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

by Michael Schur

And yet here I sit, writing this book, watching the case count for the nation skyrocket because too many people think their own Ayn Randian right to unfettered selfishness outweighs the sum total of literally everyone else’s happiness and safety. It’s one of the reasons Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other struck such a chord with me—the title itself orients us, points us in a certain direction. He notably did not call his book Do We Owe Things to Each Other? He begins his journey with the point of view that we do, certainly, owe things to each other, and the goal is to find out what those things are. In a fractured national moment of stress and pain, of inequality and injustice, of ethical strain and Moral Exhaustion, we should go easy on ourselves at moments when we fail in our quest to become better people. But we cannot forget this simple truth: we owe things to each other. They may be small things, or simple things, but they’re there, they’re important, and we can’t ignore them.