exploitative globalized economy, the more guilt we will experience.

[Warning: Major Spoilers for The Good Place Season 3]

In Season 3 of The Good Place, Chidi, Eleanor, Tahani, and Jason become aware of their own culpability in economic exploitation. After theorizing that everyone goes to the Bad Place because of unjust accounting errors, the characters discover the truth — it is impossible to make it into the Good Place in a post-globalized world. Every action has unintended consequences – our participation in the economy implicitly condones the slavery, human rights abuses, and exploitation that underlies the institutional framework of capitalism. Although the characters are ignorant of their transgressions, the warrant for their guilt remains. In this way, Camus was correct – all the characters in The Good Place are guilty. They must now pay the penalty for their indirect participation in evil.

Although Solomon does not explicitly provide a solution for the problem of unintended consequences, his understanding of guilt has implications for how we ought to mitigate evil. Solomon understands evil within his emotion-related commitments (98). Traditionally, philosophers position evil within a deontological or consequentialist conception of harm. For Solomon, this understanding of evil is unproductive – instead, we must locate evil at least partially within our emotional lives. Solomon accomplishes this task by conceiving of evil as a lack of guilt or remorse (99). When we feel guilty for a morally wrong action, we “partially redeem or at least [lesson] the blame” (99). If we return to the opening example, we can understand the justification for the judge’s verdict of the murderer. Even though Mr. Frederickson is a murderer, his overwhelming guilt mitigates his evil. Conversely, if Mr. Frederickson had not felt guilt, Solomon would ascribe full blameworthiness to his evil actions. Although this position makes sense for cases of murder, Solomon does not expand on the implications for instances of unintended consequences.

Presumably, Solomon’s solution to mitigate our participation in structural evils is related to our emotional guilt. Solomon affirms the notion that “evil doesn’t require scheming and plotting about how to hurt people … it may involve no more than self-interested oblivion, an unwillingness to acknowledge … [the] disastrous consequences of one’s actions” (99). Although Solomon does not explicitly state it, his understanding of evil includes the unintended consequences of global consumerism. If we are to lessen the blame of our actions, then we must feel guilty. Capitalism has made us culpable in countless evils like climate change, human trafficking, and exploitation. Unfortunately, few people live with such a guilt – most of us have some knowledge of our complicity, yet we do not let it consume our emotional lives. Thus, if we are to accept Solomon’s view, then we must feel guilty for the unintended evils of our consumerist lifestyles. Since we participate daily in this system, we may need to feel a perpetual guilt to mitigate this perpetual evil.

Unfortunately, Solomon’s view has dire implications for our lives. Although guilt surely spurs change and character growth, a life of perpetual guilt does not seem conducive to our notions of wellbeing and the good life. Surely, We do not need to consume our emotional lives with constant guilt in order to change our behavior and mitigate our complicity in evil. In this way, Solomon’s view is intuitive when we consider explicit instances of evil – however, we must develop different strategies for mitigating the evil in our everyday lives. Perhaps, we should not define evil within our emotional lives, but instead in our behavioral responses, or lack thereof, to overt or complicit wrongdoing. Indeed, this might follow a similar structure to religious conceptions of penance – we can mitigate our own evil by reforming our behaviors and working toward the restoration of our harmful actions. For example, if we consider our culpability in the climate crisis, individual penance may require us to recycle, use less water, and become vegan. Certainly, some level of individual guilt is helpful to reform our behavior – however, this guilt is neither necessary nor sufficient to mitigate this evil.

As the final season of The Good Place airs this fall, we will finally get the show’s solution to the problem of unintended consequences. If I was to predict the show’s conclusion, I would wager that the writers will land closer to my model than to Solomon’s. While our emotional lives are an important part of our character growth, we cannot root evil within emotion. It would appear odd if the show’s writers land on this emotional conception of evil – it would imply that the solution into the true Good Place involves primarily an emotional reform rather than a transformation of character. Certainly, a lack of guilt reveals much about our emotional priorities, but we can nonetheless still mitigate our evil by distancing ourselves from the institutions perpetrating wrongdoing and working toward personal character growth. Thus, although we — like the characters in The Good Place — are all guilty, we must respond to our evil not by fixating on emotional guilt, but instead by emphasizing practical strategies for behavior correction and character improvement. In the spirit of Eleanor, we constantly and unconsciously engage in forked up shirt, but hopefully, our guilty actions will not condemn us to a perpetual life of guilt. Certainly, that life sounds like the worst possible Bad Place.

Works Cited
Solomon, Robert C. True to Our Feelings What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Shared by: Dylan Brown
Image Credit: https://thegoodplace.fandom.com/wiki/The_Good_Place_Wikia