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

by Michael Schur

cows are even happier! Because they’re not dead! You’re doing great today. The New You is crushing it. You take a quick jog around the neighborhood (for health!), help an old lady across the street (for kindness!), watch a documentary (for knowledge!), check the news (for citizenship!), and go to sleep. What a great day. But then you lie in bed, staring at the ceiling. Something’s nagging at you. How much “goodness” did you actually achieve? You feel like you did some good stuff, but then again you also felt like you could pull off wearing a zebra-print fedora to your office holiday party last year, and we all know how that turned out. So now imagine that you can call on some kind of Universe Goodness Accountant to give you an omniscient, mathematical report on how well you did. After she crunches the numbers on your day of good deeds and the receipt unspools from her Definitive Goodness Calculator, she gives you some bad news. That plastic cup you tossed? It’s eventually going to flow into the ocean, joining the Texas-size trash island that’s threatening marine life in the Pacific. (You read about that when you checked the news before bed, but you didn’t think you had anything

to do with it.) The veggie patties were shipped to your local store from someplace very far away, rendering their carbon footprint massive, and the cows you pictured are in fact penned up in a factory farm, because the legal definitions of “organic” and “grass-fed” are embarrassingly loose thanks to shady legislation written by agribusiness lobbyists. The cows aren’t happy. They’re sad. They’re sad cows. It gets worse: The sneakers you wore on your jog were made in a factory where workers are paid four cents an hour. The documentarian who made the film you watched is a weird creep who likes to sniff strangers’ hair on the subway—nice work putting ten bucks in his pocket—and the streaming service you watched it on is part of a multinational conglomerate that also makes killer drones for the North Korean air force. Oh and by the way, that old lady you helped collects Nazi memorabilia. “But she seemed so sweet,” you say. Nope! Secret Nazi. She was actually on her way to buy more Nazi stuff—that’s what you helped her across the street to do. Well, great. Now you’re miserable. You tried to be good, in your own small way, and the world smacked you across the face. You’re also angry. You had good intentions, and at least you put in the effort—shouldn’t that count for something?! And you’re

again, that’s okay! So, let’s start failing. Or, in the words of Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Virtue ethicists define good people as those who have certain qualities, or “virtues,” that they’ve cultivated and honed over time, so that they not only have these qualities but have them in the exact right amount. Seems gettable, right?

important stuff about the most important stuff. If you want to feel bad about yourself and your measly accomplishments, poke around his Wikipedia page. It’s estimated that less than a third of what he actually wrote has survived, but it covers the following subjects: ethics, politics, biology, physics, math, zoology, meteorology, the soul, memory, sleep and dreams, oratory, logic, metaphysics, politics,

cooking, economics, badminton, linguistics, politics, and aesthetics. That list is so long I snuck “politics” in there three times without you even noticing, and you didn’t so much as blink when I claimed he wrote about “badminton,” which definitely didn’t exist in the fourth century BCE. (I also don’t think he ever wrote about cooking, but if you told me Aristotle had once tossed off a four-thousand-word papyrus scroll about how to make the perfect chicken Parm, I wouldn’t blink an eye.) His influence over

Aristotle defines virtues as the things that “cause [their] possessors to be in a good state and to perform their functions well.”

Unfortunately, in Aristotle’s view, no one’s just born inherently and completely virtuous—there’s no such thing as a baby who already possesses sophisticated and refined versions of all of these great qualities.7 But we’re all born with the potential to get them. All people

he writes, “not by a process of nature, but by habituation. . . . We become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.” In other words: we have to practice generosity, temperance, courageousness, and all the other virtues, just like annoying Rob practiced his annoying bagpipes. Aristotle’s

plan requires constant study, maintenance, and vigilance. We may have been born with those starter kits, but if we don’t develop them through habituation—if we just kick back and rely on them as adults—we’re doomed. (That would be like someone saying, “When I was a kid I loved playing with

Socrates taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle, and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great,13 so

indignation.

