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

by Michael Schur

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

Aristotle says that thing is: happiness. That’s the telos,4 or goal, of being human.

Aristotle’s flourishing, to me, is a sort of “runner’s high” for the totality of our existence—it’s a sense of completeness that flows through us when we are nailing every aspect of being human.

then he drops the hammer: If we want to flourish, we need to attain virtues. Lots of them. In precise amounts and proportions.

Aristotle defines virtues as the things that “cause [their] possessors to be in a good state and to perform their functions well.”

And the same way we develop any skill, Aristotle tells us, we become virtuous by doing virtuous things.

In other words: we have to practice generosity, temperance, courageousness, and all the other virtues, just like annoying Rob practiced his annoying bagpipes. Aristotle’s plan requires constant study, maintenance, and vigilance.

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.”

Mill pulled out of his funk partly by reading Romantic poetry, which is a very nineteenth-century-British-genius way to pull out of a funk, and went on to become one of his generation’s most influential philosophers despite never teaching at a university or even attending one.

Bentham invented one. He came up with seven scales we should use to measure the pleasure created by anything we do: Intensity (how strong it is) Duration (how long it lasts) Certainty (how definite it is that it’ll work) Propinquity (how soon it can happen) Fecundity (how “lasting” it is—how much other pleasure it can lead to) Purity (how little pain it causes in relation to the pleasure it creates) Extent (how many people it benefits)

Despite all of the problems we’ve already noted with the greatest happiness principle, that ghoulish human taxidermy experiment had a point.

Williams uses the word integrity to attack the utilitarians—less in the sense of “honesty and moral uprightness” than “wholeness,” or “undividedness.” He says that their worldview causes a crack in the basic foundation of an individual’s being—the sense that “each of us is specially responsible for what he does, rather than for what other people do.” Ten people might die because Sheriff Pete thinks mass murder is a good way to maintain law and order—but that’s on Pete. If Jim kills a guy, that’s on Jim, even if he does it for the sake of some kind of “greater good.”

“Should I tell the truth?” is one of the most common ethical dilemmas we face. Most of us don’t enjoy misleading people, but the gears of society do mesh more smoothly if we grease them with white lies.

Immanuel Kant, and the philosophical theory known as deontology.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), primarily responsible for bringing deontology to prominence, believed that 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.

Since the only thing that matters is our adherence to the duty to follow whatever rule we came up with, the results of our actions are irrelevant. Following the right rules = acting morally. Not following them = failing to act morally.

the most important idea in Kantian ethics is fairly simple to understand. It’s called the categorical imperative, which he introduced in his not-at-all-intimidatingly titled Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

The categorical imperative states that we can’t just find rules that tell us how we ought to behave—we have to find rules that we could imagine everyone else following too.

Giving money to charity because, say, “we feel sad about the state of the world” might be a nice thing to do, but the action has no moral worth. 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.

Kant’s strict system also provides a form of comfort. Since moral “success” comes only from acting out of duty to follow a universal maxim, if something “bad” happens as a result of whatever we do, it ain’t on us—we acted correctly! In that sense, Kantian deontology is the exact opposite of utilitarianism;6 to that point, while all of utilitarian ethics was based on maximizing happiness, Kant thought “happiness” was irrelevant.

There’s no followable maxim involving the creation of “happiness,” because “happiness” is something subjective that we can only define for ourselves.

Whether you agree or not, Kant’s hard-core brain-based theory was a seismic event in Western philosophy; his monumental influence can be understood only when you see how many contemporary philosophers worked from his source material. He’s

This is a frequent criticism of Kantian theory: trying to obey it is a purely intellectual exercise, and it’s really goddamn hard. The character Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place is a strict Kantian, and he’s so concerned with formulating precise Kantian maxims that he essentially paralyzes himself with indecision, struggling to act in even the simplest of circumstances. At

there’s a second formulation of the categorical imperative, sometimes called in translation the practical imperative. It adds a rule to Kant’s philosophy that isn’t nearly as difficult to follow:

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.

As technical and brainy as Kantian theory is, I find there to be something sweetly humanistic about the second formulation. Kant holds humans in the highest possible regard and rejects any action that demeans them or turns them into tools used to achieve some other goal.

See how hard this is? Even though Kant promises clear answers to moral problems, when you apply his reasoning to the Trolley Problem, it seems like we’re in trouble. (We’re always in trouble with Kant. He’s always standing right behind us, clucking his tongue, pointing out how badly we’re blowing it.)

“We ought to spare the lives of as many innocent people as we can, whenever possible.” (Now, this is obviously sending us back toward utilitarian math. Put a pin in that, we’ll return to it in a second.) Since five innocent people are about to die, we conclude that the action that obeys our duty to that maxim is: “Pull this lever.” 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.

Philippa Foot was actually addressing this exact point in her original paper—it has to do with the doctrine of double effect, a philosophical idea that goes all the way back to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Basically, it means that an outcome can be more or less morally permissible depending on whether you actually intended it to happen when you acted—like, when we kill someone in self-defense, we intended only to save our own innocent life, and the result was that someone else died. If we pull the lever intending to deliberately smoosh a guy… not so great. But if the guy got smooshed because we were intending to save the lives of five guys, we’re off the hook.

