Narrator: Imagine trying to be a good person for just one day. You start by picking up a plastic cup from the street, only to realize it will still end up in the ocean. You choose veggie patties over beef for lunch, but learn they have a massive carbon footprint from being shipped across the world. You buy cage-free eggs, but discover the hens are still penned up in a factory farm. By the end of the day, you realize that every well-intentioned action has had an unforeseen negative consequence. You're left feeling angry, discouraged, and asking one simple, overwhelming question: "What the hell am I supposed to do?" This is the exact dilemma that Michael Schur tackles in his book, How to Be Perfect. He argues that for 2,400 years, philosophers have been wrestling with this very problem, and their insights provide a surprisingly practical and often hilarious roadmap for navigating the moral minefield of modern life.

Narrator: The book first explores one of the oldest ethical frameworks: virtue ethics, championed by Aristotle. Instead of asking "What is the right thing to do?", virtue ethics asks, "What is the right way to be?" The focus isn't on individual actions but on building a virtuous character. Aristotle believed the ultimate goal of human life is eudaimonia, a state of deep, lasting fulfillment or flourishing. We achieve this by cultivating virtues—qualities like courage, temperance, and honesty.

However, virtue isn't about being perfect; it's about finding the "golden mean." Every virtue is a midpoint between two vices: a deficiency and an excess. Courage, for example, is the mean between cowardice (a deficiency) and recklessness (an excess). Schur uses his own life to illustrate this, describing himself as an extreme rule-follower. His dutifulness, while a virtue, often becomes an annoying excess, like when he would enforce a dorm's loud music curfew at parties. The goal is to develop virtues through lifelong practice and habituation, learning to find the right balance in every situation, much like a musician develops fluency through practice.

Narrator: Next, the book dives into utilitarianism, a theory that cares only about the results, or consequences, of our actions. Popularized by thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, its core principle is simple: the most ethical choice is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. To explore this, Schur introduces the famous Trolley Problem. A runaway trolley is about to kill five workers on a track. You can pull a lever to divert it to another track, where it will kill only one person. Most people reflexively agree that pulling the lever is the right choice, a clear utilitarian calculation.

But the theory quickly becomes complicated. What if, instead of pulling a lever, you had to push a large person off a bridge to stop the trolley? The math is the same—one life for five—but the action feels morally different. Utilitarianism struggles here, as it can justify horrifying actions, like a doctor killing one healthy person to harvest their organs for five sick patients. While useful for broad policy decisions, its singular focus on outcomes ignores individual rights, intentions, and personal integrity.

Narrator: As a counterpoint to consequence-focused ethics, the book presents deontology, most famously associated with Immanuel Kant. For Kant, consequences are irrelevant. The moral worth of an action lies entirely in the intention behind it. Deontology is a system of duties and rigid rules, governed by what Kant called the "Categorical Imperative." The first formulation of this rule states that we should only act according to principles that we could will to become a universal law. Lying, for example, can never be a universal law, because if everyone lied, the very concept of truth would collapse and lying would become meaningless.

This creates a strict, non-negotiable moral code. Schur illustrates its challenges with the classic "murderer at the door" scenario. If a murderer asks if your friend is hiding in your house, a strict Kantian would have to tell the truth, because lying is always wrong. A more practical version of Kant's philosophy is his second formulation: treat humanity always as an end, and never merely as a means. This humanistic principle forbids using people as tools to achieve a goal, providing a powerful, if still rigid, guide for our actions.

Narrator: Moving beyond the "big three" theories, Schur introduces contractualism, a modern theory from T.M. Scanlon. Contractualism proposes that an act is wrong if it would be disallowed by a set of rules for general behavior that no one could reasonably reject. It’s not about what’s best or what follows a universal law, but about what is justifiable to other people.

The book uses the simple, everyday dilemma of returning a shopping cart to its rack. Leaving a cart in the middle of a parking lot might not violate a Kantian maxim or cause mass unhappiness, but it’s an act that a reasonable person could reject. No one would agree to a rule that says, "People can leave their carts wherever they want," because it creates an unfair burden and potential harm for others. This theory is complemented by the African concept of ubuntu, which means "I am because we are." It suggests our very existence is tied to the well-being of others, compelling us to make small efforts, like returning the cart, to ease the burden on our community.

Narrator: The book acknowledges that trying to be ethical all the time is exhausting. We face moral opportunity costs with every purchase and moral dilemmas in the media we consume. Schur explores the challenge of supporting things we love when they are created by problematic people or organizations, using the controversy around Chick-fil-A's anti-LGBTQ+ donations as a case study. There is no easy answer. Schur suggests that when something can be changed, like a racist team name, we should advocate for that change. When it cannot, like the actions of a long-dead artist, we must hold two conflicting ideas in our minds: "I love this thing," and "The person who made it is troubling."

This requires us to abandon the quest for a simple heuristic and instead engage in constant, nuanced judgment. It means acknowledging the harm caused without necessarily abandoning the art, and forgiving ourselves for the inherent contradictions in our ethical lives.

Narrator: In its final section, the book confronts a fundamental unfairness: not everyone starts from the same place. Author John Scalzi’s analogy, "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is," powerfully illustrates how privilege and circumstance dramatically affect a person's ability to navigate the world and, by extension, their capacity for ethical effort.

To address this, Schur introduces philosopher John Rawls's concept of the "veil of ignorance." Rawls asks us to imagine designing the rules of society without knowing what our position in that society will be—we don't know our race, wealth, gender, or talents. From behind this veil, we would naturally create a fairer system, because we would want to protect ourselves in case we ended up in the least fortunate position. This thought experiment forces us to acknowledge the profound role of luck in our lives and argues that those who have benefited from good luck have a greater moral obligation to create a more just and equitable world for everyone.

Narrator: Ultimately, How to Be Perfect concludes that the goal of ethics is not to achieve a flawless moral record. Perfection is impossible. The book’s most important takeaway is that the real victory lies in the effort. It is about caring enough to try to be good, knowing you will inevitably fail, and then having the courage to apologize, learn, and try again.

The true challenge the book leaves us with is not finding the single correct answer to every moral question, but rather building the habit of asking the questions in the first place. By consistently reflecting on our actions and motivations, we engage in the ongoing, messy, but deeply human process of becoming a slightly better person today than we were yesterday.