UrbanUpdate

In 2005, television writer Michael Schur’s then fiance gently rear-ended a Saab in slow-moving traffic. Some days later, the couple received a claim for $836. But when Schur went to examine the damage to the Saab, he found a barely discernible crease. A bit incensed, Schur proposed a solution. At the time, Hurricane Katrina had just devastated New Orleans. Instead of putting the $836 toward a bumper that didn’t need it, Schur, a concerned citizen, offered to donate $836 to the Red Cross’s Katrina relief efforts. In the following days, as Schur told this story, both in person and on a blog, people sharing in his moral outrage started making their own pledges. More than $20,000 would go to the Red Cross if this guy agreed to not fix his bumper. Which is when Schur and his wife started to feel very guilty.

“We were excitedly discussing the most recent events, and pledges, and media requests and we looked at each other and instantly read on each other’s faces the same queasy feeling: there was something very wrong about what we were doing… though we couldn’t pinpoint what it was,” Schur writes in his new book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. It’s a project that Schur traces directly back to this very exchange in 2005. Though the episode ended with Schur calling the Saab owner to apologize and sending him a check for the full repair (not to mention raising $27,000 for Katrina victims), it also sent Schur down a moral philosophy rabbit hole: Had his public shaming crossed the line? Was raising a boatload of money still a virtuous end if it came through unethical means? How should he have acted? He started reading books on ethics and cold-calling philosophy professors. He wanted to learn how to live a moral life.

In the meantime, Schur’s career took off, writing for The Office, then co-creating both Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. His TV writing and ethics obsession collided in 2016, when he created The Good Place. The show’s main character, played by Kristen Bell, is a person who, after spending most of her life acting selfishly and immorally, finds herself mistakenly placed in heaven. Hoping to avoid being kicked out, she spends her time trying to learn how to be a good person. It was Schur’s way of navigating the ethical quandaries he’d been pondering in his decade of study, trying to parse what separates a “good” person’s admission to Heaven from a “bad” person’s ticket to eternal damnation. He dedicated an entire episode to moral philosophy’s most famous dilemma: a runaway trolley is about to hit and kill five people, but you have the power to divert it so it only hits one person. Do you? (The “trolley problem” also gets an entire chapter in Schur’s book.)

The show was a hit and aired from September 2016 to January 2020, a stretch of political, social, and civil unrest that raised many of the same questions of moral responsibility that Schur was asking in his fictional sitcom. Since the show’s finale, amidst a pandemic and a culture of social media shaming, the question at the heart of both The Good Place and Schur’s book has become all the more pertinent: How do we be good to one another? Though philosophy often leads to more questions than answers, GQ called Schur to see what solutions we might glean from his casual obsession with moral philosophy.

GQ: Are you at all worried about becoming known as the moral philosophy guy? I imagine it’s like becoming a MacArthur genius, where people are just waiting for you to do something dumb. People may now just be waiting around for you to do something unethical.

Schur: They don’t have to look very far or wait very long for me to screw something up. It’s always embarrassing when you screw something up or do something wrong, it’s always painful and you feel guilt and shame and humiliation. It’s not like I’m immune to it. I don’t really live in fear of it just because I’m like, “Yes, I’m a fallible human being. We all are.” If anything, it’s made me more tolerant of people screwing up. Even for the luckiest people on earth who have no stress or strain or fear or anxiety or economic woe or anything, I know how difficult it is. I think it’s good to have your failures pointed out to you so that you can learn from them and try to fix them. Every day when you wake up, the process of being alive on earth is a process of failure, in terms of ethics.

Are there some simple steps everyone can take to start behaving more morally?

I say at the beginning of the book that in the nutshell-iest of nutshells, what we’re talking about is asking some really basic questions. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is there something we can do that’s better? Why is it better? If you ask yourself those questions, you’re still going to fail all the time. You’re still going to blow it. But just getting used to asking those questions is the most important step, because we don’t ask them of ourselves very often. If we ask them more, 80 percent of the time the answer’s going to be, “Yeah, sorry. There’s nothing I can do. This decision sucks. There’s nothing better I can do,” but 20 percent of the time it’ll be like, “Oh, you know what? This other thing I could do is just slightly better so I’m going to do that instead.” That’s really what I’m aiming at.

