Looking back at T.M. Scanlon's "What We Owe To Each Other" & the TV show it influenced

(NEW YORK, NY) – T.M. Scanlon wrote What We Owe to Each Other over two decades, very much exemplifying the Contractualist ethics that he outlines in the aforementioned book, taking elements of great Social Contract theorists like Rousseau and deontological thinkers like Immanuel Kant, forming his own type of that which, he calls (as I do) “Contractualism.” A philosophy of moral ethics that is fundamentally grounded in the rules of social engagement and engagement with the outside world that we, as humans, decide with each other among small groups. 

Now, for the more cultured of us, The Good Place is where we might find this philosophy of ethics, personified by the lovable dork Chidi Anagonye. However for the uninformed, this comedy/drama which aired from 2016-2020 is in fact inextricably linked to T.M. Scanlon’s book, as people who worked on the show have directly stated (alongside other philosophical influences). We can see this in the show, where in the 3rd season Chidi is seen lecturing his students on the novel (after he is brought back to life) on the contents of this very book! 

For the seriously uninformed on this very clearly serious and important matter: The Good Place follows six protagonists fundamentally change who they are as individuals, after of course, dying and being sent to heaven (that is actually an experimental area of hell, designed to psychologically torture the 4 humans that inhabit it with their own guilt for their believed duties to each other and the ‘neighborhood’). But, through perseverance, and the unfortunately ill-thought out aspects of the Demon who runs the neighbourhood, they are able to not only become better people, they are able to get into the real “Good Place”, and even manage to change that for the better.

Scanlon’s book, when thought about in this unrealistic, but interesting, frame of thought allows us to understand the world around us better by understanding the simple question of what do we actually owe to one-another? That eternal struggle that the protagonists of The Good Place go through embodies what I believe all people struggle with: what if everything I'm doing is wrong, and none of it really matters. In the TV Show, none of it matters because a demon could reset you and make you lose a year’s worth of your memories. In real life, we often ask these questions when it seems that there is little hope left for our personal betterment. When we feel as though we have failed those we love or like, or worse, those we love or like have fundamentally failed us. 

The Contractualist school of thought, as best understood by my reading of Scanlon’s book, is not just about what we owe to society, and certainly not about the frame of thought that those aligned with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s school of thought that, “there is no such thing as society”, but rather, it’s about the fundamental questions that Plato and Socrates asked, what is virtuous? What is good? What is honorable? It takes those questions of millenia ago, and reframes it into its titular question, what do we owe to each other, and takes a long detour through the great and interesting philosophers of time, from Social Contract Theory and Utilitarianism, to various other schools of thought.

Though it uses some unfortunate ‘90s framing, like: some believe that sodomy should be illegal (how can we stop that), the question it asks proves that, at the very least, the writer is a fundamentally good person. Because it demonstrates something that even our current leaders fail to ask, what do we owe to all of the people that make up our existing societies? How can we even deign to believe that there is such a thing as a difference between, for example, an American and a Brit. Or, for a more historical example, a Birt and a Frenchman. These questions have not, nor will they ever, go away. But, in asking them continually, I believe that the collective good, and the universal good of all people are in some sense assuaged, as we often look at the past thinkers who asked it, and paraphrase them. To make this more timely, I will quote another long-dead man, Tony Benn “every generation has to do it for themselves again, there is no railway station called justice that if you catch the right train you get there, every generation has to fight for their rights.” Or in other words, we may not know what is just or what is right, but we do know to ask those questions, and fight for what we believe it to be.