This all goes back to the idea that sometimes, if we use utilitarian methods, we arrive at the right moral answer but for the wrong reasons.

So while a duty to follow the maxim “We ought to spare the lives of as many innocent people as we can, whenever possible” might seem like just a fancy way of a utilitarian saying “Five is more than one!” that similarity dissolves when we add in the second formulation of the imperative: that we should not use people as a means to an end, but rather as ends in themselves. Shoving Don off the bridge certainly counts as using him as a means to an end—he would cease to be a person, and literally become a tool (in this case, a “human trolley stopper”) that allows us to achieve some other goal. In the Trolley Problem Classic, utilitarian accounting and deontological duty overlap—whichever one we use, we’re likely to arrive at the same result (pull the lever, save the five people). But utilitarian accounting isn’t as finely honed as Kantian reasoning. As the details of the problem shift and change, strict utilitarianism keeps telling us to “kill one and save five,”9 even when we start to feel queasy about the way in which we’re carrying out the “kill one” part.

Of course, this is Kant’s whole point: they’re not universal maxims if you can pick and choose when to follow them.

Aristotle, in contrast, allows us to seek virtue in a more experiential way—by trial and error, essentially—which strikes me as more compassionate. It feels like he trusts us, and has more tolerance for the mistakes we’re bound to make.

Nietzsche was an inveterate snob. His entire worldview is based on the idea that most people are weak and dumb, and a very small number are incredible and brilliant, and those people should be allowed to do whatever they want. This is another case—like the Greeks celebrating “wise men” while they cleared their throats and pointed to themselves—of a philosopher essentially arguing that we ought to revere people who are suspiciously like the philosopher himself. Also, if you’re scoring the philosophy fight between Kant and Nietzsche, at least Kant’s snobbery didn’t accidentally help create the Nazis.

What We Owe to Each Other by T. M. Scanlon.

Scanlon calls his theory “contractualism.” It’s nowhere near as central to the history of philosophy as our Big Three, but its core tenet really appeals to me. It provides a reassuring ethical baseline—a kind of standardized, universal rulebook that we can all thumb through for guidance as we wander around in the world bumping into people on the street and getting caught in awkward interactions at Jamba Juice. Scanlon’s work comes out of Kantian “rules-based” ethics, but it isn’t as demanding.

Contractualism is the Quick-Start Guide.

For me, Scanlon’s process for determining ethical rules is much easier to grasp and deploy.

I’m reasonable if, when you and I disagree, I’m willing to constrain or modify my pursuit of my own interests to the same degree that you’re willing to constrain or modify your pursuit of your interests. When we come together to suggest our rules, then, we aren’t just “looking out for number one.” Rather, we both want to design a world where we accommodate each other’s needs, so that when we don’t see eye to eye on something, finding a way to coexist in some kind of harmony becomes our top priority.

That’s partly why contractualism appeals to me more than Kantian deontology. Kant wants us to encounter a problem, press pause, enter some kind of solitary meditation zone, use our pure reason to discern and describe a universal law that applies to the problem, and then act out of a duty to follow that law. Scanlon wants us to figure this stuff out with each other—to sit across from one another and simply ask: “Do you agree that this is okay?” He puts his faith not in abstract reasoning, but in our necessary relationships with other people.

In fact, one of the best explanations of why “other people” matter isn’t really an “explanation” at all, but rather a worldview: it’s the southern African concept of ubuntu.

A lot of the explanation of ubuntu is done through aphorisms, anecdotes, and proverbs, though the South African political philosopher Johann Broodryk defines it this way: A comprehensive ancient African world view based on the values of intense humanness, caring, sharing, respect, compassion, and associated values, ensuring a happy and qualitative human community life in the spirit of family.

“It may be asked whether this notion is unique,” he writes, “since all cultures ascribe basically to these positive values.” He’s right, of course—if we think of ubuntu as, say, “human interconnectedness,” there are parallels in Buddhism, or the Hindu concept of dharma. The difference, he says, is that in Africa “these values are practiced on a much deeper level. It is about a real passionate living of humanity, as if humanity is the primary reason for living above all other concerns.”

Here’s a proverb that I think comes close to encapsulating the whole idea: A person is a person through other people.

Ubuntu is Scanlon’s contractualism, but supercharged. It’s not just that we owe things to other people—ubuntu says we exist through them.

Their health is our health, their happiness is our happiness, their interests are our interests, when they are hurt or diminished we are hurt or diminished. The virtues that political scientist Michael Onyebuchi Eze cites as being characteristic of ubuntu ring an Aristotelian bell—“magnanimity, shari...

In 2006, Nelson Mandela was asked to define ubuntu and said this: In the old days, when we were young, a traveler to our country would stop in our village, and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, and attend to him. That is one aspect of ubuntu, but it [has] various aspects.… Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question, ...

The individual does not and cannot exist alone.… He owes his existence to other people including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole.… Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say, “I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.”

We’re not really going to discuss René Descartes, but consider for a second his famous Enlightenment formulation Cogito, ergo sum—the aforementioned “I think, therefore I am”—which, again, is one of the very foundations of Western thought. When we place it next to this ubuntu formulation—“I am, because we are”—well, man oh man, that’s a pretty big difference.