How to Be Perfect

By Michael Schur

10 min read

Why does it matter? Because "just try to be good" is actually terrible advice.

You spend one afternoon actually trying. You take the subway instead of the Uber, buy the fair-trade coffee, tip twenty percent, sign a climate petition on your lunch break. Then an omniscient accountant runs the real numbers: the fair-trade certification was last audited in 2019 by a firm the coffee company hired. The subway runs on a coal-heavy grid. The petition platform harvested your contact information and sold it to a pharmaceutical lobbying group. You held the door for a stranger. He owns seventeen rental units and just donated to a campaign against rent control.

The problem isn't your character. The problem is that moral life in the modern world is structurally entangled in ways that make even sincere effort insufficient — and the greatest philosophical minds in history have been arguing about what to do about it for 2,400 years. What follows is their best case so far. It won't solve everything. But it will change how you fail.

Even Your Best Day of Doing Good Might Be a Moral Disaster — That's the Actual Problem

The streaming service you subscribe to is owned by a conglomerate. The conglomerate has defense contracts. Follow those far enough and, Schur argues, you'll find yourself connected to drone manufacturing for North Korea. You watched a great show last night, paid your monthly fee, and somewhere in the accounting that fee becomes a rounding error in a weapons budget. You had no idea. You couldn't have.

Modern life is entangled enough that almost any consumer choice, followed far enough upstream, leads somewhere uncomfortable. That's not bad luck — it's the structure. The gap between intending good and doing good isn't a character flaw; it's a feature of a world too complex to see whole. You're not a bad person for missing it. You're a person trying to navigate something that doesn't make trying easy.

Michael Schur, creator of The Good Place, spent years with philosophy professors working through exactly this problem. His answer isn't a rulebook — rulebooks assume clean outcomes are available if you just follow the steps, which is the first mistake. What philosophy offers instead is a way to think clearly when you face a choice, and something to learn from when you get it wrong.

Getting it wrong, he insists, is the whole point — as long as you care enough to ask why. Samuel Beckett put it with characteristic bleakness: try again, fail again, fail better. That's not resignation. It's the only honest description of what moral progress actually looks like.

Goodness Is a Skill You Practice, Not a Rule You Follow

No one becomes a great musician by memorizing a chord chart. You become one by playing, badly, then less badly, then occasionally well, until your fingers know what to do before your brain has finished asking. Aristotle had the same idea about ethics, which is why his system is still the most honest account of how moral character actually develops.

His starting point is that the goal of human life isn't to follow a set of rules — it's to flourish. The Greek word is eudaimonia, and Schur translates it as flourishing rather than happiness because happiness sounds like what you feel eating a sleeve of cookies during the NBA Finals, whereas flourishing describes something larger: a person who is genuinely nailing the full project of being human.

Getting there requires virtues, the qualities that make us good at being human the way sharpness makes a knife good at cutting. Courage, generosity, mildness. Virtues aren't switches you flip. They exist on a spectrum, with too little on one end and too much on the other, and the goal is to land exactly in the middle. Aristotle calls this the golden mean.

Take anger. Too little and you stand there watching a bully victimize someone, too dulled to object. Too much and you dropkick the bully into a pond, then his family, then set the house on fire. The virtue — what Aristotle calls "mildness" — is the precise point between those two disasters. And that point cannot be looked up. It has to be found through practice, failure, and honest self-examination.

No rulebook can give you that. Julia Annas describes the result of sustained practice as "flexible and innovative" response, the easy confidence of someone who has lived inside a question long enough to know where the edges are. Closer to improv comedy than instruction-following. You've rehearsed so deeply that any new situation gets a good answer, because you've internalized how to find one. That's what "fail better" was pointing at all along: not a pep talk, but a method.

Every Major Ethical Theory Is Right Until the Trolley Shows Up

Jim is on vacation in a small foreign town when he turns a corner and finds the local sheriff, Pete, pointing a gun at ten residents lined up against a wall. Pete explains cheerfully: around here, they execute ten people a week as a reminder of who's in charge. But since Jim is a guest, Pete will deal. If Jim shoots just one local himself, the other nine go free.

The utilitarian math is immediate: one death versus nine. Shoot. Any calculator says shoot. And yet Bernard Williams, the British philosopher who invented this scenario, points out that the calculation erases the person it most concerns — Jim. He left his hotel for a walk. He had no part in Pete's philosophy. Now he's being asked to fire a gun into a human being's chest in cold blood to satisfy a ratio. Utilitarianism has no answer, because it doesn't see Jim. It sees nine and one and arithmetic.

Williams had a word for what the theory ignores: integrity. Not honesty, but wholeness. The sense that each person is responsible for what they do, not for what results when someone else forces a choice on them. Pete's murders are Pete's. If Jim pulls the trigger to stop them, that shooting is Jim's, regardless of what the ledger says.

That's what the Trolley Problem actually tests: not which answer is correct, but which framework breaks first under pressure. Utilitarianism breaks here. It gives you the answer fast and ignores everything that makes the answer monstrous.

Kantian deontology, the rule-following framework, breaks differently. Its core rule: never lie, because a world where everyone lies destroys the possibility of communication. Fine principle. Then a polite murderer knocks on your door and asks if your brother Jeff is home. Kant says you cannot lie to him. Sorry, Jeff.

Neither framework is wrong about what it sees. Utilitarianism correctly insists that outcomes matter and that everyone's suffering counts equally. Kant correctly insists that how you act, not just what results, defines your moral character. The cracks aren't flaws to fix. They're the shape of the problems that remain. Knowing where a theory breaks is the most useful thing it can tell you.

You Probably Don't Have to Return the Shopping Cart — But You Really Should

Do you have to return the shopping cart after loading your groceries? It's forty yards away. There might be an employee whose job is collecting carts. Nobody's watching.

T.M. Scanlon gives you a clean answer. His framework, contractualism, asks you to design rules any reasonable person could accept. "Reasonable" has a specific meaning: you constrain your interests to the same degree others constrain theirs. Run the shopping cart through this filter: if the store employs a cart-collector, you probably don't have to. No reasonable person rejects the rule "leave the cart if someone's paid to retrieve it."

Scanlon's framework is a floor, not a ceiling. Forty yards of walking saves a worker a trip, stocks a rack for the next shopper, and spares a door ding — real good at near-zero cost.

The Southern African concept of ubuntu goes further, and it starts from a different premise. Its core formulation: I am, because we are. Mandela described it through a traveler arriving hungry in a village: nobody waits to be asked. Food and water appear because the traveler's hunger is the village's hunger. That's not charity — that's the baseline. Descartes grounded existence in private consciousness: I think, therefore I am. Ubuntu makes existence relational. The shopping cart isn't a debt you're calculating whether to repay; it's part of what you are. Which is why, once you actually believe it, the calculation disappears.

Moral Perfection Would Leave You With No Victorian Novels, No Oboe, and One Kidney

Imagine an ethical rule with no off switch — a moral obligation that generates new moral obligations as soon as you satisfy the last one. This is not a hypothetical. It's what happens the moment you take strict consequentialism seriously.

You find a five-dollar bill. Easy call: donate it to buy a mosquito net that gets a child through malaria season in sub-Saharan Africa. Five dollars, one life saved. Flush with satisfaction, you notice your bank balance: $3,000. You've already paid rent, your job is stable, and $3,000 would buy 600 more mosquito nets. So you wire it. Then you sell the furniture you don't use, the clothes you never wear, the car you don't technically need. Then the house. You move in with a friend. And then the math surfaces: you have two kidneys, and you only need one.

Susan Wolf had a name for this chain: the "moral saint" problem. A moral saint cannot read Victorian novels, or learn the oboe, or spend a Sunday afternoon on a complicated French pastry, because those hours could be feeding the hungry instead. The result, Wolf notes with elegant dryness, is someone "dull-witted or humorless or bland." Worse: if everyone tried to maximize others' happiness, everyone would stand around waiting for someone else to need something. Total happiness falls. The system defeats itself at scale.

So sainthood is the wrong target. But accepting that carries a temptation: slide all the way back to whatever you were doing before and call it fine. That's the oscillation — impossible standard, meet comfortable inertia.

Philosopher and effective altruism advocate Peter Singer threads it. His argument isn't "give away everything above subsistence." It's a shoulder tap: tap tap tap. There are children in metaphorical ponds at this moment, and the reason most of us aren't helping isn't incapacity — it's that the ponds aren't in front of our faces. The tap doesn't demand sainthood. It demands that you not forget. Wolf sets the ceiling; Singer keeps the floor honest. Holding both without collapsing the tension into comfort is the livable corridor.

Small Ethical Lapses Are Fine — Unless You Stop Noticing Them

Does it matter if you bend a rule when no one's watching and no one's hurt?

Trying to live ethically is genuinely exhausting — environmentally optimal toothpaste, worst social media companies, labor-friendly clothing brands, all stacked on top of car repairs, family crises, and dying device batteries. Running that depleted, letting a small rule slide feels less like moral failure and more like survival.

When it's 103 degrees and the crosswalk is a full block away and there's no traffic, jaywalking isn't a catastrophe. Small transgressions under genuine strain are understandable. Whether you notice them is everything.

Consider Deb, a commuter who casually parkours onto a packed trolley without paying. She's invisible to everyone inside; no one's journey is affected. Good-deed Deb (who earlier stopped a mugging) acknowledges the lapse and intends to pay next time. Her sense of acceptable behavior barely shifts. Bad-habit Deb, whose previous offenses include stealing candy from children, feels nothing. Her personal range of what she's allowed to do quietly expands, and each expansion makes the next one feel normal.

That drift, not the free ride itself, is the danger. Schur calls it the Overton window for your own moral life: the boundary between "things I do" and "things I wouldn't do" is permeable, and it moves based on what you allow yourself to notice. Give it a decade of unnoticed lapses and you end up with someone who doesn't feel the window moving anymore — because it already moved. The lapse was fine. Forgetting you lapsed is how you become someone who treats their own happiness as the only moral consideration that counts.

The Luck You Were Born With Determines What Ethics Costs You

Cornell economist Robert Frank is playing tennis in the late 1980s when he collapses on the court. His heart has stopped. His partner calls 911. Under normal circumstances, the nearest ambulance would have been thirty-plus minutes away — enough time for Frank's brain to shut down permanently. But two unrelated car accidents had placed two ambulances about a minute from those courts. One peeled off. Frank survived something that kills 98 out of 100 people it touches, with no lasting damage.

When he came to, Frank concluded that everything that followed was fruit of that random tree, and that successful people systematically underestimate luck because crediting talent and effort protects their claim to whatever they've accumulated. Conceding the ambulances means conceding that someone else's fender-bender saved your life.

The argument extends past survival stories. Consider the Negro Leagues: Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson — players who, by most evidence, were as good as anyone in the major leagues. They didn't fail to reach the top because they lacked Jordan's drive. They were born into a country with segregation laws. Jordan himself, Schur notes, is six foot six and was raised in America by encouraging parents. Transport his exact personality, his legendary work ethic, his competitive obsessiveness into the body of a 5'2" Bangladeshi goat herder, and he becomes the world's most intense person at something nobody's watching.

Moral character requires more than intention. It requires the capacity to develop virtue, the time and safety to reflect, the kind of life where "what should I do?" is a question you can even afford to ask. Annas puts it plainly: people who fail to become virtuous in brutal circumstances usually fail because of those circumstances, not because they were incapable.

Which means the lucky don't get to grade on the same curve as everyone else. If you escaped poverty, violence, and systemic disadvantage through no effort of your own, if you've been playing life on the easiest possible setting, your ethical baseline is higher. You owe more, because you started closer to the finish line.

Most Apologies Are Not Apologies — They Are Bullshit

July 2020, House floor. Representative Ted Yoho had called his colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "fcking btch" on the Capitol steps. Pressured to respond publicly, he takes the podium to apologize.

What follows is one of the great non-apologies in political memory. He calls his wife and daughters as character witnesses. He denies the incident occurred while simultaneously apologizing for it. He closes by refusing to apologize for "loving God and America," which nobody requested. Net effect: I'm here to apologize. I won't apologize. It didn't happen. Also my virtues are unavailable for apology. Yoho out.

Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt spent a 1986 paper (later a surprise bestseller) distinguishing this from lying. A liar knows the truth and deliberately contradicts it. A bullshitter doesn't care what the truth is; he cares only about the impression he makes. Frankfurt's example is the thunderous Fourth of July orator: whether he loves or hates America is immaterial, because his patriotic declarations are aimed not at accuracy but at how the audience sees him. "The essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony."

Yoho's speech was directed at his political allies, not at Ocasio-Cortez. It was a performance of apologizing, not an apology. The distinction matters: a phony apology compounds the original wrong. It says, in effect, your pain isn't real enough to require a genuine response. That's a second offense in apologetic clothing.

Which is why the discomfort of a real apology — the flushed face, the shaky voice — is the point. That discomfort is the proof. Without it, you're just giving a speech.

The Only Standard Worth Holding

Here is the only honest ending to a book about ethics: you will fail at this. Not once, dramatically, in a way that becomes a useful story. Quietly, repeatedly — you'll think "I already gave this month" and put your phone down, let something small slide, convince yourself the choice was probably fine. That's not a reason to stop. That's what the work looks like from the inside.

The asking is the ethics. Not arriving at the right answer — the asking, sincerely, in the moment after you blew it. Think of someone who donates to the wrong cause for sentimental reasons and then spends a week bothered by why it still feels wrong. That person is doing moral philosophy. The one who felt nothing isn't. Kant, Singer, Aristotle — all of it is just equipment for asking the question more precisely.

Which is what Beckett understood. "Fail better" isn't comfort. It's a description of what progress looks like when the standard never moves. You never stop failing. You fail, hopefully, in a direction.