How to Be Perfect

Happy Bastille Day! 

 The Los Angeles Review if Books reviewed Michael Shur's How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question under the title Fools and Philosophers: On Michael Schur’s “How to Be Perfect”. I am not sure I would buy the book but the book is not directed to me. The book sounds directed more to those who do not read philosophy.

It sounds like a reminder to the difficulty of living ethically and the benefits of that difficulty.

Encouraging readers’ effort to be good people despite Moral Exhaustion is one of Schur’s key aims. Rather than pushing for moral monomania, he suggests striving for improvement, doing a little better tomorrow than yesterday. Though he mostly avoids today’s biggest moral questions, in hopes of perhaps not “drifting into the thorny world of politics,” the book still functions as moral instruction, a guide for using theoretical philosophy to improve one’s ethical efforts. By the end, he’s shown how the presented theories might work together to aid in an attempt at moral living.

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 Michael Schur is a jester, a fool. He makes us laugh. But, as he put together this funny and sound exploration of theoretical and applied ethics, something else happened. With his careful attention to the complexities of moral life, development of a novel concept to explain one of our era’s defining features, and an unflinching analysis of his own character and foibles, Michael Schur has shown us something of how to be a philosopher, too.

At a point in my life all that I really had left of my ethics was do no harm to others. That is far more difficult than one may think. It is the root of all ethics. It is far more thorny than I allowed for back in the day. Especially thorny in its application when one stops thinking in detail about one's actions.

sch 6/28/22