I’m ashamed to admit that this is often a conversation I have with myself with regard to Amazon. I’m like, “Well I probably shouldn’t… but if I order in the next four hours, it’ll be here tomorrow!”

Well, that’s a capitalism problem. Because capitalism is really good at giving people what it is that they need as cheaply and quickly as possible. I do it, too, and honestly, the thing that made me rethink it more than anything was the pandemic. It was like, “Oh, you know what? I’m out of scotch tape, so I’ll just buy it on Amazon. Give me it now, I want it now.” What you haven’t thought about maybe until the pandemic, is that someone is in a warehouse somewhere, not making a very great living, and is running around and can’t go to the bathroom or they’ll get fired, and they’re hustling to get you a dumb roll of scotch tape and throw it in a box, and then another person is whipping down the highway from some warehouse somewhere to get you the scotch tape, while you’re bored on your couch, flipping through Twitter and watching a baseball game. If you’ve paid attention, I think we’re all a little more empathetic toward the people whose responsibility it is to give us the stupid stuff we want, the second we want it.

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Is there a particular philosopher, or school of philosophy, that you find most useful?

I think they’re all useful in different moments. Utilitarianism [a school of philosophy that believes in maximizing the most amount of happiness for the most amount of people] works really well with gigantic problems, like vaccines and mask-wearing, where an enormous number of people are being asked to do something. “Okay, how do you divvy up these vaccines?” Well, you start with the people who are the most at risk, right? The oldest and in most infirm, and the people with the most comorbidities or vulnerabilities to the disease because the pleasure and happiness of every dose is maximized, instead of giving it to a 23-year-old ding dong on spring break, who will probably be fine if they get COVID because they’re young and healthy. The amount of pleasure and happiness with that dose is very small, as opposed to an 85-year-old with diabetes.

I have found myself feeling the most connection to Aristotle because Aristotle’s whole thing is like, “This is trial and error. That’s all it is.” There’s a perfect amount of different virtues that you’re supposed to find. The way you find them is just by screwing up, making mistakes, and then inching closer toward the exact right amount of all these qualities. I find that very humane. He understood, even 2,400 years ago, that what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis is complicated and weird and hard. All he wanted you to do is keep marching toward the right amount of these qualities.

In the beginning of the book, you write that the question of “What the hell am I supposed to do?” has never been harder to answer than it is now. Why do you think that’s the case?

We now know everything about every person. Thirty years ago, you’d get in your car, you flipped on the radio, an Eric Clapton song comes on the radio, and you just happily sang along to the Eric Clapton song. Now we know the truth about Eric Clapton. When that song comes on, you have to think about his racist rant on stage in that concert from 30 years ago. You have to think about the fact that he’s an anti-vaxxer. You have to think about the fact that he was part of a movement in England and America in the ’60s that stole Black music and occasionally didn’t pay money or properly attribute that music to the original artist. When we sit around and think about what we should do, we’re hyper aware of what everybody else is doing and how that affects us, and how what we’re doing affects them. That’s why Chidi [a character on The Good Place, who was, appropriately, a moral philosopher] was paralyzed all the time.

What do we do in the face of that paralysis?

Well, again, we don’t think of perfection as any kind of reasonable goal. We muddle through and we do the best we can. We make a mental note of it and swear that if we have the time and energy and resources in the future, and we come into a similar situation, we’ll try to maybe do the other thing. One of the things that bugs me about philosophy and ethics is that it’s very rarely contextualized. These are abstract theories, and people are living concrete lives, right? If you were to take a random person and make a list of what they have to care about, this can’t be very high on the list. It just can’t be. What they care about is, “Do my kids have enough food? Do I have enough money to pay rent? Am I going to get fired from my job? Is my company going to downsize and fire me? Is my mom, who has a hospital bill that needs to be paid, going to be evicted from her house?” There are immediate and practical problems that, by necessity, supersede these more abstract problems.

