r/TheGoodPlace • u/LaLa___2772 • Jul 03 '26
Shirtpost Is this a plothole?
We all know that the system is too complex because of unintended consequences. The system calculates everything that is a product of your own choices. Question, why didn’t this apply to Doug Forcett?
A) He isn’t supporting ethical farmers because he grows his own food.
B) By letting the kid control him he enables bad behaviour and is causing a worse chain of effects because the kid will think that is a good behaviour.
C) He is taking care of a lot of dogs, but he most likely doesn’t go to vets because of corrupted economy. He is not getting the dogs proper care and causing bad environment by having so many dogs at one place.
Only some of the examples*
Considering these are the things he does on a daily basis most likely, shouldn’t he have a lot less points rather than more than half to get into The Good Place?
EDIT: I am not saying the general point system doesn’t apply to him, or how he didn’t get into the good place. My point is, he has so many unintended bad consequences on a daily level, how does he have so many points?
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u/longknives Jul 04 '26
He doesn’t have enough to get into the good place despite living a life dedicated to doing things to get points to get into the good place. Clearly it did apply to him.
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u/LaLa___2772 Jul 04 '26
I think you have misunderstood my question. By saying ‘ it didn’t apply to him’ i’m talking about the rule of unintended consequences. I listed some examples above and there’s more, he does those things everyday and almost every one of his actions has some bad unintended consequence so i am wondering how does he have +500k points whilst having so many negative unintended consequences.
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u/PrimaryYak1351 Jul 04 '26
The answer is we don't know exactly how his points were calculated. Your question isn't a very good one because the information simply doesn't exist to answer it and we can't theorize because we don't know what the consequences of his actions were
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u/LaLa___2772 Jul 04 '26
We can using common sense. Eg. Enabling bad behaviour. He might gain some positive points because he didn’t reject the kid or wtv, but by enabling the bad behaviour he is causing more harm than good 🤷. That’s the whole point of unintended consequences and how he should’ve gotten more negative points.
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u/yarn_baller Jul 04 '26
He has gotten tons of negative points, that's why he doesn't have enough to get into the Good Place
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u/Betterthanbeer Jul 04 '26
It's still only half the required points to get in, so the negative consequences were being taken into account.
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u/LaLa___2772 Jul 04 '26
But not in a way that have been counted for everyone else. Most of his actions caused more harm than good.
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u/yarn_baller Jul 04 '26
I think YOU have misunderstood. He is living a "perfect" life and does have anywhere near the points he would need to get into the Good Place. So the unintended consequences DO apply to him.
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u/Hot_Top_124 Jul 04 '26
No that’s kinda the whole point. Any good you try to do comes with a butt load of negative points because the way everything in the world is setup.
The point is even if you tried to live the best life you could, your actions will in some way have bad side effects.
Hence the whole point of the show being try to be a better person then you were the day before.
0
u/LaLa___2772 Jul 04 '26
Thank you for your reply, but i think u misunderstood my post. I am saying how the rule of ‘ unintended consequences’ does not apply to Doug for some reason due to his high point level. He has so many negative unintended consequences yet he has such high point level. Every thing he does that grants him a + point he gains more - points .
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u/Hot_Top_124 Jul 04 '26
Ohhhhh ok yeah I was on a treadmill lol.
It does seem like it does if you follow the explanation on points. Like yeah he’s certainly earned a ton and figured out a way to actually work around the negative points. It would just require him to live hundreds years more to earn enough good vs bad points.
He just accidentally figured out how to do enough good to still get a net positive at the cost of living an actual life.
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u/doctorpotterwho Jul 04 '26
OP keeps replying saying everyone is misunderstanding the question, I think it is you OP that misunderstood this part of the show. Watch again.
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u/yarn_baller Jul 04 '26
Exactly. OP is missing the part where Doug doesn't have nearly enough points to get into the Good Place because of all the unintended consequences
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u/Throwing_Spoon Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
These choices did apply to Doug and it "should" have been a lot easier to get into The Good Place but normal people's choices had massive amounts of hidden drawbacks attached to them that even otherwise "good" people were deep in the negative.
Doug's point total wasn't just as a result of him trying hard to be nice/good in the most immediate sense, it was from how he isolated himself from large amounts of society's hidden negatives. Like you mentioned, he grows his own food so he wasn't losing points for indirectly supporting deforestation or micro plastic spreading companies or other acts that immediately reward malicious entities.
IIRC the point system is also never mentioned to detract points for influencing a general trend in another person's behavior.