Golden Means: They Make You Less Annoying!

We’ll understand and adapt to any new situation, able to see and decipher the very foundational code of human existence—like Neo at the end of The Matrix.

Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, she tells us that “ ‘knowledge makes men gentle,’ just as ignorance hardens us.” This is an idea Aristotle would like, I think. The more we try to learn and understand the lives being led by other people—the more we search for a golden mean of empathy—the less we will find it permissible to treat them with cruelty.

oozes disdain.

lacuna

congeal

When we’re first confronted with one of these situations—a friend bought an ugly shirt to wear to a job interview, say, and asks us for our opinion—we might do a couple of consequentialist calculations:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. We need to really take that in, because it’s arguably the most famous sentence in Western philosophical thought.

“Act out of a duty to follow a universal maxim.” No exceptions!

Kantian deontology is the exact opposite of utilitarianism;6 to that point, while all of utilitarian ethics was based on maximizing happiness, Kant thought “happiness” was irrelevant.

tenet

ubuntu.

dharma.

ideal of being human.”

A person is a person through other people.

ubuntu says we exist through them. Their

Aristotelian bell—“magnanimity, sharing, kindness”—but the emphasis is now on the communal instead of the individual. In 2006, Nelson Mandela was asked to define ubuntu and said this:

In the old days, when we were young, a traveler to our country would stop in our village, and he didn’t have to

ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, and attend to him. That is one aspect of ubuntu, but it [has] various aspects. . . . Ubuntu does not mean that people should not enrich themselves. The question, therefore, is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?9

So. Why should we return the shopping cart to the shopping cart rack? Because it helps other people, and we are only people through other people. Living in our world, going about our days with our own problems and annoyances and issues to deal with, it’s easy (and tempting) to remain trapped in our little brains and to only do stuff that improves our lives or eases our own pains. But . . . come on, that stinks. We’re not alone here o...

The individual does not and cannot exist alone. . . . He owes his existence to other people including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole. . . . Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the

whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say, “I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.”

Understanding the limits of required virtue can give us a North Star by which we can navigate: Exactly how good do we have to be, practically speaking, before we’ve achieved

This is that “happiness pump” idea, rephrased: Wolf describes it as a person whose default setting is not “self-preservation,” but rather “other-preservation.” It’s the ego turned inside out. When we think of it that way, it doesn’t sound so terrible—it even echoes ubuntu—but in order to achieve this moral sainthood we’d have to do this all the time, in every scenario, which essentially renders the idea impossible. If we were having lunch with our best friend, Carl, and across the street a woman got frustrated by a malfunctioning parking meter, we would have to leap up and rush to help her . . . unless doing so made Carl upset, because he was right in the middle of an emotional story about his ongoing troubles with his sister, and thus the act

oboe,

self-abnegates to

The soldier with too much courage will become rash and stupid, charging over a hill and trying to take on an entire army by herself, while the one with no courage will wet his pants at the first sign of trouble and abandon his fellow soldiers. The ideal amount of every virtue, again, is that theoretical perfect balance between excess and deficiency. So

other gains the upper hand? The teams are vices—like cowardice and rashness—

So the golden mean actually demands that we exhibit some amount of mildly “vice-like” behavior in order to maintain our virtuous balance. The person seeking the golden mean of courage, for example, has to occasionally stir in a little cowardice, because if she doesn’t, she may become too rash.

I believe my own worst faults are: impatience, recklessness, excessive bluntness, emotional extremes and vindictiveness. But Aristotle’s idea of . . . “the golden mean” explains that all these are fine in moderation—people who are never impatient don’t get things done; people who never take risks live limited lives; people who evade the truth and do not express pain or joy at all are psychologically and emotionally stunted or deprived; and people who have no desire whatsoever to get even with those who have damaged them are either deluding themselves or have too low an estimate of their own worth.

adjacent,