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In the shows you’ve created, there’s always a current of friendship and community and people working together, which goes against our rugged, Western, Manifest Destiny individuality. What do you trace that instinct back to?

Some of it was probably just that I liked those shows when I was a kid. I liked the workplace family idea, the Cheers ethos. Some of it just happens to be what the country is feeling at the moment that we’re working on these shows. Parks and Rec was written during the financial crisis of 2007, and Obama’s run for the presidency in 2008. It was very clear to Greg Daniels and me that the government was going to be playing a really significant role in people’s lives.

I’ve always had a bee in my bonnet about people who just deride the government, like, “Government is bad. Government is evil. Government is wrong.” Government picks up your trash and they pave the roads and they put up stop signs and stuff. Why are we so furious at the government?” That was the message of Parks and Rec: This is just a group of people who are trying to make decisions about who plays on what soccer field. It’s not like the evil empire in Star Wars or something.

But I will say that part of me is also sympathetic toward people whose need for individuality is very strong. Ron Swanson in that show was an actual 19th-century libertarian, who shot his own meat and didn’t rely on anyone and thought that the government was so evil that he didn’t think there should be traffic lights, stop signs, or a post office. There are different, authentic ways to live life, in this country and elsewhere. At the end of the day, we need to rely on each other. There’s no such thing as a functioning society without the concept of interconnectedness, interrelational reliance. We need other people to do their part and we need to do our part for them. That pervades a lot of the shows that I’ve worked on.

There’s a William James phrase you used about “the flexibility to absorb new truths,” or having an ability to change our minds. You also talk about how disgrace or guilt can be a good thing in forcing us to examine our behavior. So I’m curious how you feel about the pitchfork mentality of Twitter and the public shaming, and if that precludes more honest cultural conversations about right and wrong?

I think a lot of good has come from it. A lot of bad behavior has been exposed as bad behavior. I can’t see why that’s bad. The other day, there was that Merrill Lynch employee who said something racist and threw a smoothie at a kid. And I hope his future is in some way redemptive and positive. If he needs some kind of help, I hope he gets it. I hope he apologizes. I hope he makes himself into a better guy. But, regardless, that guy’s a menace at that moment. He’s a dangerous, racist asshole. We now know that about that guy. While it is also exhausting to be confronted with people’s worst behaviors all the time, it’s better than what it used to be. That guy, in the old days, got to go home and keep living his life as a racist guy who threw smoothies at kids. That’s not good either.

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The pendulum has swung very far in one direction, which is now, all of this behavior is constantly being exposed and we are constantly picking up our pitchforks and coming for people. The problem with it is all of this behavior ends up getting lumped into one category, which is just capital-B Bad. This is Bad. This guy is Bad. That behavior’s Bad. We’re not doing a lot of parsing of, “What’s the context? What are the circumstances? What else has this person done? Is this person sorry for what they did?” They go into a bucket and the bucket is labeled Bad and then we move on to the next thing.

I will say, again, it is good that this is the new system. There needs to be repercussions for bad behavior like that. The next step in this evolution is to get a little better at really examining it, parsing it, determining where our lines in the sand are, and how we judge people. We need to discover for ourselves what’s forgivable and what isn’t. That is an enormous question. Maybe the single biggest question we all face is, “What can we forgive and what can we not forgive?”

I think it probably also has to do with structural changes too. It’s almost like the plane is going down and we could all put on our individual oxygen masks, or we could try to stop the plane from going down. I feel like moral philosophy can feel like we’re putting on our oxygen masks, as opposed to being like, “Let’s fix the structure of the plane so it doesn’t crash and we don’t all die.”

One-hundred percent. This is the spit in the ocean problem, where you’re like, “Okay, I’ll pick up this litter that I dropped on the ground, but also global warming is happening.” Many of the changes that need to happen, if we want to survive, if we want to continue as a species, cannot be tiny individual actions. There has to be enormous structural change at the national and international level. Enormous things have to change that an individual cannot greatly affect other than to cast a vote in an election every two or four years or something.

