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

by Michael Schur

Doing the Bare Minimum: Still (Apparently) Too Much for Some People For the first year-plus of the Covid-19 outbreak, there was one persistent and harmful issue: No one wanted to wear masks. Or, more accurately: no one wanted to, but millions of dopes actually wouldn’t.

Wearing a mask is roughly as annoying as returning a shopping cart to the rack after we’ve unloaded our car—it takes more effort than just doing nothing, but barely more effort, really, and when we run through the pros and cons of mask-wearing it becomes ludicrous not to do it. Here’s what was asked of us: buy a two-dollar face covering and use it when you go outside. Here’s who would benefit: everyone, everywhere on earth. Here’s how they’d benefit: society returns to normal much faster, and everybody doesn’t get sick and die. 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.

Masks are physical incarnations of ubuntu.)

The point is, we need “imperfect” qualities, as long as they are exhibited only in the correct amount to be useful—by keeping us from tilting too far into excess or deficiency—and not harmful.

is there a greater moral value in donating anonymously?

Whatever the reason, one thing became clear: I was being super lame. Tipping twenty-seven cents was pretty lame, and doing so only when I knew I would be seen doing it was doubly lame.

In philosophy, “desert” deals with figuring out what people are owed, or in some cases what they’re entitled to, based on different actions in different scenarios. Moral desert is the idea that if we do good deeds, we should be rewarded for them—sometimes in like a cool spiritual way, where our souls become enriched by the cosmic positivity we’ve created, but sometimes in a literal, “big shiny trophy!” way.

(Side note: So much of philosophy involves investigating embarrassing human activities and inclinations. We really are weird little creatures.)

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–) is a Buddhist monk from Vietnam who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Martin Luther King Jr.

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.

the theory known as pragmatism. In a series of lectures from 1906, he describes it as “a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable,” and man oh man, does that seem like it could be useful to us.

The larger point James makes here is: What difference does it make? We can accurately describe the event, the results of either explanation are the same in terms of what occurred, so the rest is just semantics.

What difference would it practically make to any one [sic] if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.

It’s simply concerned with truth and uses every method at its disposal to find it. The metaphor James uses for pragmatism is a “corridor in a hotel,” with a lot of doors branching off it. Behind one door is a religious man; behind the next is an atheistic woman; then a chemist, a mathematician, an ethicist, and so on—each one offering a possible way to arrive at some kind of fact that we can rely on. The pragmatist can, at any moment, open any of those doors and use what she finds to arrive at truth. It’s the jambalaya of philosophy.

James called pragmatism “a mediator and reconciler” that—and I love this phrase—“ ‘unstiffens’ our theories.”

Pragmatism, has, in fact, “no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence”—as long as its reasoning is tethered to the right facts. In this case, the fact is: more money was raised for people in need than might have been otherwise because of an egotistical guy’s ego, and no recognizable harm came to anyone else because of that fact. So be it.

Perhaps a pragmatist wouldn’t care one way or the other whether we pat ourselves on the back after doing something good—self-aggrandizement is less an ethical issue than a “good taste, bad taste” one—but Immanuel Kant would, and Thich Nhat Hanh would (for a different reason), and it’s not hard to imagine a bad motivation for a good act causing us actual moral trouble at some point.

There’s a cool historical thing going on here, where James is speaking in the immediate aftermath of a massive shift in the way people understood the universe.

The year preceding these lectures, 1905, is sometimes called Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis—“year of miracles”—because the papers he published on special relativity and the particle theory of light blew the world of physics to smithereens, and all scientists everywhere had to basically start from scratch.

So here comes William James, philosopher and (not inconsequentially, I think) psychologist, who explicitly designs a theory that can help move people away from old, inferior ways of thinking and toward new and better ones. He writes about the process of forming new opinions, how “a new experience puts them to a strain,” causing an “inward trouble… from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions.”

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.

There’s a concept in public policy called the Overton window, named after its inventor, Joseph Overton-Window.

But there’s a serious point here: 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.

Rand (1905–1982) was a novelist and philosopher who offered her readers the deal of a lifetime. Developing a nineteenth-century idea called “rational egoism” or “rational selfishness,” she suggested that the true path to moral and societal progress involves people caring only about their own happiness.

She called her theory “objectivism,” and it’s basically the exact opposite of utilitarianism—instead of trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for everyone, we do it only for ourselves. Or as she wrote in the afterword to Atlas Shrugged: My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others.… The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good. Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you.… Any man of self-esteem will answer: No. Altruism says: Yes.

Or, to put it another way: “Fuck all y’all.”

The appeal of her theories to those interested in achieving and maintaining power is certainly more likely to explain her enduring place than is her actual talent—Rand’s novels are endless monstrosities, written in turgid prose that doubles as an effective pre-op anesthetic.

Nonetheless, we live in a world where “Be as selfish as you can!” is somehow a mainstream moral theory.

