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

by Michael Schur

We share this planet with other people. Our actions affect those people. If we care at all about those people, we ought to figure out how to make the best decisions we can.

If you enjoy semantic rabbit holes, you can poke around various dictionaries and tease out the differences… and then join me as we blithely ignore those differences, because life’s too short.

In 1746, a group of British booksellers asked Dr. Samuel Johnson to write a definitive dictionary of the English language. Over the next eight years, he did just that—he wrote an entire dictionary. Using only his own brain.3 After he was done, a woman approached him, annoyed, and asked how he could have possibly defined a “pastern” as “the knee of a horse” when it is actually part of the foot. Johnson replied: “Ignorance, Madam. Pure ignorance!”

Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason? No. You shouldn’t. Was that your answer? Sweet. You’re doing great so far.

See? Being good isn’t so hard. You just have to understand the world as completely as Neo does at the end of The Matrix.

“If cruelty horrifies us,” Shklar writes, “we must, given the facts of daily life, always be in a state of outrage.”

The questions are obvious: Should you do nothing, allowing five people to be killed? Should you pull the lever, killing one person? Also, why are these people working on active trolley tracks in the middle of the day? Who approved this? Jerry, from scheduling? That guy is so incompetent. I heard he only got this job because his cousin owns the trolley company.

We need to really take that in, because it’s arguably the most famous sentence in Western philosophical thought. The only others that really come close would be René Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), Thomas Hobbes’s “The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and of course the Insane Clown Posse’s “Water, fire, air, and dirt / Fucking magnets, how do they work?”