A Girl From Arizona
How The Good Place's Eleanor Shellstrop demonstrates that praxis, and ethical leadership, develops through repeated, imperfect effort.
I didn’t really expect that this newsletter and my focus on praxis was going to allow me to gush about one of my favorite shows of all time, The Good Place, but boy am I glad I found the intersection of these two passions. I’ve been using fictional characters exemplars of praxis, and at first glance its not obvious that The Good Place’s central figure, Eleanor Shellstrop, is much of a roll model. While Atticus Finch represents praxis in its fully realized form (moral deliberation and virtuous action already aligned), Eleanor, a self-professed “Arizona trash-bag,” shows us something equally important: praxis as it actually develops. Messy, recursive, resistant, and real.
Most of us aren’t Atticus Finch. Most of us are Eleanor: starting from somewhere less than virtuous, uncertain whether we even can change, suspicious that moral growth might be reserved for people who were already halfway decent to begin with. Eleanor’s journey in The Good Place demonstrates that praxis (the integrated practice of belief, reflection, and ethical action) is not an inheritance or a talent. It’s a capacity we develop through repeated, imperfect effort.
And crucially, The Good Place knows it’s doing philosophy. This isn’t a show where we impose philosophical categories onto characters who happen to stumble into moral questions. This is a show about moral philosophy, featuring an actual ethics professor as a main character, that takes seriously the question: can anyone learn to be good?
Eleanor’s answer, hard-won over four seasons, is yes. But not easily, and not all at one time or just once. What makes her journey particularly relevant for leadership is that she eventually becomes someone trusted to guide others through their own transformations: not because she became perfect, but because she practiced. The capacity to lead ethically develops the same way: through repeated, reflective effort.
Spoiler Warning: This article contains significant spoilers for all four seasons of The Good Place. If you haven’t finished the series and want to experience its surprises firsthand, consider bookmarking this and coming back later.
Trust me, its worth it.
Everything Is Fine
When Eleanor Shellstrop dies and wakes up in what she’s told is “The Good Place” (a pastel afterlife for the morally exemplary), she knows immediately something is wrong. She doesn’t belong here. Her life was defined by selfishness, manipulation, and a studied indifference to anyone else’s wellbeing. As she’ll later admit, she once saw someone drop a tray of spaghetti and said “ha ha” out loud.
The Eleanor we meet operates entirely through poiesis: production without principle, action aimed solely at outcomes. She’s clever, certainly. She sold fake medicine to the elderly, she cut in every line, she maximized her own comfort at every turn. But there’s no reflection underlying these choices, no examined principles, no consideration of who she’s becoming through what she does.
When faced with exposure, Eleanor’s first instinct is to double down on poiesis. She doesn’t try to become good: she tries to appear good. She’ll mimic virtue just convincingly enough to avoid detection. It’s output management, not transformation.
This is where Chidi Anagonye enters: her assigned soulmate, an ethics professor, and her extremely reluctant teacher. Chidi agrees to help Eleanor learn moral philosophy, and initially, Eleanor treats it like any other system to game. Learn the right vocabulary, perform the right behaviors, pass the test.
But Chidi is teaching philosophy, not behavior modification. He’s asking her to reflect, to consider principles, to examine not just what she does but why. And slowly (more slowly than Eleanor would like) something begins to shift.
She starts asking different questions. Not “what do I need to do to stay here?” but “why did I become the person I was?” Not “how do I fake goodness?” but “what does it actually mean to be good?”
Although there is a greater twist to come, the climax of Eleanor’s situation in Season 1 hits in Episode 7, “The Eternal Shriek”
Eleanor:
Michael... the problem in the neighborhood... is me.
I was brought to the Good Place by mistake.
I’m not supposed to be here.
This is the big pivot point for Eleanor, where she moves into a fully selfless act. She has a long way to go, but she sets herself solidly on the right path.
Most Improved Player
Within the theme repetition, at a later point in the series Eleanor becomes fixated on earning points: the cosmic currency that supposedly determines who belongs in The Good Place. If she can just do enough good deeds, accumulate enough moral credit, surely she can justify her presence. She helps others, but only when she calculates it will benefit her standing. She performs kindness while keeping a mental ledger.
This is still poiesis, just dressed up in ethical language. The actions might look virtuous from the outside, but they’re disconnected from any genuine principle or reflection. While her actions as a human were unethical poiesis, this later ethical poiesis isn’t really better. Eleanor is treating morality like a transaction: inputs and outputs, costs and benefits, optimization without transformation.
The show is remarkably clear about this trap. The point system is the mechanism used to determine who went to The Good Place during life, and it turns out to be fundamentally broken. It reduced ethics to arithmetic, virtue to a scoreboard. And in doing so, it missed something essential about what it means to be good: that it’s not about accumulating moral credit but about becoming a certain kind of person.
Eleanor has to learn what the show itself demonstrates: you can’t game your way into genuine goodness. You can’t perform virtue without principle and call it ethics. Real moral development requires reflection on why you’re acting, not just calculation about what to do.
