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

by Michael Schur

That means the kind of capital-H Happiness he’s talking about has to involve rational thought and virtues of character, and not just, to give one example off the top of my head, the NBA Finals and a Costco bucket of peanut butter cookies.

First, those people are dirty liars, because there is no way to achieve higher-level enjoyment from running, because there’s no way to achieve any enjoyment from running, because there is nothing enjoyable about running. Running is awful, and no one should ever do it unless they’re being chased by a bear. And second, Aristotle’s flourishing, to me, is a sort of “runner’s high” for the totality of our existence—it’s a sense of completeness that flows through us when we are nailing every aspect of being human.

The categorical imperative states that we can’t just find rules that tell us how we ought to behave—we have to find rules that we could imagine everyone else following too. Before we do something, we have to determine what would happen if everyone did it; and if a world in which everyone did it would be all screwed up, that means we’re not allowed to do it.

Philippa Foot was actually addressing this exact point in her original paper—it has to do with the doctrine of double effect, a philosophical idea that goes all the way back to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Basically, it means that an outcome can be more or less morally permissible depending on whether you actually intended it to happen when you acted—like, when we kill someone in self-defense, we intended only to save our own innocent life, and the result was that someone else died. If we pull the lever intending to deliberately smoosh a guy . . . not so great.

We don’t just owe things to people—we owe our whole freaking existence to them. And when we think of “other people” that way, well, we’re not going to stop at the minimal amount that we “owe to each other”—we’re gonna damn well return the shopping cart to the rack if we think it eases the burden of those around us.

Descartes saw his own singular consciousness as proof of existence. Practitioners of ubuntu see our existence as conditional on others’ existence.

When we’re trying to become better people, we should remember how powerful the simple act of conversation can be, to help us navigate these choppy waters.

Revisiting the incident, I also better understand the true power of Julia Annas’s quote: “The result [of practicing something] is a speed and directness of response comparable to that of mere habit, but unlike it in that the lessons learned have informed it and rendered it flexible and innovative.”

the work of making better choices is frequently annoying. We just have to accept that. And two: it can be done—if we want to do it, and can summon the time and energy to make it happen.

The formula is simple,” he wrote in another New York Times Magazine article from 1999, “whatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.”

the simple act of asking ourselves: What am I doing? Is there something better I could be doing? Confronting our behavior may be painful and annoying, but it’s also a remedy for apathy, which is the enemy of improvement.

seems like every time we think we’ve made a good decision, even if we’ve researched the issue and feel we’ve gone with the best option, someone writes an article explaining why we’re actually Part of the Problem.

“This is the way it’s always been done” is the last defense of the true ignoramus. The amount of time something has been done is not, by itself, a good reason to keep doing it. By relying solely on precedent and failing to critically examine the problems that precedent might create for us, we’re basically just flipping the middle finger to the idea of progress, or finding ways to be better people.7 We’re actively not trying to be better, and worse, we’re seeing the not-trying as a virtue. This benefits no one.

The most important part of becoming better people, I’ll say yet again, is that we care about whether what we do is good or bad, and therefore try to do the right thing.

1. I love this thing. 2. The person who made it is troubling. Forgetting about (1) means we lose a piece of ourselves. Forgetting about (2) means we are denying that this thing causes us (and others) anguish, and thus we’re failing to show concern for the victims of awful behavior.

Existentialism, in a hilariously reductive nutshell, believes the following: Human existence is absurd. There is no “higher power” or deity or meaning to be found beyond the fact of that existence, and this condition fills us with dread and anxiety. The movement’s overall goal (though the details vary from writer to writer) was to make sense of what we can do in the face of that absurdity, dread, and anxiety.

Existentialism is a little like when your parents yelled at you when you were fifteen because you did something stupid, saying “You’re a grown-up! You’re responsible for your actions!” except in this case it’s a French philosopher yelling at you, and his conclusions deny the existence of God.

For Sartre, life with no God to create systemic order for humanity may indeed be disturbing, but it’s also freeing. Without commandments we have to follow, or “meaning” to be found in religion, or national identity, or your parents being dentists and demanding you become a dentist too, or anything else, we’re truly free—in like a big-picture, eagle-eye-view-of-everything way—to choose what we are. “Signs” or “omens” exist only because we choose to see them, and we should never make a decision based on one; or if we do, we should recognize that the sign isn’t making the decision—we are simply choosing to interpret the sign in a way that points to our decision.

But—and this is kind of tricky—when we make our choices, we’re actually making them for all people.3 Yeah. Wrap your head around that for a second. When we choose to do things, says Sartre, we’re creating an image of a person as they should be, which can then be viewed and followed by everyone else. Here Sartre weirdly converges with Kant, because he wants us to ask ourselves, “What would happen if everyone did what I am doing?” He wants us to determine our own morality but also model that morality for everyone else. This might seem like a contradiction: There’s no God, no “meaning” to the universe, no guidebook to follow, everyone can make whatever choices he wants . . . but also those choices should be a model for everyone else? Then, we might ask, wouldn’t thinking of yourself as a model for others be in conflict with the idea that everyone makes choices for herself, not following any external guide or rulebook? But don’t worry, there’s a good reason that this seems like a contradiction: it’s a contradiction. It’s honestly a little unclear how Sartre maintains all of these ideas simultaneously, or even why he would want to. He did sympathize with the Communists in postwar Europe, so maybe his political beliefs seeped in a bit here as he tried to find a way that humans were connected to each other? All I know is, people have been writing about this contradiction for seventy years, so the odds I untangle it in this paragraph are . . . slim.

