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

by Michael Schur

For starters, how do we know what’s excessive or deficient? How do we know when we’re angry in the right amount, for the right reasons, at the right people? This is the most common criticism of virtue ethics: So, we just need to work and study and strive and practice, and somehow magically obtain this theoretical “perfect” amount of every quality, which is impossible to define or measure? Cool plan. Even Aristotle has a hard time precisely describing a mean sometimes. Regarding mildness, he writes, “It is hard to define how, against whom, about what, and how long we should be angry, and up to what point someone is acting correctly or in error.” And then he shrugs: “This much is at least clear: the intermediate state is to be praised, and… the excesses and deficiencies are to be blamed.” The entire system can seem a little like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment on “hard-core” pornography—that although he couldn’t actually define it, “I know it when I see it.” That may seem like a tenuous basis for an entire ethical system. And yet: We kind of get it, right? We can probably all remember a time we got furious at someone or something, and later thought: “Ehhhh, I probably got too angry there.” Or maybe a time when we let something go, and then felt like we should’ve raised our voice a bit louder. If we take the time to mull over what we’ve done, if we really commit to examining both our own actions and the actions of those around us, we can eventually come to understand ...