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

by Michael Schur

The best thing about Aristotle’s “constant learning, constant trying, constant searching” is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesn’t rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.

Quoting the great Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, she tells us that “ ‘knowledge makes men gentle,’ just as ignorance hardens us.”

The more we try to learn and understand the lives being led by other people—the more we search for a golden mean of empathy—the less we will find it permissible to treat them with cruelty.

This is Kant’s calling card: the insistence that morality is something we arrive at free of our subjective feelings or judgments.

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.

A global pandemic is, oddly, an ideal scenario to illustrate contractualism—what we owe to each other in this case is both easy to identify and infinitesimally small, and the benefits are astronomically huge.

while Kant and Mill ask What should I do?, Aristotle is asking What kind of person should I be?

I mean, if you don’t let them include your name on the donor roll, then no one will know what a good person you are!

In fact, even with good intentions and level heads, if we give in to our lesser instincts too often there’s a far more likely outcome than “we become black market weapons dealers.” It’s simply that we become selfish. We start to believe that our own “right” to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, is more important than anything else, and thus our sense of morality concerns only our own happiness or pain. We become… Ayn Rand.