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

by Michael Schur

Categorical Imperative:

we should discern rules for moral behavior using only our ability for pure reasoning, and then act out of an unflinching duty to follow those rules.

“maxim”

Since the only thing that matters is our adherence to the duty to follow whatever rule we came up with, the resul...

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

So, should we lie to our friend? No. Because first we have to imagine a world where everyone lies—and in such a world, we’d realize, no one would ever trust each other, human communication would cease to function, all interactions would become suspect, and even lying (the thing we’re thinking about doing) would lose its point. So: we can’t lie to anyone, ever, for any reason.

when we tell the truth, we have to do so not “because we care about our friend” or “we’re afraid we’ll be caught in a lie” or something—we tell the truth only out of a duty to follow the universal maxim we have reasoned out.

For Kant, an action gets no moral credit unless it's motivated in the right way. And the "right way" is FOR DUTY. If it happens to be the exact thing a dutiful person would do, it still gets zero moral credit if it's not done BECAUSE it's one's duty. (That motivation is necessary, but -- as I read Kant -- it needn't be that one wouldn't also prefer to act that way. It just has to be the case that one would so act even if only for duty.)

It only has moral worth if we’re adhering to a maxim—perhaps “When we are able, we ought to help those less fortunate”—that we can imagine everyone in the world following.

Basically, Kant wanted to differentiate between humans using their pure reason (thus confirming our specialness, as the only creatures who can do that) and the rest of the beasts in the lower, animal world, where emotions and feelings reign supreme and events unfold due to these baser passions. That’s why things like happiness and fear have to be taken out of the equation when we’re looking at motivations—I mean, cows and porcupines can feel happiness or fear, and we’ve gotta be better than some dumb porcupine munching on a twig.

This explains why Kant thinks giving to charity out of sympathy or sadness might be praiseworthy, but not moral. His esteem for the human ability to use our brains makes him a bit of a snob—and

second formulation of the categorical imperative,

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.

ESPN engineer.

the smooshing of the one other guy wouldn’t be morally weighing on our shoulders, because we didn’t intend to smoosh him.

We can reasonably argue that we would have pulled that lever if no one were on the other track, so if the result of following our maxim is “one guy gets smooshed,” well, that sucks, but it was not our intention.

the doctrine of double effect,

Natural Law theory rears its head!

Deontology, however, draws important lines of distinction between acceptable and unacceptable “kill one” actions.

Kant tells us that we are not allowed to lie, because lying can’t be universalized, because if everybody could lie it would render all human communication meaningless, etc., etc. And so, absurdly, Kant tells us we’re not allowed to lie to a murderer, even when he has flatly stated that he is there to murder our brother.

Sometimes with Kant it feels like a game where we have to find either the right way to phrase the maxim we will follow, or a way to avoid not following it, in order to achieve the result we want without running afoul of his rules.

Kant would feel if he were hiding in our attic and the polite murderer came looking for him. Maybe he’d hope we had ignored his writings and read more Aristotle.

Pragmatism asks us to be moral referees, watching the action unfold and determining whether there is any difference between one outcome and another—and thus whether the dispute is idle or meaningful. Of course, if we’re playing referee, a new question arises: When do we blow the whistle? If someone does something bad, something that we believe has a tangibly negative effect on the world, should we say so? When, if ever, should we not only determine that someone is acting immorally, but actually call them on it?

Shaming someone for caring about Thing X when unrelated Thing Y is far more dire just doesn’t hold water. The common modern-day term for this is “whataboutism.” Whataboutism is most commonly deployed as a defensive strategy. Someone is caught doing something bad—anything from an actual crime to saying something mildly offensive on the internet—and then instead of owning up to it, he says, “Well, what about [Way Worse Thing X]?!” or “What about that bad thing you did?!”5 or “What about the fact that I also did [Good Thing Y]?”

These are "fallacies of relevance," like citing an irrelevant reason, or ad hominem (which attacks a person rather than a position).

CHAPTER EIGHT

* Note the reference in this chapter back to Wolf’s critique of “moral sainthood” * Is Schur’s appeal to James C. Scott’s justification of rule-breaking bad faith? Or good practice?! * Ayn Rand's glorification of selfishness + Free Rider Problem * Is the FRP a threat to an ethical community? * Not if Schur’s Rules for Exceptions are part of the culture * The group can tolerate some habitual free riders (where to draw the line of intolerance is another question)

as we learned from Susan Wolf’s “Moral Saints,” and from the case of that annoying guy who allowed his dutifulness to run amok (me), following every rule all the time in all scenarios isn’t necessarily good.

