Abstract

From beginning to end, the ethical vision of The Good Place is shaped by creator Mike Schur's reading of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other. The characters on The Good Place become better people not because they have figured out a system for getting along with each other. Rather, the moral journey of the characters on The Good Place changes them into fundamentally different people. Levinasian ethics focuses on the encounter with other people and the response to that encounter. For Emmanuel Levinas, the act of preserving an understanding of the world or self is always done at the expense of other people. Contrary to Scanlon, on The Good Place the responsibility for the other is not met in agreement or in respecting disagreement. It is met in the willingness to cede one's place to the other.