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

by Michael Schur

In short: being good is impossible, and it was pointless to even try, and we should all just eat hormone-filled cheeseburgers, toss the trash directly into the Pacific Ocean, and give up. That was a fun experiment. What now?

To make it a little less overwhelming, this book hopes to boil down the whole confusing morass into four simple questions that we can ask ourselves whenever we encounter any ethical dilemma, great or small: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is there something we could do that’s better? Why is it better? That’s moral philosophy and ethics2 in a nutshell—the search for answers to those four questions.

Nearly every single thing we do has some ethical component to it, whether we realize it or not. That means we owe it to ourselves to learn what the hell ethics is and how it works, so we don’t screw everything up all the time. We share this planet with other people. Our actions affect those people. If we care at all about those people, we ought to figure out how to make the best decisions we can.

I’m just kidding—we’re still gonna fail all the time. But again, that’s okay! So, let’s start failing. Or, in the words of Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

But to become better people, we need a sturdier answer for why we shouldn’t do it than “because it’s bad.” Understanding an actual ethical theory that explains why it’s bad can then help us make decisions about what to do in a situation that’s less morally obvious than “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?” Which is just about every other situation.

Aristotle says that thing is: happiness. That’s the telos,4 or goal, of being human. His argument for this is pretty solid, I think. There are things we do for some other reason—like, we work in order to earn money, or we exercise in order to get stronger. There are also good things we want, like health, honor, or friendships, because they make us happy. But happiness is the top dog on the list of “things we desire”—it has no aim other than itself. It’s the thing we want to be, just… to be it.

Technically, in the original Greek, Aristotle actually uses the nebulous word “eudaimonia,” which sometimes gets translated as “happiness” and sometimes as “flourishing.”5 I prefer “flourishing,” because that feels like a bigger deal than “happiness.” We’re talking about the ultimate objective for humans here, and a flourishing person sounds like she’s more fulfilled, complete, and impressive than a “happy” person. There are many times when I’m happy, but I don’t feel like I’m flourishing, really.

Aristotle defines virtues as the things that “cause [their] possessors to be in a good state and to perform their functions well.” So, the virtues of a knife are those qualities that make it good at being a knife, and the virtues of a horse are the horse’s inherent qualities that make it good at galloping and other horsey stuff. The human virtues he listed, then, are the things that make us good at being human.