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

by Michael Schur

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. Scanlon published his book in 1998, but if he were writing it now, I bet he’d have a lot to say about those dopes. 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. I said before that contractualism can quickly and effectively identify behavior that feels unreasonable or selfish—well, every time I see a video where someone screams that wearing a mask in this Taco Bell is a form of oppression, my first thought is: “You’re being unreasonable, and I reject your rule.” (For someone practicing ubuntu, of course, suggesting that we don’t all have to wear a mask would be ludicrous; the main function o...