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

Schur suggests that most people agree that it’s wrong to punch a friend in the face without any reason. More difficult is explaining why it is right or wrong to do something. Moral philosophers attempt to do just that, and Schur plans to explore three broad categories of moral philosophy, starting with virtue ethics, which was pioneered by Aristotle, an influential Ancient Greek polymath.

In his writing on ethics, Aristotle sought to explain what qualities make a person good. To Aristotle, the goal of human life was eudaimonia, which is typically translated as “flourishing” or “happiness.” Such flourishing is more than just physical pleasure and involves a high level of personal satisfaction. To achieve such a state, Aristotle argues, a person must attain key attributes, or virtues, such as courage and honesty. He compares people to knives, which must have certain qualities, such as sharpness, to be effective.

Aristotle next considers how to achieve these virtues. He explains that no one is born with them, but everyone has the potential to develop them through practice and habituation. Schur compares the process to the training undergone by professional musicians and athletes, who may have natural talent but must develop it through hard work. Crucially, Aristotle suggests that it is possible to develop qualities even if we were not born with any particular strength in that area. In such cases, finding a skilled guide or teacher is essential.

Aristotle’s next point, which Schur describes as “the slipperiest, and most elegant, and the most infuriating” part of Aristotle’s ethical theory (31), has to do with knowing whether we have achieved any particular virtue. According to Aristotle, each virtue exists on a continuum ranging from too much to too little; the key is to find the perfect balance between the two extremes, such as anger and mildness. Though Aristotle did not use the term, this concept is widely referred to as the “golden mean” today. Under this view, punching a friend for no reason is bad because it demonstrates excessive anger; similarly, Schur reflects that he is sometimes too rules oriented when a more laidback attitude might better. Schur compares the refined flexibility that results from pursuing Aristotelian virtues to the ease with which an experienced comedian can improvise under changing circumstances.

Schur concludes by drawing on the work of Latvian philosopher Judith Shklar, who suggested that cruelty should be viewed as the worst quality or type of behavior. With this context, even if someone does something wrong, that still doesn’t give us the right to punch that person.

Schur opens by describing a hypothetical situation: Suppose you are driving a trolley down a track, and the brakes fail. Ahead of you are five construction workers who will be run over and killed by the trolley. However, you can pull a lever to move to another track, killing just one person instead of five. The question is whether you should pull the lever, and most people agree that you should.

Known as the trolley problem, this thought experiment introduced by Philippa Foot in 1967 has gone through variations to become widely influential. One variation places the viewer above the trolley on a bridge next to a man who is large enough to stop the trolley, posing the question of whether it would be right to push him onto the tracks to save the construction workers. Another variant asks whether a doctor would be justified in killing an innocent bystander to provide life-saving organ transplants for five other people. Most people agree that it would be wrong to push the man off the bridge or to kill the bystander, even though the results are essentially the same as in the earlier example with the lever.

Schur now introduces the next major school of philosophical thought: utilitarianism, as developed by British philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism is a subset of consequentialism, which evaluates actions by their results. According to Bentham, the best actions are those that make the greatest number of people the happiest. Bentham suggests that we should analyze each action in terms of how “intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure” the pleasures and pains it produces are (47).

As useful and attractive as this theory sometimes is, Schur illustrates some of its weaknesses as well. As an example, he presents a hypothetical situation: Suppose an electrician named Steve is injured and repeatedly shocked while working on a transformer during the broadcast of a World Cup soccer match. Rescuing Steve would require shutting down the broadcast, causing millions of viewers discomfort. From a utilitarian standpoint, Steve should be left suffering until the broadcast is over. Some utilitarians attempt to sidestep this issue by factoring in the sadness that many people would later feel after hearing about Steve’s plight, but Schur suggests this is “a total cop-out” (49).

Another problem centers on the difficulty of understanding the way that choices affect outcomes. For instance, if a group of teachers offers a large marshmallow as a reward for good academic performance, some students may conclude that their teachers are “irredeemable goobers” and study harder to make up for their teachers’ incompetence, leading to higher grades in spite of, not because of, the marshmallow initiative. In the same way, many actions have difficult-to-predict consequences, making utilitarian analysis impossible.

Another critique of utilitarianism comes from British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who pointed out that since every individual is different, so are their desires and pathways to pleasure. British philosopher Bernard Williams expanded on this critique with a thought experiment: Suppose that a vacationer stumbles across a town where the sheriff shoots 10 people each week. The sheriff offers to reduce the weekly death count to one, provided that the vacationer fires the shot. Utilitarianism would suggest that the vacationer should agree to this arrangement, effectively denying individuals’ responsibilities for their own actions.

Schur concludes with a reminder of the strengths of utilitarianism. In cases such as disaster or pandemic response, a utilitarian approach to distributing limited resources seems most fair (58).