Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 463: Solutions to all of Your Moral Dilemmas | Michael Schur

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Life is filled with all kinds of moral dilemmas— from the mundane to the momentous. Should I lie and tell my friend that I like her ugly shirt? Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Ultimately, does anything we do even matter?In today’s conversation, television writer and producer, Michael Schur helps us to navigate our moral dilemmas and answer some of these difficult questions. Schur is best known for creating and co-creating such shows as Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, and Rutherford Falls. Additionally, he has worked on shows like The Office, Master of None, The Comeback, and Hacks. He is also the Author of How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. In this episode we talk about: What got him started on the road to reading philosophy and studying ethicsThe so-called “trolley problem”Trusting your gutNatural states of virtueThe evolutionary advantages of virtueAnd how white lies can be beneficial in a complicated and messy societyThis interview was recorded in person at the TED conference in April of 2022, where both Michael Schur and Dan Harris spoke.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/michael-schur-463See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, as you know, life is filled with all kinds of moral dilemmas from the mundane to the genuinely momentous. Should I lie and tell my friend I like her ugly shirt? Do I have to return my shopping cart to the shopping cart rack thingy? Can I enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? Should I treat myself to a new iPhone when there are children going hungry around the world? How much money should I give to charity?

Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences often for being bad? And ultimately, does anything we do even matter. Today, we're going to get answers from an unlikely source. Michael Schur is a television writer and producer who is perhaps best known for creating and co-creating such shows as Parks and Recreation, a personal favorite of mine, Brooklyn 9.9, the good place and Rutherford Falls. Additionally, he has worked on shows such as The Office master of none, the comeback, and hacks. Another personal favorite.

He is also the author of How to Be Perfect, the correct answer to every moral question, which is a phenomenal title. Turns out, he has a long-standing interest in moral philosophy, somewhat of an auto-diedact. And he has turned this interest into a TV show before the good place, which has a huge cult following. And now this book, in this conversation, we talked about many of the questions I posed at the top. Plus, what got him started on the road to reading philosophy and studying ethics, the so-called trolley problem, trusting your gut, natural states of virtue, the evolutionary advantages of virtue, and how white lies can be beneficial in a complicated, messy society. This interview was recorded in

person this past April at the TED conference where both Michael and I spoke. It was a huge blast to be at the TED conference and I really enjoyed meeting Michael. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral?

Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com, all one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. I wish there's that in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast.

just saw somebody say to you, but I'm a massive fan of your work. Oh. And during the pandemic, parks and rec and Brooklyn 9.9 were my happy place. I'm very pleased to hear that. Do you have children? I have one seven year old child. So that's too young.

The interesting thing about the pandemic was that parents who had nothing to do with their kids had like all rules about TV watching one at the window. Yes. And because of that, I think those shows, shows I've worked on became watching one at the window. And because of that, I think those shows, shows I've worked on became more popular during the pandemic when they had when they were on

than they're airing. Like the office, Parks and Rec Brooklyn, like it was in a good place. More people came up to me and said that they had watched them in the last two years than when they were actually on the air. It's very weird. Well, I think it provided a valuable service.

I mean, I would get to the end of the day and I was so horrified and stressed and Harkson Breck did the trick. You were not 10% happier. I was 10% more despairing. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so given your background, how did you get interested in ethics and moral philosophy? Well, it's a lifetime of being a kind of rule follower. It starts with that. It starts with this weird, inexplicable orientation toward being concerned about right and wrong.

That goes as far back as I can remember, my earliest memories are like, am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing? My single biggest fear in life, I realize what a nice thing this is to be able to say and how privileged I am to be able to say this. But essentially, my biggest fear in life. I realize what a nice thing this is to be able to say and how privileged I am to be able to say this. But essentially, my biggest fear in life is being anywhere and having a person in like a uniform and a badge come up to me and say, you're not allowed

to be here. Like, that's my biggest fear. Like, I'm breaking a rule. I'm in a restricted zone. I have failed to heed a list of rules or warnings and a person of authority comes up to me and tells me that I'm breaking a rule. I live in fear of that every day. On Parks and Rec the character Ben Wyatt, played by Adam Scott, was terrified of cops. Yes, that's me. I just gave him that quality because police officers to me,

and again, I understand the privilege with which I'm saying this, but my fear about police officers is just that they represent like a person who could tell me that I have run a foul of a rule. So it started with that and then over the course of my life, there have been a bunch of events which have involved me blowing it somehow, like making a mistake and stepping in it. And eventually I got to the point where I was like, I need to not just have a gut feeling about what's right or wrong. I need to understand why things that are right or wrong are right or wrong. And that requires me to read philosophy and study ethics. And so I started doing it

casually in a self-instructed way about 20 years ago. And I've just sort of continued ever since. That question, why is it right or wrong? Did it make you think that I don't need to follow all rules because some rules are not actually on the wall between right and wrong? Yeah, in some ways, yes. There are certainly people who will argue in ways ranging from civil disobedience to people who argue in favor of occasional kind of anarchy

that restricted herents to all rules is a mistake. I would agree with that. I think restricted herons to rules or orders gets people in a lot of trouble. There are many historical precedents you can think about for times when people said, like, well, I only did that because I was following orders, right? So it's not that you have to learn all the rules just so you can follow all of them. I think you have to learn the rules so you can understand whether they're good or bad rules, and then you need to decide whether following them is ethically or morally correct, and very often it's not. Like there are the greatest progressions of our society, of our country, of the world have come from people specifically breaking

rules that were immoral or unethical. And because they knew that their understanding of the world, of a just world, was more advanced than the rule. And we should be constantly evaluating the rules that we have and throwing out the ones that don't make sense and writing new ones. And I think when we stop doing that is when we get into trouble. And whether you're a government or like a private club or whatever you are, if you just stick to the same rules you've always had, you're blowing it. So in the book, you pose a sort of series of, I guess, decreasingly absurd questions.

You start with absurd and you get that actually pretty wrenching set of questions. Sure. And you work through them. You wrestle with these questions. And the first one is on the far absurd end of the spectrum, which is, is it kosher to punch my best friend in the face right now? Yeah. Let's start there. Is it okay to punch your friend in the face?

No, the actual question is, should I punch my friend in the face for no reason? I showed the book to Pamela Hironomy in its first four chapters, who is one of the philosophical advisors in the good place, and she was like, you can't ask that question. That's such an absurd question. It does, it's not fruitful. And I was like, no, I'm asking it because of how absurd it is because it's so obviously the answers know. In the first four chapters, I ask silly questions like that because I'm trying to just get out the basic nuts and bolts of the big picture there is that one is about virtue ethics, about Aristotle. And Aristotle writes about these qualities. He wants us to have, things like kindness and generosity and courage and stuff, and he wants us to practice them every day so that we have them in the exact

right amount. And what he doesn't want is a deficiency of equality or an excess of equality. So the point is that one of the qualities he wants us to have is mildness, which is basically how you regulate your anger. So too much anger, you punch your friend in the face for no reason, too little anger, you are pushover, you don't stand up for what you believe in, you don't protect a kid who's being bullied or whatever. So I asked that question simply to get at the question of like, what is the right amount of mildness to have? What is the right amount of anger to have?

Because what's interesting about Aristotle is you hear the quality of anger and you think like, well, that's something to avoid. He doesn't want you to avoid it. He wants you to have it. He just wants you to have the right amount directed at the right people for the right reasons. That's part of why I really like Aristotle is

because he's not asking you to be, what you might think of as like a perfect human being, where you never get angry, you never get frustrated, you never get impatient. He's asking you to have all of these qualities just in the right ways. So, no, you should not punch a friend in the face for no reason, but that also doesn't mean

you should never get angry because a person who never gets angry is not standing up for the right things or protecting people who need to be protected. How do you personally do with this balance? I'm a pretty mild guy, like I get that. Yeah, like I'm pretty conflict diverse. Actually, I think if anything, I have a deficiency of anger.

I think I should probably get, I do get upset and I get angry. Anyone who follows me on Twitter has seen me get angry at certain people at certain times. But I'm not quick to temper. That's not one of my faults. I have many, but that's not one of them. So yeah, I would never, that would not be a problem for me, punching someone for no reason. My problem would be the other way.

It would be like, I don't punch someone when I should. Right. Like you right now, I want to punch you. Okay. There are mics between me and Am, so I'm somewhat safe. Although he is tall, he could leap over them.

I'll try to keep my questions sufficiently mouthed. I just watch yourself. Yeah. The wrong question, and this goes south and I hurry. Trolley dilemma. This is actually quite a famous ethical can under him. Yes. The trolley problem invented in 1967 by a woman in Phillipa foot in the UK, probably the most famous philosophical thought experiment, right? You're on Trolley the brakes fail on the track or five workers. We're going to be killed, but there's a lever you can pull switches you want

to do another track where there's one guy. And the question is, do you pull the lever and why? Almost everybody says he has, of course, you pull the lever. The interesting thing isn't the choice to do that. It's the explanation of why and what people will say is, well, one person dying is better than five people dying, right? The problem is as soon as you make that call and you make it about the numbers of people, you get led into these really weird sort of like side problems that you didn't anticipate, for example, someone will say, okay, well now imagine your doctor, you have five patients who need organ transplant and they they're gonna die.

