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

by Michael Schur

But Aristotle’s idea of… “the golden mean” explains that all these are fine in moderation—people who are never impatient don’t get things done; people who never take risks live limited lives; people who evade the truth and do not express pain or joy at all are psychologically and emotionally stunted or deprived; and people who have no desire whatsoever to get even with those who have damaged them are either deluding themselves or have too low an estimate of their own worth.

He might say that there is a limit to self-sacrifice, because someone who tilts too far toward helping others to flourish—a happiness pump, essentially—may be unable to flourish herself. There is some amount of “selfishness” that’s appropriate and even good for us to have, because without it we aren’t properly valuing our own lives. If flourishing is the ultimate human purpose, it requires us to protect ourselves a little from suffering.

I never really asked myself whether it was… okay that he wrote men and women like this.

All we have, and all we ultimately are, is the choices we make while we’re alive.

the human condition is fundamentally absurd.

Camus says we have three choices. 1. We can kill ourselves.

So Sisyphus has to complete this same ridiculous task over and over forever—so what? “The workman of today,” he points out, “works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.”

If Aristotle tells us to keep trying different things in order to find the bullseye of virtue, existentialists say: keep making choices, because choices are all we have in our absurd, meaningless universe.

Also, not that this matters, but what a looker, am I right? It’s funny to think of philosophers as sexy, but you gotta give it up—Camus was a stone-cold hottie.

Most of these people fail to become virtuous because of the difficulties of their situation, not because they are not capable of it.

the cream isn’t rising to the top—the people who were closest to the top already are rising to the top, and the whole concept of meritocracy crumbles to dust.

(Some people, as the old saying goes, were born on third base and think they hit a triple.)

people who achieve (or inherit) a high level of wealth and success are invested in the idea that they earned it.

people who are successful are often overly invested in the idea that they and they alone are responsible for their success, and are sometimes ignorant to, or unwilling to allow for, the important role luck has played in their lives.

In Rawls’s scenario we divide up the pile of M&M’s, but since the universe decides who gets which portion, we’re gonna divide it (somewhat) equally.

A bullshitter, however, is “unconstrained by a concern with truth.” The bullshitter couldn’t care less what the truth is—he wants only to make himself appear a certain way or achieve some effect on the listener.

We have said, over and over, that caring about what we do requires us to accept and endure a lifetime of screwing up.

One of the great ironies of aging is that every ten years or so, you look back on the person you were ten years before and shudder—at the mistakes you made, at your immaturity and thickheadedness—and then you breathe a sigh of relief that you’re so much smarter and more mature now. Then ten years later… it happens again.

When we pitch rules to the doormat, he agrees to everything, because he undervalues his own interests. When we pitch rules to the asshole, she agrees to none of them, because she overvalues her interests.

We can’t take advantage of the doormat, for example, by realizing he will just agree to whatever we propose and then proposing a bunch of rules that serve to benefit ourselves at the doormat’s expense; instead, we need to keep ourselves in check by recognizing that there is a disconnect between the way these doormats/assholes are acting and the way a reasonable person would be acting, and only propose rules they’d follow if they were, indeed, reasonable.