The Tomato Problem
Most sitcoms don’t stick with me. They are just comedic background music for my life. However, in the popular sitcom The Good Place, a show where the main characters think they’re in heaven but live in hell, there’s an episode where they realize they can never get to ‘The Good Place’ because every action in modern society creates a bad impact. Chidi, a philosophy professor in the show, attempts to wrap his head around this idea in a long-winded rant: ”...but these days just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labour, contributing to global warming.”(Weng, 2019). This line haunts me with its truth because, yes, buying a tomato might support child labour in a third-world country like Sierra Leone and its diamonds, even if I intended to eat healthier. My donating a couple of bucks to a homeless person might be the money he uses to buy drugs that make him go insane and kill seven people, all because I intended to be kind. If I hand someone a rock, and they use it to kill someone, am I an accomplice? The Good Place revealed how everything we do creates unseen ripple effects. That leads us to The Tomato Problem; that the intent behind a choice has become so disconnected from the impact that we don’t even know what the impacts are. So now, with all the choices we face every day, is it even possible to make ones that don’t have bad ripples?
Our society has progressed to a point where things are more complex than they seem. Nothing is as black and white as it seems. Take the tomato, I see it as just a fruit to buy in the store. The choice seems simple: buy it to be healthy, or get a pack of Oreos. The complexity lies in that tomato may come from a company supporting child labour and stealing Indigenous land, which I wouldn’t know. Yet my choice to purchase that tomato perpetuates that cycle of unfair labour and unethical business practices. My tomato money gives that company more power to exploit lower-income communities and hide their actions. That is my fault, even if I didn’t know. The intent wasn’t cruel, but the impact was. Which matters more? The higher power deciding my fate knows both intent and impact. Every good act has a bad result rotting in its core. You just don’t know it’s there until you bite in.
Few know what’s going on behind the scenes of that tomato production. Most just see it sitting on top of a shrinking pile in Cold Storage for $3.99. We can't judge certain actions by impact, and that list grows because of the widening disconnect between intent and impact. Our interconnected society makes it impossible to align intent with impact because they've become so physically and mentally separated. But unlike The Good Place, I think the intent, rather than the impact, will be judged because the intent is what speaks of the soul.
The soul guides our every action. It holds our morals, values, and priorities. We give someone that rock because we value compassion. We buy that tomato because we value self-improvement. The soul reveals a person's true nature, wanted or not. The impact of our actions reflects how the world responds to what we do. When you cannot know an action's impact, it cannot guide your choice. If you avoid all actions that might hurt someone anywhere, you cannot act in today's interconnected society.
As I said earlier, if I give someone a rock and they kill someone, am I an accomplice? No. The choice to use my rock to murder someone was not mine, it had nothing to do with me. If I pay for a tomato, and the company decides to use that money to build factories enabling child labour in third-world countries, I bear no fault in that choice was not mine. If I had paid for the tomato knowing the money would finance this, then yes, I deserve the blame.
This principle appears in recent boycotts of companies that supported Israel throughout the Israel-Palestine conflict. Many people refused to buy from Starbucks because they knew that money would support a government and its military policies, which they opposed. Knowledge of negative impact, even when distant from the action, assigns some blame. However, a person bears no blame for an impact they could not control, even if someone else used their choice for harm.
So, The Tomato Problem. Intent, impact, and their modern star-crossed lover-esque story. The Tomato Problem exhibits how intent and impact have grown apart. Humanity cannot anticipate every choice’s impact in this new society where choices can create impacts across oceans. If someone cannot plausibly understand their action’s impact, we must judge their intent. Intent reveals what the soul wants. The soul reveals if a person is good or bad. That's why my solution to The Tomato Problem focuses on the soul's intent—it matters most and determines whether I reach The Good Place or The Bad Place, even if the sitcom writers disagree.
Works Cited
“Chidi Sees The Time Knife.” Episode. The Good Place 3, no. 11. NBC, January 17, 2019.