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

by Michael Schur

This planet contains eight billion people, and

What the hell am I supposed to do?

Nearly every single thing we do has some ethical component to it,

the words of Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

the German philosopher Martin Heidegger,

Later I found out that Heidegger was basically a fascist,

so you end up gravitating toward certain thinkers and away from others based on nothing more complicated than how much they resonate with you.

My understanding of ethics (and thus: the crux of this book) is organized broadly around a group of theories—virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism—which are currently thought of as the “Big Three” in Western moral philosophy.

randomly coldcock your buddy.

the oldest of the Big Three, called “virtue ethics”—tries

What makes a person good or bad?

Aristotle.

Aristotle lived from 384 to 322 BCE,

If we want to flourish, we need to attain virtues. Lots of them. In precise amounts and proportions.

This is the “lifelong process” part of the equation: “Virtue comes about,” he writes, “not by a process of nature, but by habituation.…

Habituation isn’t very different from the “practice makes perfect” ethos that was drilled into us

The ancient Greeks were kind of obsessed with how important teachers (or “wise men”)

Socrates taught Plato,

Plato taught Ar...

Aristotle taught Alexander t...

“golden mean,”

That’s the golden mean of this quality: that perfect middle spot, representing the exact amount of the quality in question that keeps the seesaw level.

The golden mean of anger—which, again, Aristotle calls “mildness”—represents an appropriate amount of anger, reserved for the right situations, to be directed at people who deserve it.

(golden means of various qualities),

(a deep understanding of our actions, rendering us “flexible and innovative” in their applications to other, more complicated situations).

posed in 1967 by a British woman named Philippa Foot.

she was an esteemed philosopher, and the Trolley Problem is arguably modern philosophy’s most famous thought experiment.

second of our three main Western philosophical schools: utilitarianism,

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)

John Stuart Mill (18...

Bentham had many admirable qualities—he argued for gay rights, minority rights, women’s rights, and animal rights, which were not things a lot of people...

Bentham’s disciple J. S. Mill was also an early women’s rights supporter, authoring a groundbreaking work of feminist thought called The Subjection of Women in 1869.4

Mill died in 1873 of St. Anthony’s fire, a rare infection where your skin essentially explodes into bright red inflammations.

Utilitarianism is one branch of a school of ethical philosophy broadly called “consequentialism,”

cares only about the results or consequences of our actions.

Bentham’s initial phrasing of utilitarianism was that the best action is whatever makes the most people happy.

He called this the “greatest happiness principle,”

it’s an attempt to take morality out of the abstract and make it more like math, or chemistry.

Bentham invented one. He came up with seven scales we should use to measure the pleasure created by anything we do:

Bentham even suggested new terminology for our measurements:

“hedons” for units of pleasure,

“dolors” for units...

Any ethical theory that suggests a muddy pig had a happier and better life than one of humanity’s greatest thinkers is in trouble right off the bat, probably.8

This guy tries too hard to be “funny”. For me he comes across as “lame” (for lack of a better word).

sorry, Steve, you’ll just have to stay there and get continuously zapped until your bones are visible through your skin like in cartoons.

Another lame example

Sorting out these broader, secondary pleasure/pain implications can be a maddeningly inexact science.

people are bad at, it’s drawing the correct conclusion from a given result.

Some are indifferent, so they study the same amount. And some are so incredulous at how boneheaded an idea this is, they conclude that their teachers are irredeemable goobers and they need to transfer to another school—so

Lame

lacuna

the sense that “each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do.”

when we’re confronting moral dilemmas, especially ones where serious pain and suffering result from our actions, relying solely on utilitarian accounting is bound to cause significant problems—there are other factors here, not least among them our integrity, and ignoring those factors may result in our doing things we really don’t feel are the right things to do.