James C. Scott actually thinks breaking a rule every once in a while is morally necessary: One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it.… How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay “in shape” so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is “anarchist calisthenics.” Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready. For Scott, these small transgressions build up our ethical muscles and prepare us for more important moral exercise.

Is Schur in bad faith here? Or is this just good practice? (Sleuth ourselves!)

I say we allow ourselves these moments of rule-breaking, on two conditions: First: that the rules we violate are not obviously harmful to other people.

if the rule you want to violate is, say, “Don’t flee the scene of an accident,” or “Don’t start a war in the Middle East under false pretenses,” there is no “good deed” bank account with a high enough balance to excuse your behavior.

Imagine a rule-breaking situation in which we already meet Schur's two conditions (no harm to others + acknowledged as sub-ideal). Is Schur right to add that justified rule-breakings requires a positive "good-deed balance"?

Second: we need to acknowledge that what we’re doing is not ideal.

it’s a short journey to becoming “people who always jaywalk.”

The "Overton window" here is just another way of talking about what Aristotle (and everyone else) calls habituation: The more you do something, the greater the ease with which do it. "Virtue (or vice) is aquired by habit."

the shifting of an Overton window often happens gradually, and we readjust to its new range very quickly,9 so there is risk in allowing ourselves to do anything we know is bad just because we want to.

we become selfish.

A mode of vice (and lack of virtue)

Free Rider Problem.

wearing a mask falls roughly at the “don’t jaywalk” level of individual sacrifice.

which kinds of failure are good and which are bad. The good kind comes from trying to do something good, and either miscalculating or just flatly making the wrong decision.

The kind I was gesturing at when I didn’t want to change banks came partly from apathy, or maybe “moral laziness.”

Has Bill Gates done enough? More pointedly, you might ask: if he really believes that all lives have equal value, what is he doing living in such an expensive house and owning a Leonardo Codex? Are there no more lives that could be saved by living more modestly and adding the money thus saved to the amount he has already given?

“The formula is simple,” he wrote in another New York Times Magazine article from 1999, “whatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.”

“effective altruism.”

by not giving their extra kidney away, they are valuing their own lives as 4,000 times more important than the lives of anonymous strangers.

When kids are literally dying, he says, it’s hard to justify ignoring their pain and sending your annual charitable gift to a local art museum or symphony orchestra.

The Covid-19 crisis

What are my responsibilities? How much should I do to help? I believe the answer (in this situation, and others like it) starts with Scanlon and then drifts over to Singer. When a public health crisis affects everyone on earth at the same moment, the minimum requirements for all of us—the rules no reasonable person would reject, the basic things we owe to each other—are easy to determine and non-negotiable: we need to limit our travel to the best of our ability, maintain social distancing, wear masks, and so on. After that—and this is where Singer comes back into the picture—our responsibilities scale up depending on our socioeconomic situations.

Obligation to cooperate rises as the consequences of noncooperation rise...

This ethical dilemma feels unique to our age: When information is so readily available, how do we escape the guilt (or shame) that comes from learning about our unintentionally bad decisions?

A virtue ethicist might say,

There is some golden mean we should find, wherein we think things through as much as we can but forgive ourselves when our well-intentioned actions have some deleterious effect.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Domingo. If we don’t know of at least one person or thing whose actions make it problematic for us to be their active fan, it’s only because we’re hermits who haven’t looked at the internet in twenty years.2 Here’s our old friend Moral Exhaustion,3 with another new fun twist. It’s hard enough to figure out what we’re supposed to do all the time—now we have to be responsible for what we like?

What, if any, are our ethical obligations pertaining to what we like (especially considering the "cancellable" morally problematic nature of the artists, thinkers, athletes, etc.)?

We are emotionally interwoven with the parts of the culture that shaped our identity, so just detaching ourselves from them is painful.

“This is the way it’s always been done” is the last defense of the true ignoramus.

Saying “this world is problematic” amounts to saying “I, who have helped build this world, am problematic.” For people deeply invested in the way things are, any change would mean confronting decisions they’ve made that created or sustained the troubling reality.