It was kind of a joke but also kind of not. The idea – which I admit may be a little far-fetched – is that The Good Place is a fictionalization of an idea from Kant’s so-called rational theology (his attempts to provide a basis in rational argument for certain religious principles). The idea in question is an argument for the immortality of the soul (or “noumenal subject,” in Kant-speak) based on the demandingness of the moral law and the fact of human imperfection. The argument basically goes like this: we all find ourselves with the call to be good (he considers this just a given), but also with a whole lot of selfish, hedonistic, or just contrarian impulses that make it very difficult to consistently heed that call. It is impossible for any human being to be completely good all the time. And even if you’re acting in accordance with the moral law, you might still be doing it from self-interested motives rather than the motive of duty, in which case the action still has no real moral worth. People can get morally better over time, but it would take an infinite amount of time to become completely morally good.

So, why does this prove that the soul is immortal and we therefore have the infinite amount of time we need to become morally good rather than that we’re all fucked? Well, he’s already argued that we’re practically justified in faith in God (this is not supposed to be a Descartes-style theoretical argument) because we can only be rationally motivated to pursue the aim of morality – which, Kant says, is the “highest good,” the apportionment of happiness in accordance with virtue (i.e., good people are happy, the best people are the happiest; bad people are unhappy, the worst people are the most miserable) – if we believe there is a possibility that it will be achieved. But given what we know about this crapsack world, we would only be justified in believing that the highest good is achievable if we believed there was an omnipotent, benevolent being who guaranteed its achievement, and that’s God. God has not decreed or commanded the moral law, because the moral law is supposed to be justified by rationality itself; but God is its guarantor, so to speak.

So, why does God not just apportion happiness after death to the level of virtue achieved during life? Put simply, because that would make God a real dick. And that’s kind of what we see in The Good Place: all of our heroes died young, before they had a chance to turn their lives around. But what we see in their afterlife is that they all have the capability to turn their lives around, given the right opportunity and motivation. So Kant’s idea is that after (well, the “after” is vague, because noumenal existence is outside of time… there are some parts of this argument where you have to squint) our embodied selves die, the rational subject lives on, interacting with other rational subjects in some way that I’m not completely clear on because none of them have bodies. But they become happier and happier as they become morally better. That, I submit, is what The Good Place dramatizes: continuing moral improvement after death, via interaction with other people who are also morally improving.

Does this mean that everyone ends up perfect and perfectly happy? Or, put differently, is Kant the pseudo-secular version of a universal salvationist? (There are some Christian theologians who believe that Jesus’s sacrifice saved literally everybody, even Hitler.) No, it does not. Kant thinks that everybody makes a fundamental choice either to try to be good or not to, and this choice is expressed over time in the direction that a life takes. It might seem a little implausible that Eleanor and Jason, especially, made a fundamental choice to try to be good, considering how they lived their earthly lives… but the fact that they’re susceptible to moral improvement after death means that they must have.