The Forking Trolley by James M. Russell

Author:James M. Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palazzo Editions
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

21st Century Dilemmas

The Deathbed Promise

Promises play an important role in The Good Place. Chidi feels obliged to keep his promise to help Eleanor from the start of the show. We know that he is assiduous at keeping promises: he even missed visiting his mother in hospital when she was having back surgery, because he had promised the nephew of his landlord he’d help him program his telephone. Michael says more than once that you just shouldn’t break promises. And Eleanor’s more mediocre side comes out when we see that, having promised to take brownies to a baby shower despite her aversion to them, she has been googling good excuses for missing it.

The question of why we should keep promises often comes up in ethics classes. A classic conundrum is the question of why we should keep a deathbed promise, especially if the consequences would be better if you don’t. Say you promise your dying grandmother that you will evict her daughter from the house because they have fallen out, when simple kindness dictates you shouldn’t go through with it. You aren’t hurting anyone by breaking the promise, so should you keep it?

I recently saw a different version of this conundrum on an Internet forum – the poster’s wife had died young from cancer, and when she was dying he had spontaneously promised never to remarry. Now, many years later, he was in love with someone, but feeling bound by his promise, even though it was creating a problem his wife probably wouldn’t have wished on him in the first place.

What do you think he should have done?

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