And yet, for all the anguish it entails, Sartre believed, about existentialism, that “no doctrine is more optimistic.” The way Sartre puts it, in his trademark “everything I say is kind of terrifying, even when I’m trying to reassure you” style, is this: “Man is condemned to be free.” We have no crutches, or “reasons” to do whatever we choose to do, except that we have chosen to do them. (And I know what you’re thinking—what if I just don’t choose anything? No go. “If I decide not to choose, that still constitutes a choice,” he says.4) The “optimistic” thing about this condition, for him, is that “man’s destiny lies within himself.” If we embrace the idea that all we are is our choices, we are forced to freely make any choice we want, whenever we want. We have no other option—there’s no other way out of this anguish-filled mess. All of which makes existentialists super fun at parties.

So here we are, two hundred pages deep in this book, having learned all about deontology and utilitarianism and contractualism and virtue ethics and a bunch of other stuff, and along comes a morose Frenchman to tell us that there’s no God and people define themselves through action and we have to just make decisions with no guidance except “the essential anguish of our own existence” or something. He’s telling us that Kant and Bentham and Scanlon and Aristotle are about as helpful to our moral lives as a coin flip. Should we listen to him, and junk all these other theories?

Camus’s existentialist musings are also even more stripped down and intense than Sartre’s. As I mentioned earlier, Sartre did some (kind of contradictory) work to make his philosophy compatible with Communist political movements in postwar France; Camus didn’t care about that. Sartre thought we should perform actions that could serve as models for others; Camus didn’t care about that either. His existentialism is like a balsamic reduction of Sartre’s—sharper, more intense, more potent. In fact, Camus actually claimed repeatedly that he wasn’t an existentialist, but come on, dude, yes you were. I mean, look at you:

Camus broke down his version of existentialism (which, again, he denied it was, blah blah blah) this way: Humans desire meaning from the universe, but the universe is cold and indifferent and denies us that meaning; in fact, nothing “means” anything, really, or at least nothing is more “meaningful” than anything else. So we’re just little specks of nothingness on a big dumb rock floating in space, desperately searching for something we’ll never find, and thus, the human condition is fundamentally absurd.

We can acknowledge the fundamental absurdity of the human condition, and just kind of exist within it! I added the exclamation point to try to hide how bleak a sentence that is. But for Camus, that’s the only real answer.

The only way to cope with our desire for meaning inside an empty, pointless universe is to recognize how absurd it is that we exist in an empty, pointless universe and still desire meaning. He wants us to stand in the middle of the hurricane of absurdity, neither denying it nor allowing it to defeat us.

Camus says that Sisyphus’s existence was made deliberately and inexorably absurd, which means it’s all Sisyphus can think about, and thus he understands how absurd it is, and therefore it frees him from the distracting illusion of meaning: there is only this singular task, this one struggle. Camus concludes, in a sentence that has been rocking the worlds of college freshmen for seventy years: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Sartre’s existentialism: we choose to act, and the choices are ours and ours alone. And there’s a comfort, sometimes, in Camus’s existentialism: just being human often feels ridiculous, and true happiness may come from accepting that ridiculousness as inescapable. Both men also encourage us not to dwell on our mistakes. Okay, we blew it. Next time: don’t.

If Aristotle tells us to keep trying different things in order to find the bullseye of virtue, existentialists say: keep making choices, because choices are all we have in our absurd, meaningless universe.

We’ll deal with this in greater detail in the next chapter, but it’s relevant here: the choices we make may be our own, but the life into which we’re born, and many of the events that befall us after that, are things we often have little or no control over.

These people (usually heterosexual, rich, white men, with a bookshelf full of Ayn Rand novels) conveniently forget that for a meritocracy to work—for a society to properly value and celebrate hard work and individual success—the people within the society need to start from the same point of origin.

Now consider this: What if I—now an adult television writer with plenty of money and a nice house and no cute little starving French urchins to feed—steal a loaf of bread, just . . . because? Kant would say the two actions—Jean Valjean stealing bread and me stealing bread—are the same, because both violate the same universal maxim. Sartre might agree—we both simply made a choice. But I would say that when Jean Valjean stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, he was courageous, valiant, self-sacrificing, and generous, whereas when I did it I was just a rich asshole who stole a loaf of bread for no reason. My crime would be worse.

It’s okay to admit that part of what they have is due to luck. It doesn’t diminish their achievements. It simply acknowledges that we all owe part of our success to chance, and celebrates those smart and capable and talented enough to capitalize on the breaks that go their way.

Rawls wants to propose them before we’re out in the world, walking around and doing stuff—because if we make rules before we know what we’ll all become, we’ll all surely agree to them.

If we’re lucky enough to live on this planet for more than a couple of years, we’re condemned to cause damage to people we love, people we don’t even know, and everyone in between.

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.

One of the great ironies of aging is that every ten years or so, you look back on the person you were ten years before and shudder—at the mistakes you made, at your immaturity and thickheadedness—and then you breathe a sigh of relief that you’re so much smarter and more mature now.

Honestly, as far as “guides to life” go, I don’t think anyone’s beaten that in the 2,400 years since. Know thyself—think about who you are, check in with yourself when you do things to see if you’ve made good decisions, remember what you value and care about, understand your integrity, and live a life consistent with that integrity. Nothing in excess—because too much (or too little) of anything will screw you up.

The word “buffalo” written out eight times in a row creates a complete and grammatically correct sentence.