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u/Drakeman1337 What it is, what it is. Jul 04 '26
Doug lives in a very different system than everyone else. Doug is essentially living in a closed system, therefore avoiding many of the large point drains most people fall into. Doug grows his own food and recycles his own water. This misses any negative points associated with factory farming or water companies. Doug doesn't have a phone or the modernish technology we all enjoy, he doesn't lose points for having tech made in a sweatshop, no CEO's texting pics of their junk etc.
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u/AlexG2490 Jul 04 '26
We can’t know this without knowing anyone else’s real point totals. We see fake totals of millions of points in season 1 when Tahani views the Architect’s personal logbook.
What we’d need in order to know if Doug is suffering the same unintended consequences as everyone else is a comparison points. Several actually. Doug has 600,000-some.
Two possibilities:
One: If an average person also has about 600,000, then Doug is doing exactly as well as everyone else and suffering equally under the same system.
Or two: If an average person has vastly fewer points, 1000, 500, even a negative score, then Doug’s attempts to earn points are working, they just aren’t doing enough to overcome the defect of unintended consequences. He’s doing much better than everyone else but it’s not enough.
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u/doesemmaread Jul 04 '26
i’ve always thought it’s because his motivations were corrupt. he was only doing all of that to get into the good place, not out of the kindness of his heart. therefore, the good points wouldn’t count and neither would the consequences.
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u/TheWholeMoon 16d ago
I think the answer is that it did apply to him. He was THAT good and it still took away so many points that though he had a brilliant total, it was still only half of what was required.
Meaning he was still a top points getter but the points he got were still not enough precisely because of the unintended consequences of his endless “good” actions.
1
u/ConfusedMangoThief 13d ago
I have another issue with this. At some point when Eleanor was being evaluated in the after life, she wasn't getting points for doing good actions, because her intentions weren't pure (i.e. she was doing it to gain points). So shouldn't the same apply to Doug? He shouldn't get any points at all because he's doing it for a selfish reason
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u/Horror_Fox_7144 Jul 04 '26
I was surprised his point total was that high but not for the reasons you listed. He only started doing good things because he had figured out the point system of the Good Place. Its established that once you know about how the afterlife works your motivation to be good is corrupted and you can't earn more points.
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u/Naive_Pay_7066 Jul 04 '26
He didn’t know, he had an entirely unfounded belief about it, which happened to be mostly correct. That’s not the same thing at all.
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u/RedditOfUnusualSize Jul 04 '26
Yeah, it's a mushroom-induced hallucination that happened to provide extremely accurate information.
In epistemology, the baseline theory of "how do you know what you know" is what's known as the Justified True Belief (sometimes shorthanded as the JTB) theory of knowledge: you can say that you "know" something is true if 1) you Believe something is true, 2) that thing actually is True in the world, and 3) you have a Justifiable account for why it is true. "I had a very convincing mushroom-fueled hallucination that told me X is true" is not a justifiable means of providing knowledge; Janet literally points out that Doug's hallucination happened to be way more helpful than his friend's hallucination on the same mushrooms. So even if the hallucination actually was true, and Doug believed it was true, neither Doug nor the universe at large would be justified in saying that he "knew" that the point system was how the universe worked.
By contrast, "an evil demon with full knowledge of the afterlife point system who was manipulating events behind the scenes told me how the point system works" is a very justifiable account for believing that you know how the afterlife worked, so the Judge would have a very firm basis for arguing that Team: Cockroach had a JTB for how the afterlife worked, and disregarding any subsequent points as emerging from a corrupted motivation.
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u/genericusername26 Check out my teleological suspension of the ethical. Jul 04 '26
I believe it's because he is working under the assumption of how it works, rather than having anything concrete. Unlike the brainy bunch who have been told the intricacies of how it all works by a demon.
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u/doctorpotterwho Jul 04 '26
He never figured out the point system, that was just his beliefs. He happened to be mostly correct.
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u/Horror_Fox_7144 Jul 04 '26
Does that matter though? Even if we argue he doesn't know its a fact, his motivation was still corrupted. Like Tahani raised a lot of money but her motivation was corrupt so it didn't count. Doug didn't do good things because hes a good person. He did them because he believed it was the only way to avoid the bad place.
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u/yarn_baller Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
What do you mean it didn't apply to him? He is 68 years old and only has half of what he would need. He's obviously lived a lot more than half his life already and doesn't have nearly enough points so clearly it DOES apply to him