I know you corresponded with David Foster Wallace a bit when you were younger. Is there an idea of his that you find most resonant or useful?

I find the interviews with him fascinating. There’s a couple quotes that come back to me a lot. “Fiction is about what it means to be a fucking human being.” I’m interested in the fact that he decided to curse in that moment because he’s doing it to make a very specific point: It’s hard to be a human being, and good literature and good art is about nothing more complicated than what it is like to be a human being. It’s seeking points of connection and points of identification with other people.

There’s another quote. He didn’t like Bret Easton Ellis very much. An interviewer asked why not and he basically said—this is a real paraphrase—“Look, we all agree that life is dark and sad and traumatic and awful. Writing a book that says, ‘Hey, look how dark and sad and traumatic and awful life is,’ isn’t very interesting to me.” That’s what he thought Brett Easton Ellis was doing. He said, “What means more to me or what seems like a better idea to me is to say, ‘Okay, given that we all know that life is dark and sad and awful and traumatic, here is a prescription. Here’s a path or a blueprint for how you can navigate a world that’s dark and sad and traumatic and awful.’”

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He thought that novels specifically, but all art, should be prescriptive in some way, that you should treat this like you’re a doctor diagnosing a problem. You’re saying, “Here’s one way you can get over this. Here’s a kind of medicine you can take,” or, “You’re in a dark forest and I’m going to illuminate a path that will bring you out of the forest and into safety.” That really hit me. When we started Parks and Rec, I sent that quote to Amy Poehler and said, "This is what I want this show to be like.” Yes, we know that the government has a lot of problems. We know that it’s inefficient, that it can be corrupt, that it can be a morass of bureaucratic red tape, blah, blah, blah. What I want this show to be is about a woman who’s like, I am going to find a better path through this stuff. I’m going to hack through the weeds and I’m going to show everyone who lives in my town that there is a way that we can navigate this, that we can come out the other side and make things better.

That became our North Star for that show. Every episode at some level had to be about her saying, “I know things suck. I’m going to make them suck 1 percent less than they currently suck.” 

On one hand, you could argue that America is at a nadir ethically: we can’t get some people to get vaccines or even wear a mask. On the other hand, we’re having meaningful conversations about changing long standing and harmful social norms. How do you feel about where America is right now?

It’s both at a nadir and an apex simultaneously. That's what's really weird about it. America prizes and praises and celebrates individual success and achievement more than anything. We are the country that elevates Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Simone Biles, LeBron James, and Tom Brady. We love individuals doing outrageously successful things and living successful lives.

Because of that individualistic spirit, you run into these problems when we all need to do something together. People have been taught that their individual liberty, success and happiness is of primary importance. People still read Ayn Rand novels happily in this country—constantly! They didn't stop reading them when they were 16 like the rest of us did. They still think, "Yes, selfishness, that's the way to go. Be as selfish as you possibly can." It's the story of expansion to the complete disregard of people who were already living here when we showed up.

At the same time, we care more about ethics and morals than we ever have. The #MeToo movement and the post-George Floyd America has forced a lot of industries to care about the treatment of other people that they have historically ignored. Suddenly, a whole lot of awful people can't get away with their awful behavior anymore because the country has decided that it cares now about that stuff. It's both things at the same time.

"Toward a more perfect union," is the phrase you hear all the time, right? We're trying to move toward a more perfect union. I think you could argue, despite all of the miserable selfishness and the unpleasantness that has been on display so often for the last two years, that slowly but surely, in a clunky, jangly way, we're in a Mad Max convoy with these weird vehicles and people are falling off them and dying and we're in the desert and it's dangerous and scary, but we're heading towards some more perfect union in this weird convoy.

Will we ever get there? No, probably not, not in our lifetimes. But it is heartening to think about some of the ways that things have gotten better, even amidst all of this nonsense and the very obvious ways in which things have gotten worse.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQBooks