Top Quotes: “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question” — Michael Schur

Introduction

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

— Maya Angelou

“This book hopes to boil down the whole confusing morass into four simple questions that we can ask ourselves whenever we encounter any ethical dilemma, great or small:

What are we doing?

Why are we doing it?

Is there something we could do that’s better?

Why is it better?”

“But there’s a second formulation of the categorical imperative, sometimes called in translation the practical imperative. It adds a rule to Kant’s philosophy that isn’t nearly as difficult to follow:

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.

In other words: don’t use people to get what you want. Lying to our friend does just that — we’re doing it in order to avoid a difficult conversation, or in order to avoid seeming like a jerk. She’s not an end in herself, she’s a means to an end.”

“I cared about the reaction to the deed, and how I might benefit from it. Tipping ceased to be simply the action of tipping – it became a means to an end, and the end was selfish. Buddhist philosophy suggests that true happiness comes from remaining focused on the things we do, and doing them with no purpose other than to do them.”

“It’s not hard to imagine a bad motivation for a good act causing us actual moral trouble at some point. We may start to see the external “rewards” for good deeds as more desirable than the acts themselves, which might then lead to us doing things just for clicks and likes and faves and flattering interviews.”

“I made him an offer: I would donate $836 to the Red Cross’s Katrina relief efforts in his name, and he would go on living with damage to his rear bumper so minimal you needed a high-powered microscope to notice it. He said he’d think it over.”

“I say we allow ourselves these moments of rule-breaking, on two conditions:

First: that the rules we violate are not obviously harmful to other people.

Second: we need to acknowledge that what we’re doing is not ideal. The minimal harm we generate from this small bad action could be compounded if we pretend we’re not doing it, because that might alter the way we think of ourselves, and eventually even change what kind of people we are.

There’s a concept in public policy called the Overton window, named after its inventor, Joseph Overton-Window. An Overton window describes the range of “acceptability” a political idea has at any given time. Some ideas – say, same-sex marriage – begin as extremely unlikely, or even unthinkable. Over time, various factors emerge in the culture – more acceptance of LGBTQ+ people generally, more gay characters on popular TV shows – and the window shifts a little, making same-sex marriage more politically possible. As cultural norms continue to evolve (younger politicians take office, proponents engage in effective activism, people realize that we all have at least one LGBTQ+ person in our social circle), the Overton window shifts with them, until finally the range of possibility described by the window includes same-sex marriage actually being recognized as the law of the land. Something once unthinkable becomes possible, and then eventually it becomes reality.

Regarding our little transgressions, we see the potential problem, right? Overton windows can represent any kind of range, including what we consider acceptable behavior for ourselves. So, we know jaywalking is wrong, but we do it anyway… and then we’ve become “people who occasionally jaywalk.” No big deal. But once that’s true, it’s a short journey to becoming “people who always jaywalk.” Then one day we can’t find a garbage can, and we think, “I mean, tossing a gum wrapper on the ground isn’t that much worse than jaywalking,” so we do that… and soon we’re littering all the time, and since littering is now acceptable we start parking illegally, which shifts our window to allow for stiffing contractors out of pay-ment, and once we do that it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to cheating on our taxes, and then embezzling money, and cheating on our spouses, and smuggling endangered rhinos out of India, and selling black market weapons to international terrorists.

Now. Is this likely? Of course not. That’s a deliberately absurd “what if, like one of those cops in a 1980s PSA warning kids that if they smoke a single cigarette they re on a fast track to heroin addiction. But there’s a serious point here: the shifting of an Overton window often happens gradually, and we readjust to its new range very quickly, so there is risk in allowing ourselves to do any thing we know is bad just because we want to. In fact, even with good intentions and level heads, if we give in to our lesser instincts too often there’s a far more likely outcome than “we become black market weapons dealers.” It’s simply that we become selfish. We start to believe that our own “right” to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, is more important than anything else, and thus our sense of morality concerns only our own happiness or pain. We become… Ayn Rand.”

“Bad Writer, Worse Philosopher

Rand (1905–1982) was a novelist and philosopher who offered her readers the deal of a lifetime. Developing a nineteenth-century idea called “rational egoism” or “rational selfishness,” she suggested that the true path to moral and societal progress involves people caring only about their own happiness. She called her theory “objectivism.” and it’s basically the exact opposite of utilitarianism – instead of trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain for everyone, we do it only for ourselves.”

“This is an amazing philosophy. And not in a good way. If our own happiness is the moral purpose of our lives, that means we’re obligated to maximize it at the expense of everything else, including, and especially, other people’s happiness. In Ayn Rand’s world, there could be a thousand Steves trapped behind that ESPN generator, and I could be the only one watching the World Cup on TV, and I’d still decide to let them all fry because I am happy and they are merely potential hindrances to my happiness. It’s bananas. Here’s my favorite quote of hers, wherein she takes a brave stance against “being nice”:

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others…. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice – which means self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction – which means the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good. Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you…. Any man of self-esteem will answer: No. Altruism says: Yes.

