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

by Michael Schur

What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is there something we could do that’s better? Why is it better?

It’s not just that we owe things to other people—ubuntu says we exist through them.

lucky enough that we’re able to do something to make other people’s lives a bit easier, at little or no real cost to our own. There are billions of people for whom that isn’t the case, so we have a duty to pick up the slack. Do a bit more than we’re ethically required to do. Pay back the gods of luck. And if we’re not lucky—if life has dealt us a series of blows that mean our internal batteries are running at 1 percent and we’re barely scraping by, well, we fall back on those contractualist rules—we do whatever we can to address the minimum amount we owe to each other.

(A person incapable of shame, said Aristotle, has no sense of disgrace.)

“Telling a lie,” he writes, “is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth.” In other words, a liar knows the truth and deliberately speaks in opposition to it. A bullshitter, however, is “unconstrained by a concern with truth.” The bullshitter couldn’t care less what the truth is—he wants only to make himself appear a certain way or achieve some effect on the listener.

The point is this: to demand perfection, or to hold people to impossible standards, is to deny the simple and beautiful reality that nobody is perfect.