How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

by Michael Schur

Is it possible to describe a set of qualities we all have to have, in the exact right amount, that will make every one of us “good”? To answer that, we need to unlearn all the stuff we’ve learned—we

Aristotle needs to define (1) which qualities a good person ought to have, (2) in which amounts, (3) whether everyone has the capacity for those qualities, (4) how we acquire them, and (5) what it will look (or feel) like when we actually have them.

“maximum success.” Aristotle says that thing is: happiness. That’s the telos,4 or goal, of being human.

There are also good things we want, like health, honor, or friendships, because they make us happy. But happiness is the top dog on the list of “things we desire”—it has no aim other than itself.

“eudaimonia,” which sometimes gets translated as “happiness” and sometimes as “flourishing.”

happiness is different from pleasure (the kind associated with hedonism), because people have brains and the ability to reason.

Aristotle’s view, the very purpose of living is to flourish—just like the purpose of a flute is to produce beautiful music, and the purpose of a knife is to cut things perfectly.

human virtues he listed, then, are the things that make us good at being human.

All people have what he calls “natural states” of virtue: “Each of us seems to possess his type of character to some extent by nature; for in fact we are just, brave, prone to temperance, or have another feature, immediately from birth.”

Aristotle tells us, we become virtuous by doing virtuous things.

“Virtue comes about,” he writes, “not by a process of nature, but by habituation.… We become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”

You might recall having an aptitude for generosity but not temperance, or industriousness but not mildness. In order to flourish we need to develop all of these virtues,

Habituation may be the most important part of Aristotle’s ethical system,

The Subjection of Women in 1869.4

a true consequentialist might not even care that the result was achieved in an unintended way—we got the result we wanted, so who cares how it happened?)

“each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do.” Ten people might die because Sheriff Pete thinks mass murder is a good way to maintain law and order—but that’s on Pete. If Jim kills a guy, that’s on Jim,

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

if something “bad” happens as a result of whatever we do, it ain’t on us—we acted correctly! In that sense, Kantian deontology is the exact opposite of utilitarianism;6 to that point, while all of utilitarian ethics was based on maximizing happiness, Kant thought “happiness” was irrelevant.

happiness is an ideal not of reason but of imagination,

There’s no followable maxim involving the creation of “happiness,” because “happiness” is something subjective that we can only define for ourselves.

Kant doesn’t care what you think of the world versus what I think of the world—he wants to take feeling and sentiment out of the equation.

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only. In other words: don’t use people to get what you want. Lying to our friend does just that—we’re doing it in order to avoid a difficult conversation, or in order to avoid seeming like a jerk.

doctrine of double effect, a philosophical idea that goes all the way back to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Basically, it means that an outcome can be more or less morally permissible depending on whether you actually intended it to happen when you acted—like, when we kill someone in self-defense, we intended only to save our own innocent life, and the result was that someone else died.

we should not use people as a means to an end, but rather as ends in themselves. Shoving Don off the bridge certainly counts as using him as a means to an end—he would cease to be a person, and literally become a tool

As the details of the problem shift and change, strict utilitarianism keeps telling us to “kill one and save five,”9 even when we start to feel queasy about the way in which we’re carrying out the “kill one” part. Deontology, however, draws important lines of distinction between acceptable and unacceptable “kill one” actions.

if we think of ubuntu as, say, “human interconnectedness,” there are parallels in Buddhism, or the Hindu concept of dharma. The difference, he says, is that in Africa “these values are practiced on a much deeper level. It is about a real passionate living of humanity, as if humanity is the primary reason for living above all other concerns.”

political scientist Michael Onyebuchi Eze cites as being characteristic of ubuntu ring an Aristotelian bell—“

This has been a core tenet of Southern African philosophy for centuries, but in Western philosophy the contractualist idea that our moral lives are dependent on our mutual relationships with other people is more of an outlier.

Descartes saw his own singular consciousness as proof of existence. Practitioners of ubuntu see our existence as conditional on others’ existence.

I find contractualism to be a reliable ethical guide when I’m weighing my decisions and my responses to other people’s. Remember, though, that it gives us only a minimum baseline for creating a livable society.

virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, contractualism, ubuntu…

the golden mean actually demands that we exhibit some amount of mildly “vice-like” behavior in order to maintain our virtuous balance. The person seeking the golden mean of courage, for example, has to occasionally stir in a little cowardice, because if she doesn’t, she may become too rash.

Buddhist philosophy suggests that true happiness comes from remaining focused on the things we do, and doing them with no purpose other than to do them.

peccadillo:

Thich Nhat Hanh would probably disagree with James (and me) here, because he cares more about the person doing the thing than what happened when he did it. The Buddhist view of happiness requires that it be the right happiness—the mindful happiness that comes from devotion to the Buddha’s teachings.

even with good intentions and level heads, if we give in to our lesser instincts too often there’s a far more likely outcome than “we become black market weapons dealers.” It’s simply that we become selfish. We start to believe that our own “right” to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, is more important than anything else, and thus our sense of morality concerns only our own happiness or pain. We become… Ayn Rand.

if guilt is how we police ourselves, we need to allow ourselves to feel that guilt, and we need to listen to our guilty consciences when they give us pause.