Plenty of great TV shows and movies involve people making tiny bad decisions and then spending the rest of their lives making more and more of them to try to make up for the first one, eventually becoming irredeemable monsters. It’s unlikely any of us will, say, decide to start cooking crystal meth like Walter White in Breaking Bad and one day find ourselves running a New Mexican drug empire. But if guilt is how we police ourselves, we need to allow ourselves to feel that guilt, and we need to listen to our guilty consciences when they give us pause.

The widespread lack of guilt among mask resisters feels like a gut punch, to me. Because again, it’s such a minuscule ask—wearing a mask falls roughly at the “don’t jaywalk” level of individual sacrifice. Imagine we were in that Hot Day Jaywalking scenario from earlier—it’s 103 degrees and the crosswalk is a block away, so we intend to just hustle across the street. Now imagine that someone said: “Hey, I know it’s annoying, but if we all agree to head on down and use the crosswalk instead of jaywalking, we can save a hundred thousand people from dying in auto accidents.” Imagine how easily we’d make that call! Okay, it’s a little hot and a bit inconvenient… but 100,000 people? It’d be one of the simplest calculations we’d ever made. 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.

In a fractured national moment of stress and pain, of inequality and injustice, of ethical strain and Moral Exhaustion, we should go easy on ourselves at moments when we fail in our quest to become better people. But we cannot forget this simple truth: we owe things to each other. They may be small things, or simple things, but they’re there, they’re important, and we can’t ignore them.

Singer wants us to think about Gates differently: not as a man who gave $30 billion to charity, but rather as a man who still has $53 billion, none of which he’s giving to charity. What would we think of a man who has $53 billion2 and gives none of it away? We’d start with “What an ass,” and probably not move much beyond that. But is that fair to Gates? Given, you know, the $30 billion he did give to charity?3

Another complaint about Singer’s worldview is that he’s super not into supporting what we might call “cultural” charities. 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. Again, hard to argue with the logic of that statement, but also: Orchestras are nice!

this line of attack can feel like a cousin of my Saab bumper move: you shouldn’t care about this, because that is so much worse. Oh, you want to give the art museum a hundred bucks? That’s cool. You could literally save twenty human lives with that money, but no, go ahead, staring at a Brancusi sculpture is also important I guess.

Singer’s arguments can be frustrating in their inflexibility. Again, their basic logic is inescapable, and we find ourselves repeatedly butting up against that logic even as we feel that it’s unfair.

We do a lot of dumb stuff that we don’t need to do, and when we do that dumb stuff, we very rarely think about the moral opportunity cost—the other, better things we could be doing instead. Singer’s unrelenting focus on moral opportunity cost is why I love him, buzzkills and all—his uncompromising utilitarianism serves an important function.

Confronting our behavior may be painful and annoying, but it’s also a remedy for apathy, which is the enemy of improvement.

We can hardly hope to hit an Aristotelian mean of civil engagement if we feel no consequences when we underperform.

It’s a second-level ethical dilemma: How do we respond to the unintended ethical dilemmas that sometimes result from our attempts to solve ethical dilemmas?

The most important part of becoming better people, I’ll say yet again, is that we care about whether what we do is good or bad, and therefore try to do the right thing.

Sometimes in philosophy, people throw around the word “heuristic.” A heuristic is a tool that allows us to input a problem and get a solution—a rule of thumb that gives us a guideline for our behavior.

Existentialism, in a hilariously reductive nutshell, believes the following: Human existence is absurd. There is no “higher power” or deity or meaning to be found beyond the fact of that existence, and this condition fills us with dread and anxiety. The movement’s overall goal (though the details vary from writer to writer) was to make sense of what we can do in the face of that absurdity, dread, and anxiety. Even at its height, existentialism was largely misunderstood and criticized.

We’re talking about Jean-Paul Sartre—one of the most famously grim people in history. He named his cat “Nothing.”

In a very short time—really between 1943 and 1945—Sartre had managed to piss off Communists, atheists, and artists, even while being an atheistic novelist who wrote for underground Communist journals. That’s hard to do. This existentialism is powerful stuff.

The religious objection to existentialism doesn’t take much explanation: Sartre completely denies the presence of any omnipotent God that watches over us or judges our actions. To Sartre, we’re born out of nothingness—poof!—and then it’s entirely up to us what we are and do, and then we die—poof!—and that’s it. Nothing “guides” us, we’re not following any playbook from religion or spirituality or anything. All we have, and all we ultimately are, is the choices we make while we’re alive.

“Signs” or “omens” exist only because we choose to see them, and we should never make a decision based on one; or if we do, we should recognize that the sign isn’t making the decision—we are simply choosing to interpret the sign in a way that points to our decision.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.… These two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them.

The complete freedom that existentialists shove down our throats—the insistence that we can’t defend our choices using any external structure—keeps us from using those structures as a crutch.