Description

By Leah Henrickson

Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms our Ethics by Juan Enriquez (2020) MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 304pp., $US25 (hardback) $US17 (paperback) ISBN: 9780262044424

In the American sitcom The Good Place (2016–20), a group of characters – all deceased – attempt to upgrade themselves from ‘the bad place’ to ‘the good place’. Among the group is a moral philosophy professor, Chidi Anagonye. Chidi offers lessons on ethics and quips about the need for ethical behaviour when the characters repeatedly make questionable decisions that satisfy their hedonistic tendencies. He is framed as a stick-in-the-ethical-mud, and is regularly reminded that ‘everyone hates moral philosophy professors’. By the show’s conclusion, however, it is attention to ethics that saves the characters from the bad place, and (spoiler alert!) everyone dies happily ever after.

page: 409-413
Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation
Volume 37, Issue 4
SKU: 370412