1) Ethics is a matter of establishing and then following the right set of rules. But "the right set of rules" can be neither established nor followed.
2) The "afterlife" is all about cruel and arbitrary judgment based on an unexplained set of rules from which judgment is final and permanent and cannot be appealed.
3) The only way to fix this wholly unjust arrangement is through a Platonic style of "reincarnation" which doesn't involve actual incarnation (too late for that) but does involve reliving one's life, but with all of one's memories intact (there's the Platonic elision) over and over and over until you "learn" to be good enough for "The Good Place." (You have eternity, what else are you gonna do with it?)
4) Which is all about materialism and the satisfying of your every material need (including intellectual, not just physical). Your spiritual needs? Solved by abnegation and dissolution; we'll get to that; because....
5) But even that "system" breaks down because eternity is boooorrriingg!, and the only solution is death.
6) However since everyone in "The Good Place" is already dead, the solution means "dissolving into the universe." At one point it's kind of compared to a wave (you are the wave) and the ocean. The wave crests on the shore, but the ocean is still there. Get it? Death without immortality is the only solution to the tedium of immortality, since they had to cut off the Platonic solution of achieving one's ultimate end by being in the presence of the "Good" forever (which is too close to the "God," where Christianity goes via neo-Platonism; and any movement away from the good is a move toward imperfection, which having reached perfection, the system cannot allow. So the "Good Place" is not perfection; only absolute negation is, beyond the reach of any system.)*
7) I suppose it is, in the end, some kind of Americanized milquetoast Buddhism, as comedy. Or maybe it's just comedy, and you can't take the premise all that seriously. Or maybe the problem is we are creatures of time and space and while we can imagine eternity and infinity, we can't really conceive them. We can't really conceive death, either, so when it finally comes for our four protagonists, it's actually a relief and a return to the "universe," rather than a negation and an abnegation and an elimination. And what we can't conceive we have to explain in metaphors. As metaphors go the wave/ocean one is not a bad metaphor; but it's not a good one, either. It's just sort of middling, a way of saying "Death is okay because it's not really death, except it is, but not really." Or something.
8) Well, it is a comedy, after all.
9) But what ethical system is based entirely upon rules and their strict adherence? Yes, the Hebrews/Jews are often portrayed, thanks to Christianity, as being obsessed with rules. Then again it was Christians demanding the Ten Commandments be put up in courtrooms and classrooms and other public spaces. Humans have always preached rules round and square; round and accommodating for me, square and restricting for you. But the laws of Moses were meant to provide a structure for nomads wandering the desert who wanted to settle down and get along with each other. They were laws, not ethical rules, even if some of them strike us as "spiritual" rather than "legal." Then again, we used to use laws to enforce morality (mixed-race marriages were considered immoral, as were same-sex marriages), so....
The prophets, however, saw the laws as ways to treat each other fairly. "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, seek mercy, and walk humbly with your God?" What are the rules for doing that? Or isn't that statement a challenge to rule-making, and a reference back to the essence of social order: "Do to others what you want done to you." Isn't that the fundamental ethic? Shouldn't we cleave ethics (how people behave, is all Aristotle meant; he was a describer, not a prescriber) from morality (which is pretty generally "How YOU should behave!"). Even Socrates just went around proving rules had to be broken.
10) The word "Justice" does appear in one of the final episodes of the "The Good Place," during a discussion of how to reorder the afterlife so it is more fair and less arbitrary. And for one brief, shining moment, it appears the chief ethicist (and worrywart) of the show will break free of the bottle he has flown into (to use Wittgenstein's metaphor). But no. What they establish is a system that keeps the rules but lets people learn and learn (very Platonic!) until they deserve "The Good Place," but then we get the "wave" metaphor and the implication is all the souls that earn the "Good Place" eventually give up on it (human life endlessly stretched out into a forever now is tedious beyond bearing) and, having finally "achieved" what they want to achieve, they move on.
11) Back to Plato, then (the Phaedo this time): we're all ghosts just waiting to finish the business we were meant to finish (a bit of a bad Christian gloss on Plato, that) and when we do, we truly die.
12) Which is neither funny nor satisfying, when you think about it.
13) But maybe the only lesson from the TV show is that we humans have an easy time imagining "infinity" and "eternity," but can't really conceptualize either one. And we really, really, REALLY like to tell other people what to do.
*if you're wondering, there is no "God" in "The Good Place." Just hapless bureaucrats following rules they can't change and which no longer work. So they bail out. Where they go is not explained, but who cares, really?
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