Warning: contains spoilers!



Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during the pitch meeting for The Good Place. Who’d have thought that ratings gold would be found in a sitcom about the afterlife, with regular references to Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Aristotle? It presumably helped to have comedy heavyweights Kristen Bell and Ted Danson attached and that it was created by Michael Schur, who has The Office, Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine on his credits.



And the original premise is solid: selfish and immoral Eleanor Shellstrop (Bell) dies and is sent to a non-denominationally pleasant Heaven by accident but becomes determined to become a good person in order to be worthy enough to stay. The writing is reliably hilarious and the ensemble cast have an exceptional chemistry. The show is also peppered with adorable quirks such as the characters being unable to swear in the Good Place, instead defaulting to curses such as “holy shirt!” and “motherforker!”



But moral philosophy is the beating heart of the program, and it has some of the best jokes that this one-time postgraduate in moral philosophy has ever heard.

So, what are the concepts that guarantee The Good Place will endure as both a brilliantly inventive comedy and a tiresomely obvious thesis topic for lazy undergrads?

Aristotelianism

Nobody likes moral philosophy professors. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images

Throughout the show Eleanor is helped by Michael (Danson) – the cosmic Good Place architect named, neatly, after both an Biblical archangel and the show’s creator – and her supposed soulmate, the endlessly anxious Senegalese philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper).



Chidi’s lessons to help Eleanor become a better person begin with the classics: Socrates, Plato and especially Aristotle.



Aristotle’s teachings formed the basis of modern philosophy, particularly in developing the practice of applying rules of logic as a method of arriving at the truth. But it helps that the exploration of his teleological musings are peppered with jokes like Eleanor’s dismissive, “Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?” to which the exasperated Chidi replies, “Plato!”



This, to be clear, is a very good but also accurate joke about Plato’s student.



Utilitarianism

This is the philosophy that everyone immediately latches on to at university, thinking “ah, this is the one that makes sense!” before having it all torn down for them. The basic idea is that a moral act is one that grants the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It seems smart and right, until you start getting into questions about unintended consequences and natural justice.



This is well illustrated by Philippa Foot’s Trolley Problem, in which a runaway tram is heading for a group of workers on the track who will all be killed, unless you throw a switch to send it on to a side track where it will kill only one person. So, which is better: letting a bunch of people die by accident and inaction, or actively murdering a completely uninvolved bystander?



It’s an enduring thought experiment, but in The Good Place, Michael figures that it’s better to experience it in a more hands-on manner – and thus puts Chidi at the controls of an actual trolley which actually crushes people, in face-splatteringly gory ways.



There’s also a sweet blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke name-checking utilitarianism’s greatest foundational theorist, Jeremy Bentham, as the trolley barrels past a movie theatre, the marquee of which displays its current showings of Strangers Under a Train and Bend it Like Bentham. This is a show that deeply respects puns.



Deontology

This is a show that deeply respects puns. Photograph: NBC/Getty Images

Deontological ethics is concerned with the morality of one’s actions, with the various schools of thought each seeking to establish sets of rules which, if obeyed, will produce ethical behaviour. These rules typically concern our duty to one another. Kant, so beloved by Chidi, was especially big on this.

The theory has obvious flaws, since there are massive question marks over what those rules should be and who gets to set them (even God was cool with asking Abraham to kill his own son, after all), but it does offer a sort of moral clarity if you don’t look too hard. It proves entirely unsatisfying for Chidi facing the Trolley Problem, but The Good Place isn’t above using these sorts of hard and fast rules elsewhere.



For example, the quiz Michael uses to assess whether someone is a good person or a bad person is filled with these sorts of rule-based questions – for instance, “Have you ever paid money to hear music performed by California funk rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers?”



Existentialism

This is a theory that seeks to establish a set of rules of behaviour for practical ethics, but takes as its starting point the individual as moral agent. It rejects the notion of some nebulous moral ideal, asking instead that the individual act with moral “authenticity”. Basically, it’s a philosophy tailor-made for teenage boys.



It gets plenty of play in the series, not simply because an entire episode is based around Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of total freedom coming only through having complete faith in oneself and life (although he phrased it more as being with God, what with the times and all), but also because Chidi reveals that he’s writing a Hamilton-style rap musical as a way of helping Michael understand ethical philosophy: “My name is Kierkegaard and my writing is impeccable! / Check out my teleological suspension of the ethical!”



But it goes even deeper than that: the entire first series, despite its many digressions into Chidi’s ethics tutorials, is revealed finally to be essentially an extended riff on Jean-Paul Sartre’s perky afterlife play No Exit, which famously concluded:



Garcin: So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture chambers, the fire and brimstone, the “burning marl”. Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is – other people!

Holy forking shirtballs indeed.

• The Good Place is showing now on Netflix in Australia, UK and the US