Dance Dance Resolution
Here’s where The Good Place does something philosophically brilliant: it literalizes the recursive nature of ethical development through the bigger, central twist that comes next.
At the height of season 1, we learn that Eleanor and her companions aren’t in The Good Place at all. They’re in The Bad Place: a psychological torture experiment designed by Michael, a demon who has spent centuries tormenting humans. The twist recontextualizes everything. There was never a reward to earn. The whole thing was forked from the beginning.
And yet, when Eleanor discovers the truth, she doesn’t abandon her efforts. She keeps trying to improve. More than that: she chooses to keep trying, even knowing there’s no paradise waiting for her, no cosmic accountant tallying her good deeds.
Then the show goes further. Michael reboots the experiment. Over and over. Hundreds of times. Each reboot wipes everyone’s memories, resets their relationships, starts them over from scratch. And in every iteration, Eleanor re-learns how to care. She consistently moves from selfishness toward something better. Not because she remembers doing it before, but because given the opportunity to reflect on her actions and their principles, she consistently chooses growth.
I don’t know about you guys, but I am definitely the best version of myself. I know a shirt-ton about ethics now, ‘cause I studied. And I read books that weren’t even written by the Real Housewives.
This is praxis as practice: not a single conversion moment but a capacity that develops through repetition. Eleanor demonstrates that ethical development isn’t about achieving a permanent state of goodness. It’s about building a disposition toward reflection and revision that persists even across memory wipes.
As she tells Chidi in one of the later reboots:
Eleanor:
I wasn’t a good person. But thanks to your help, I think I can be.
That “can be” is crucial. Not “am now” but “can become.” Eleanor is articulating praxis as potential, as ongoing work, as commitment rather than achievement. The desire to keep learning, and to continue the process of reflection and revision, is the practice. This is what distinguishes praxis from poiesis: it’s not about producing a final product (a “good person”) but about maintaining an integrated practice of thought and action.
Best Self
By the final season, Eleanor and her friends have convinced the cosmic authorities to overhaul the entire afterlife system. The old model (judge souls based on a single lifetime, send them to eternal reward or punishment) is replaced with something more philosophically sound: a system where every soul gets as much time as they need to grow and reflect, to practice becoming better.
Eleanor is chosen to help run this new system. She becomes an architect of others’ moral development; the ultimate validation that praxis isn’t about starting virtuous, but about committing to the journey.
In this role, Eleanor demonstrates that praxis compounds. The habits of reflection she developed become the foundation for helping others reflect. The willingness to revise her understanding of herself becomes the capacity to help others revise theirs. She leads not through moral superiority but through practiced empathy and hard-won wisdom.
Her final test comes when Chidi, having completed his own journey, is ready to walk through the door into peaceful non-existence. Eleanor, devastated, chooses to support his decision. Her love for him is no longer possessive or self-serving: it has been transformed through praxis into something that honors his autonomy and his own path.
Eleanor:
I proposed a rule that Chidis shouldn’t be allowed to leave because it would make Eleanors sad,and I could do this forever, zip you around the universe showing you cool stuff, and I’d still never find the justification for getting you to stay.Because it’s a selfish rule.
I owe it to you to let you go.
This is praxis in its mature form: action that emerges from deep reflection and aligned principle, even when it costs you something. Especially when it costs you something. Not because we had to. Not because we were threatened or incentivized. But because we wanted to. That intrinsic motivation, that internal alignment of belief and action, is the essence of praxis.
Whenever You’re Ready
Eleanor Shellstrop teaches us that praxis is not reserved for the already-virtuous. It’s available to anyone willing to engage in the work of reflection, revision, and recommitment. She shows us that moral development is not linear; we backslide, we forget, we have to relearn the same lessons, but that this repetition is not failure. It’s the process itself.
What makes The Good Place philosophically important is that it takes seriously the question that haunts anyone trying to live ethically: What if I’m too far gone? What if I’ve been selfish for so long that change is impossible? What if being good is something you either are or aren’t?
Eleanor’s answer is definitive: No. Ethical capacity develops through practice. You learn to reflect by reflecting. You learn to act with integrity by acting with integrity, failing, and trying again. There is no threshold you must clear before you’re allowed to start.
As Chidi says, in a moment that captures both Eleanor’s messiness and her genuine growth:
Chidi:
You’re cool, and you’re strong, and you make fun of me a lot, and I’m obsessed with ethics and you’re, like, this hot mess - but it’s a good combo.
Praxis doesn’t require perfection. It requires commitment to the ongoing integration of belief, reflection, and action. Eleanor demonstrates that you can be a work in progress and still be making progress. You can be flawed and still be practicing. You can start from selfishness and still, through sustained effort and genuine reflection, become someone who acts with integrity and care.
The most hopeful claim The Good Place makes is this: becoming a better person is not about already being good enough to deserve improvement. It’s about being willing to practice, to reflect, to fail, and to keep going anyway.
Eleanor didn’t start with praxis. She built it, incrementally and imperfectly, over countless attempts and failures. And if that trashbag can do it, then perhaps the rest of us can too.
Take it sleazy.