MovieChat Forums > The Good Place (2016) Discussion > Is a flawed person worthy of the same pu...

Is a flawed person worthy of the same punishment as an "evil" person?


I don't see any of the 4 leads as being "evil" people. Yes, they have flaws, but their flaws were very very common things. (I think any viewer could relate to their issues.) But did this mean they merit eternal punishment? I don't think so. Especially Chidi, whose did not intentionally hurt anyone.

And in the case of Eleanor, she did make a concerted effort to learn and transition. Shouldn't that count for anything? I think any one of the four could have improved their character and merited being in the real Good Place.

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Never say never...

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> I don't see any of the 4 leads as being "evil" people.

Correct. And, they were all punished about the same. And, it's kind of a stretch to say that they were tortured at all. They were continually presented with difficult decisions to make and then had to face the consequences of those decisions. That kind of sounds like what everyone does on Earth every day. That's hardly torture.

We never met any truly evil souls so we really don't know how they are treated in The Bad Place. We have nothing to compare it with to be able to say that Eleanor was treated the same as an evil person.

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What Would Jesus Do For A Klondike Bar (WWJDFAKB)?

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Evil is real and not real at the same time. Everybody is merely flawed. Evil is a judgement we make. But when you see real evil you know it.

Even Hitler believed he was doing the right thing, he was merely very wrong.

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Eleanor was pretty evil in life.

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It's a Binary system. Heaven or Hell.

They weren't "Evil", so to deserve to go to Hell, as you wrote
BUT
They weren't "Saints", and deserving to go to Heaven with so many actual saints, and martyrs and heroes who sacrificed their lives for others.

Somewhere you must draw a line and it's more like "You must Earn Paradise or you go to Hell".

As a human you may wonder why not a middle place for middle people. Or even better why not a Proportional system.

Unfortunately God thinks otherwise!




Cosmos hates Google.

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Dr_Sagan - You're right about it being a binary, but not entirely. There is no "sort of kind of" conditional at work. It's an absolute yes or no, and I'll explain the reasoning for it, but I'll start with a caveat. First I'm not trying to evangelize or anything, just trying to explain how the reasoning goes, for better or worse. Plus, since this kind of thing makes some people foam at the mouth, I'll cover it with spoiler tags, so no innocent eyes will be harmed in the process. Remember, ya ain't gotta read it, but I promise no one will be harmed if they do so.

First, the reasoning goes, God is all perfect and purely good, because if he weren't, he couldn't be God.

Mankind, by his very nature is not. No person can be all good, since everybody, at least once in his life, had had at least one bad thought.

An all purely good God cannot associate with something less than purely good, as doing so would mean God is no longer purely good. Think of it like this: imagine a swimming pool of absolutely pure water in it. There's nothing in it but H2O . Now assume that a single carbon atom fell into it. Even though it would imperceptible to the human eye, it would no longer be pure.

Therefore, it's irrelevent if someone is just flawed. A "just flawed" person would be no different than a truly evil person.

So they basic premise of the show doesn't hold water. That doesn't mean it's no good, it just means its fundamental plot point is flawed. But how many shows don't suffer from the same problems?


The issue of deciding between teleological and deontological ethic is also an interesting subject of discussion (the issue that the OP raised), but I won't bore people with it unless they just insist I do.

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I wonder if the real Dr. Sagan made it to the Good Place.

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I agree none of them are evil people. Just flawed (mind you Eleanor legitemently was pretty horrible before this snapped her out, and Jason was at best amoral).

But not good enough to get into the good place. Its possible this all works like in Dante's Inferno.

So the people who weren't good enough but aren't evil get the more minor tortures. I.e. in this case being trapped for eternity in situations that make them miserable and afraid.

And the truly evil people get flayed.

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People are never purely evil and they really aren't condemned in these systems for how much evil is *in* them. It's about evil acts and intentions.

So, Eleanor and the others can be not particularly bad and still end up in The Bad (or probably more likely The Medium) Place. What they were didn't get them condemned. The harm they did to others, or failed to prevent, is what did it.

The Historical Meow http://thesnowleopard.net

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Well I never said purely evil. I agree people are rarely pure evil, but there does get a point where you've done so much damage it gets hard to see you as not an evil person.

Still I see your point about the consequences and damage. Yeah I understand, I was just wondering if something even worse happens to the people who did much worse damage.

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So the people who weren't good enough but aren't evil get the more minor tortures. I.e. in this case being trapped for eternity in situations that make them miserable and afraid.
Yes, I like that theory a bit more. Of course, after a time they will get used to being together and stop torturing one another.

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Never say never...

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Michael says in the first episode (though, can we really take ANYTHING he says as true at this point?) that only a very teeny tiny percentage of people end up in The Good Place. And we're lead to believe that the sort of people who end up there are exceedingly good and have never caused harm or hurt to anyone. This would exclude Chidi who hurt everyone around him with his indecisiveness and Tahani who was passive aggressive and pretentious and a braggart. And this would also obviously exclude Eleanor and Jason who were outright evil.

Apparently intention doesn't count in Chidi's case, because though he never INTENDED to hurt anyone, he ended up hurting everyone around him. And they make it clear that, no, you cannot work your way out of The Bad Place by changing your ways: your points are accumulated during life and that's all that matters. Which is actually similar to real world religions as well. I've never heard of any Judaeo-Christian religion that allows you to "work your way up" out of hell. Even in Mormonism, which has not only a Good Place (the Celestial Kingdom) and a Bad Place (Outer Darkness) but many "Middle Places" (the Telestial Kingdom and the Terrestrial Kingdom), you cannot work your way up from one tier to the next all the way to Heaven. Whatever you've done during life is all that counts and you're stuck in whichever tier you made it into for eternity.

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I get the feeling that Hell is mostly Medium Places.

<*>

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Yes. But I don't believe anyone deserves to be punished. Whether flawed or evil people.Any God that would send someone to hell is an evil God. Any spiritual being that creates hell is evil.

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I agree with you. I think that "Hell" is entirely a human construct designed to fit into our own very very limited view of the universe. Any "loving" deity is not going to create an elaborate "Hell" designed to torture for eternity.

___________________________________
Never say never...

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