Red Dwarf is my favourite sitcom, and the series of novels might be my favourite literature, closely followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Dice Man, Enduring Love and the Earthsea Quartet. It strikes me that Red Dwarf contains so much philosophical content, much more than any other non-strictly-academic piece I have ever read. It touches on just about every area of philosophy one can think about. Here are just a few that I can think of and I will try to add more when I remember them:

What it means to lead a good life. In the episode with the Inquisitor, we are told that the Inquisitor travels through time judging everybody who ever lived and if finding them worthy of Life allows them to remain, and if finding them unworthy they are replaced by somebody who never got the chance to live. Furthermore, the Inquisitor allows each defendant to judge themselves by their own standards of whether they have deserved to live.

Personal Identity. The metaphysic of Red Dwarf seems to support the existence of souls. Rimmer, the Cat and Lister are said to swap bodies a few times with no brain transplant. Somehow their personality, memories and stream of consciousness is exchanged between the bodies. We are told that in Better Than Life, Rimmer is stripped of his body and becomes essentially a sound wave that appears to carry his soul. (Although even in Red Dwarf, better Than Life is a fiction so this doesn't tell us much). Rimmer himself is a psychologically identical reconstruction of a now-dead person, but he is always referred to, and refers to himself, as the original Rimmer. There are countless times in the series where the characters are somehow resurrected because of time travel. In the Inquisitor episode (I saw that last night, hence the recollection), Kryten and Lister are judged unworthy of life and deleted from history, replaced with alternates. Before they are deleted physically they manage to escape. The Inquisitor then chases them and kills the original Rimmer, Cat and both alternates. Lister then manages to erase the Inquisitor from history, bringing back the original Cat, Kryten and Rimmer. Lister is the only one who remains temporally continuous. Are the others now clones of themselves or psychologically continuous? In another episode the Red Dwarf crew are attacked by their future selves, who irresponsibly have used time travel to lead luxurious lives throughout history, and now they need some kind of Warp Drive from the original Red Dwarfers. They kill everybody but Rimmer, who ends the series by shooting their own Warp Drive. We learn in the next series that somehow the destruction of the Warp Drive prevented the crew from ever becoming the future selves they encountered and hence none of them were killed. But how did they still have the memories of their now-never-to-exist future selves? Lister dies on another occasion, and to resurrect him they take him to a backwards universe where he is re-born with a heart attack and leads a whole backwards life until he is collected by the crew and brought back to his original universe, with memories intact of his former forwards life, and backwards life.

Artificial Intelligence. Is Kryten a person? We are told that Lister helped Kryten to break his programming, making him somewhat autonomous and sporting several negative emotions like anger, jealousy and ambivalence. We are still told that Kryten is programmed not to kill, and has no desire to prolong his life.

Determinism. Is the sort of time travel in Red Dwarf consistent with Determinism? We are told that to ensure his necessity, Lister has a child with Kochanski and they go back in time to leave the child where Lister himself was found as a baby. Hence Lister is his own father and son, and Kochanski is his mother and mate. Quite often characters do things because they believe they have to in virtue of what has already happened. When they are in the backwards world they do things like regurgitate food. They put a lot of effort into detaching heavy engines from the ship and carrying them into the woods and burying them, because they work out that actually the engines fell off the ship and they had to go and dig them up and re-attach them, which is what they were doing by detaching them. When they regurgitate rabbit, Kryten makes sure to re-attach the meat to the bones and bring it back to life, and then he goes out and un-makes the trap that he found it in. What would have happened if he didn't bother doing that? Did they have any Free Will while in Backwards World?

Ignorance and Happiness. Is virtual reality any less insignificant than actual reality? Is living in Better Than Life a worthy and fulfilling life? In one episode (although it is a dream), we are told that the characters are actually just "losers" in a totalitarian society who decided to play a virtual reality game called Red Dwarf for several years while on life support machines. When they come out of it they are told that they performed badly on the game, hardly scratching the surface of what was possible. Does our own future hold this sort of life for our own children? Is it a worthwhile use of life?