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

by Michael Schur

“To put cruelty first,” she writes, is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God.… However, cruelty—the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear—is a wrong done entirely to another creature.

When we think only of religious “sins” as the ultimate bad stuff we want to avoid, we end up manufacturing justifications for horrible atrocities; her example is the European conquerors coming to the “New World,” encountering its Indigenous peoples, and rationalizing genocide as the will of a Christian God. If we elevate cruelty—transgressions against other humans—to the top of the “worst crimes we can commit” list, we can no longer find and exploit any such loopholes.

Act only out of duty to follow a universal maxim Derive these maxims using your pure reason Happiness is irrelevant

But deontology also creates new problems for us. Chief among them: when we replace feeling and individual judgment with strict universal laws that we have to discern and then follow, it can take a very long time to figure out what the hell to do. Sometimes, behaving ethically can be a “trust your gut” type of exercise, and Kant is here to tell us our guts are stupid and we shouldn’t listen to them.

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.

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 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.

The mindful action—the doing of a thing with no intention but to do it—provides greater calm and joy.

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.

“This is the way it’s always been done” is the last defense of the true ignoramus. The amount of time something has been done is not, by itself, a good reason to keep doing it. By relying solely on precedent and failing to critically examine the problems that precedent might create for us, we’re basically just flipping the middle finger to the idea of progress, or finding ways to be better people.

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 most important conclusion it leads him to is this: if there’s no giant structure that fills the world with any kind of meaning before or after we exist, then: “Man is responsible for what he is.”

So Sisyphus has to complete this same ridiculous task over and over forever—so what? “The workman of today,” he points out, “works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.”

And in the case of Sisyphus, “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.” Camus says that Sisyphus’s existence was made deliberately and inexorably absurd, which means it’s all Sisyphus can think about, and thus he understands how absurd it is, and therefore it frees him from the distracting illusion of meaning: there is only this singular task, this one struggle. Camus concludes, in a sentence that has been rocking the worlds of college freshmen for seventy years: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

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.

If Aristotle tells us to keep trying different things in order to find the bullseye of virtue, existentialists say: keep making choices, because choices are all we have in our absurd, meaningless universe.

People don’t choose to be put in many situations that they’re in—they’re just in them, and those situations often force them to make other choices that in a more forgiving (or at least neutral) world they wouldn’t make.

Rawls says that we ought to decide the rules for our society from what he calls the “original position”—meaning ideally, we’d all decide how we would divvy up things like salaries and resources for our society before we knew which role we were going to play in that society. We’d conceive of these rules from behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding who we’re all going to become—it’s like deciding what the rules will be for grown-up humans, back when we’re all embryos. This, he says, guarantees a decently just world, and further guarantees that we’ll all think of it as just. “Certain principles of justice,” he writes, “are justified because they would be agreed to in an initial situation of equality.”

The bullshitter has only one goal: to make the listener think of him as a certain kind of person, whether it be a patriot, a moral avatar, a sensitive and caring soul, or whatever else advances his personal interests.