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

by Michael Schur

Thich Nhat Hanh

Buddhist monk from Vietnam who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Martin Luther King Jr.

Thich Nhat Hanh just kept advocating for peace in Vietnam and trying to help people. That’s how good a person he is. In perhaps his most famous book, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, he shares this story:

Mindfulness is the core of Buddhist philosophy;

Hanh defines it as “the energy that brings us back to the present moment.”

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.

beautiful idea.

2 For

acting out of duty to follow a universal maxim

In his twelfth-century magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, the Jewish scholar Maimonides lays out eight levels of charitable giving.

William James.

James (1842–1910) was a sort of nineteenth-century Aristotle—he

sometimes called the “Father of Modern Psychology,”

theory known as pragmatism. In

It’s the jambalaya of philosophy.

pragmatic/utilitarian conclusion that if good is maximized, motivation of the giver is secondary.

I agree with this

carbon-dating

marshmallow experiment,

my wife creased that guy’s bumper was the difference between shame and guilt.

guilt is the internal feeling that we have done something wrong—it’s

Shame is humiliation for who we are, reflected back at us through other people jud...

Ted Cruz!2

“whataboutism.”

whether shame is a productive way to achieve an ethical outcome.

consequentialism. After all, I turned a minor fender bender into a massive redistribution of wealth to people in tremendous need—whatever

The act of lightly shaming our fellow citizens for unvirtuous actions or beliefs may therefore be okay; this isn’t guesswork on my part—Aristotle actually says that while shame is not a virtue, per se:

Here we’re confronting a condition I think of as Moral Exhaustion.

the Overton window, named after its inventor, Joseph Overton-Window.

describes the range of “acceptability” a political idea has at any given time. Some ideas—say, same-sex marriage—begin

the Overton window shifts

Something once unthinkable becomes possible, and then eventually it becomes reality.

which shifts our window

It’s simply that we become selfish.

own happiness or pain. We become… Ayn Rand.

Objectionism

Developing a nineteenth-century idea called “rational egoism”

“rational selfishness,”

that the true path to moral and societal progress involves people caring only about their own happiness. She ...

Rand has plenty of adherents, especially among those who call themselves libertarians.

anyone.

No surprise there. Its Repu lican philosophy

Trolley Problem, the Free Rider

failure is the inevitable result of caring about morality and trying to be good people.

we can only hope that the little voice in Deb’s head chirps loudly enough to keep her from making this a habit, or at least to warn her that she’s been doing stuff like this a lot recently and ought to knock it off.

And yet here I sit, writing this book, watching the case count for the nation skyrocket because too many people think their own Ayn Randian right to unfettered selfishness outweighs the sum total of literally everyone else’s happiness and safety.

Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other struck such a chord with me—the

cannot forget this simple truth: we owe things to each other.

the work of making better choices is frequently annoying.

two: it can be done—if we want to do it, and can summon the time and energy to make it happen.

really tough questions that plague us in our daily lives, that cause us anxiety and anguish and often lead to loud arguments with our closest friends and family. But in a fun way!

“Opportunity cost” is an economics term describing what we give up when we spend our resources—the opportunity cost of a company putting more money into research and development is that it can’t hire as many workers;

Moral opportunity cost, then, would be the good we miss out on doing when we choose to do something else.