Or, to put it another way: “Fuck all y’all.””

“It’s frankly dispiriting that a woman who advocated radical selfishness and utter disdain for everyone but oneself wasn’t booed off the world stage, but even today Rand has plenty of adherents, especially among those who call themselves libertarians. (There are more than a few Randites in the U.S. Congress – former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan says he asked all of his staffers to read her books, a request which, based on their length and unreadability, may have violated the Geneva Conventions.) I suppose at some level, this shouldn’t be surprising. She is basically telling her readers that the only thing they need to do to be morally pure is greedily protect their own interests. A diet book that claimed you could lose weight by eating pecan pie and drinking Mountain Dew Code Red would definitely sell a few copies. The appeal of her theories to those interested in achieving and maintaining power is certainly more likely to explain her enduring place than is her actual talent – Rand’s novels are endless monstrosities, written in turgid prose that doubles as an effective pre-op anesthetic. As one noted academic put it, “There are only two problems with Ayn Rand: she can’t think and she can’t write.”

“Telecom billionaire John Malone owns more than 2.2 million acres of land in the United States. That means he owns property greater than the size of Delaware plus all of New York City plus Houston. Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle Corporation, got bored a few years ago and bought an entire Hawaiian Island. The people at the far end of the “crazy rich” bell curve don’t inhabit the same planet as you and I, so on the rare occasion when they emerge from whatever James Bond supervillain volcano they live in and interact with the real world, their actions draw intense scrutiny. When wildfires ripped through Australia in 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, announced that his company would pledge $1 million AUD ($690,000 USD) in aid. For this he was roundly, and appropriately, dunked on – people pointed out that Bezos had made that much money every five minutes for the entire year. Then, predictably, people began to review what else Bezos had recently spent his money on. For example, he’d plunked down $42 million to build a clock in a hollowed-out mountain in Texas that was designed to last for ten thousand years. So, $42 million for weirdo futuristic alien super clock…$690,000 to save a continent? Barely a month later, Bezos announced he would donate $10 billion over the next decade to fight climate change, and it’s hard not to see a connection between his public pillorying and his sudden interest in large-scale altruism. (See? Shame can be good!)”

“Singer believes that there is a certain amount of money we need for a basic life – food, shelter, a modicum of entertainment or leisure, and so on. That amount varies depending on our circumstances – how many kids we have, where we live, etc. – but it’s calculable. We can figure out how much we actually need, build in a little pad for savings and medical emergencies and the like, and any amount of money we make beyond that we should give to someone less fortunate. “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.””

“Part of the calculation these folks do, when donating their kidneys, involves the fact that the chances of dying from only having one kidney are roughly 1 in 4,000 – basically the same odds as being killed by a car while riding a bicycle. That means, to them, that by not giving their extra kidney away, they are valuing their own lives as 4,000 times more important than the lives of anonymous strangers.”

“At the top of the food chain we find people like Jeff Bezos and billionaire media impresario David Geffen, who given their wealth (I’d argue) have the greatest responsibility to help other people. Which, when Covid-19 hit, they often did not. Early in the crisis, Amazon started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for its workers, which went over about as well as it had when Bezos tossed $690,000 at Australia to help fight wildfires. A basic calculation shows that Bezos could personally pay all of his 250,000 minimum-wage employees their full yearly salaries and still have about $175 billion left over.”

“The Minneapolis Lakers moved from a place with a lot of lakes to a place with basically none, and now the name Los Angeles Lakers” just makes no sense. The New Orleans Jazz was an appropriate nickname — the Utah Jazz is most certainly not. (Utah is a lovely state with many things to offer. Jazz is not one of those things.)”

“If we can even afford to be asking what we should do here, it probably means we’re pretty lucky people. We have a car full of groceries — and thus a functioning car — and the luxury of posing philosophical questions, instead of having to think only about our health or safety or where we’re going to find our next meal. If we determine that relative to others we’re lucky, which means we can afford to do a little extra, then we should do a little extra. And I don’t mean “Warren Buffett” lucky — just lucky enough that we’re able to do something to make other people’s lives a bit easier, at little or no real cost to our own. There are billions of people for whom that isn’t the case, so we have a duty to pick up the slack. Do a bit more than were ethically required to do. Pay back the gods of luck. And if we’re not lucky — if life has dealt us a series of blows that mean our internal batteries are running at 1 percent and we’re barely scraping by, well, we fall back on those contractualist rules — we do whatever we can to address the minimum amount we owe to each other.”

“You can try this: You can think to yourself, before you do something, “Would it be okay if everyone did this?What would the world be like if every single person were allowed to do whatever I’m about to do?” If that world seems twisted, or unfair, or nonsensical, you should probably do something else.

Or: Think about what you’re about to do, and imagine the result. Think of how many people will be happy, and how many sad, and how happy or sad they’ll be. Think about how soon they’ll be sad or happy, and for how long they’ll be sad or happy. Try to total it all up in your mind, and think about whether what you’re about to do will result in more total sadness or happiness.”