wherein i try to talk about a show and sort of go off rails

[sigmaleph]

The Good Place is a show that is clearly *about* philosophy in a way very little television is (or at least, television I've been exposed to). Which makes it all the more frustrating when the show is just... terrible. at analysing philosophical questions.

The comparison that comes to mind is that it's to philosophy what science fiction is to actual science, except, well... that's kind of awfully arrogant of me isn't it. I am not a scientist but I was a science student for a while. I typically have reason to be confident when I call out some bit of technobabble as making no sense whatsoever, and I have the backing of the scientific establishment behind me.

But like, me calling out Chidi for not being a consequentialist or whatever that nonsense was about free will vs determinism for not even mentioning compatibilism? Lots of real actual philosophers think consequentialism and compatibilism are wrong. I am not even an amateur philosophy student, just some girl who spends too much time on the internet, who the heck cares what I think

and yet compatibilism is the obviously correct answer to the philosophical question of determinism vs free will. like being 100% honest I'm not entertaining much reasonable doubt about this. I have the sense that I *should be* less confident that I've got this question right when clearly lots of very smart people spent longer than I've been alive thinking about this and came to different conclusions, but I'm not.

that sure sounds like it makes me arrogant, which is interesting because I tend to be a very epistemically anxious person (also an anxious person in general). why am i not on this, of all things?

anyway yeah don't watch The Good Place for philosophical instruction, and don't watch sci-fi to learn science.

Comments

[packbat]

*glances at the other comments*

I really enjoyed the college class I audited on the free will question, but I think this is one of those philosophy topics that highlights how much of the disagreements are intractable differences of intuition.

(...huh - "Free will" article on Wikipedia looks like a pretty solid overview, at least in the intro part.)

For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you? Sometimes in conversation with people whose conception of free will is profoundly different from my own, I will slide into a semi-compatibilist "we still have moral responsibility" position, but that's more "I'm often willing to speak someone else's language" than anything else. On my own, I compatibilism.

Popping back up to the attempted point about philosophy in fiction: I agree with you. A lot of people who tell stories are not students of philosophy, even on the level of "spends too much time on the Internet", and they tend towards obvious questions and obvious-to-them answers.

[packbat]

As far as feeling comfortable being certain about a controversial question, I think it's also worth considering what the impact of that philosophical position has. Your answers to questions like "does responsibility come from having made a choice?", "are you making a choice if you could not do otherwise?", and "is the universe deterministic?" - the questions I was taught about free will, modulo years of not thinking about it - have much less impact on other people than the question "do trans people actually exist?". (The Philosophy Tube video "Transphobia: An Analysis" does a good job of breaking that down.)

[sigmaleph]

hm, it's an interesting example. because of course "are trans people members of the gender they say they are, rather than the one they were assigned at birth?" is another question of which I am very sure of my answer (yes) yet it is fairly controversial one.

but a significant part of the disagreement there is not philosophical disagreement, and to the extent it is and you get into the question of 'what does it mean for someone to be one gender or another' i am substantially less confident of my answer.

(but it's not the philosophical questions behind that have the major ethical implications! it's the first question, the one I'm very certain of)

[packbat]

I think it's a little easier in the trans case to feel that confidence in your answer? I mean, far as I can tell, the evidence for denial of trans existence consists of "This makes me uncomfortable", "I never heard of this before", "I don't understand this", and excuses.

And yeah, the what-even-is-a-gender question is still up in the air, as far as I'm aware. We know there are people who tell us that they changed their gender - they were one gender before, they are another now - and we know there are people whose gender came years or decades before knowing that gender was real and having language for it, because they tell their stories too. We know there are trans people who hate some of the markers of their assigned gender - being "Sir"ed or "Ma'am"ed in public, visible facial hair or boobs, a low or a high voice, and so on - and trans people who rejoice in some of the markers of their present gender, but the former is definitely not universal and the latter might not be either. We know that trans children answer questions about themselves in ways that match cis children of the same gender. We know that cis children have to develop a gender identity themselves - none of us are born with a gender, as far as we can tell, we have to find out about gender and figure out who that means we are.