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

by Michael Schur

But it’s not always easy to determine what is good or bad in this confusing, pretzel-twisty world,

Aristotle says that thing is: happiness. That’s the telos,4 or goal, of being human.

Aristotle actually uses the nebulous word “eudaimonia,” which sometimes gets translated as “happiness” and sometimes as “flourishing.”5

If we want to flourish, we need to attain virtues. Lots of them. In precise amounts and proportions.

we become virtuous by doing virtuous things.

flourishing, you see, doesn’t just require us to identify and then acquire all of these virtues—it requires that we have every one in the exact right amount.

“To put cruelty first,” she writes, is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God. . . . However, cruelty—the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear—is a wrong done entirely to another creature.

“ ‘knowledge makes men gentle,’ just as ignorance hardens us.”

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.

Kant holds humans in the highest possible regard and rejects any action that demeans them or turns them into tools used to achieve some other goal.

It means that the people around me are considering the lives and feelings of others, and I believe that consideration to be the glue that holds society together.

If we’re able, we should move beyond the “minimum requirements” of contractualism and do that small amount of extra work.

A person is a person through other people.

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.

“I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.”

when people are shamed, they may not want to change their behavior—often, their defenses go up and they dig in their heels, which can have the opposite effect that we want it to have.

failure is the inevitable result of caring about morality and trying to be good people.

if guilt is how we police ourselves, we need to allow ourselves to feel that guilt, and we need to listen to our guilty consciences when they give us pause.

One: 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 simple act of asking ourselves: What am I doing? Is there something better I could be doing?

just being human often feels ridiculous, and true happiness may come from accepting that ridiculousness as inescapable.

Few of these philosophies grapple with the plain fact that moral choices are a lot harder for some of us than they are for others, depending on our circumstances.

The fundamental problem with applying the same ethical theories equally to all people is that all people aren’t living equal lives.

He wasn’t interested in trying to maximize overall happiness in the world as it stands, but rather wanted to design a society that every member would theoretically sign up for, with the comfort of knowing it would be relatively just.

Doing something wrong hurts. It stinks. It’s embarrassing.

Feeling private guilt is one thing; apologizing compounds that guilt with the shame of a public admission.

The ickiness we feel when we apologize—the flushed-face shame that comes from admitting fault to a person we’ve wronged—is good. It means we feel the pain we’ve caused, and we care that we caused it.

Frankfurt aims to distinguish bullshit from lying. “Telling a lie,” he writes, “is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth.” In other words, a liar knows the truth and deliberately speaks in opposition to it. A bullshitter, however, is “unconstrained by a concern with truth.” The bullshitter couldn’t care less what the truth is—he wants only to make himself appear a certain way or achieve some effect on the listener.

We simply hope that whoever we’ve wronged will recognize our sincere regret and our desire to be a little better today than we were yesterday.

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.

Know thyself.

Nothing in excess.

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.