Is it okay to go up and murder a janitor who's sweeping up outside in the hospital, harvest his organs and give them to the five people and people would say, no, of course not, that's horrifying. And then the philosophy professor will say, it's the same result, right? One innocent person dies,

five innocent people live, what's the difference? So would the interesting thing about the Charlie problem, which has been written about and talked about so much in the last, whatever it is, 55 years, that now philosophy professors hated. Like I say in my book, it's basically like stay away to heaven. It's like a great, it's like a classic of the genre that is so overplayed that everyone hates it now, you know, free bird. Yeah, free bird.

Or it's like the godfather or something. It's like, oh, do we have to watch the, or like Casablanca? So the interesting thing isn't the original problem as much as it is the discussion that it led to, which is basically the conclusion you come to is it can't just be about numbers. It can't be about the numbers of people

because once you make it about the numbers, then you're saying, well, it would be okay to murder 49 innocent people in order to spare the lives of 51 innocent people. Well, that feels wrong, but if you're just going by the numbers, then you get into those weird problems. Is it reductive to say, well, the answer or the conclusion one can draw from all of the paragraphs

you just uttered is, yeah, things are complicated sometimes. Yeah, I mean, you get to that point a lot in philosophy, right? In the investigations of these issues, the temptation is to throw up your hands and go like, I don't know, it's complicated. But what I like doing is wrestling with it and trying to get as close as you can to an answer that feels satisfactory.

In this case, there are people who will say, will can't be just about the numbers. For these reasons, there are people who will say, well, can't be just about the numbers. For these reasons, there were other people who say, like, Kant would say, like, one of Kant's formulations of the categorical imperative is you should treat people as an end in themselves, not a means to an end, like you can't use people to get what you want. So for example, one of the variations of the trolley problem is, could you shove a guy off a bridge, have him land on the tracks, and have his corpse stop the trolley problem is, could you shove a guy off a bridge, have him land on the tracks and have his corpse stop the trolley from going

to save the five lives? Are you strict utilitarian who's only arguing by the numbers, would say, yeah, sure, go ahead. Con would say, no, you're using that guy as like a literal prop to get a good outcome and you can't do that. That's interesting.

But to me, the one that really unlocked it for me was there's a guy named Bernard Williams and he talks a lot about integrity, not integrity in the way that we think of integrity as like a person of great integrity, for an upstanding moral citizen, but of being like a whole person who can't be like divided up into little parts, right? You can't compartmentalize a person according to him. And what he says is, you have to think of yourself as a person who has structural integrity. And if you don't think that it's okay for you to do something, even if a utilitarian says, no, it's okay because the numbers work out or the math works out or whatever, you have to think it's okay for you to do it, not just for anyone to do it.

And so you can't dissociate yourself from the role you're playing in the event. So when it comes to shoving a guy off a bridge or murdering a janitor and harvesting his organs, it's less a question of like, is there a theory that explains why this is okay? And more a question of like, do you, Dan, or do I, Mike, think it's okay for me, Mike,

to do this thing? And if you don't, even if the theory says you should do it, then you have to maintain that sense of integrity of like, I am a complete person, and I can't just rip a part of me out and say, like, okay, well, I guess even though I don't think this is okay, I'm going to follow this theory that says it is. This is gonna sound sarcastic,

but I don't actually mean it that way. We're only like 10% listen to your heart. Yeah, like there is some chunk of this stuff that is a gut thing. It is about listening to your soul or your heart or your just sense of right and wrong. And obviously whatever that sense is has come from combination of experiences

and parental teachings and friendships and marriages and partnerships. So it's not like we're not just born with this stuff. This stuff accrues in us over time from a bunch of different people that we trust and admire and a sense of what they were doing these calculations all the time, even if they're not conscious. We're thinking like, well, all of the people that I think are good people, what would they be doing? That is going on in our brain at a very deep level. And so when people say, trust your God, it's not just your God, it's the sum total

of all of the stuff that you've been through in your life. And there's real value there. I think it's a mix because I mean, there are studies of, you know, babies, so haven't been bived much from the culture. And I'm gonna mangle this, but the scientists in the room will have a problem, like a very, very simple problem, and the baby will try to help. Yeah. So, we are wired for collective thinking.

Absolutely. Yes. And Aristotle even would say, 2400 years ago, would say that we're born with what he calls natural states of virtue. Like this stuff is in us from the beginning. We have an inclination toward like a child on a playground. Well, if the child has two cookies and sees a kid crying because they don't have a cookie, we'll give the kid a cookie. Like that's in us deeply somewhere. And that comes from millions of years of evolution of cave men and women sharing saber tooth tiger meat with the cave people next door. There are evolutionary advantages to this stuff, to altruism and to companionship

and to community that are self-selecting and that are deeply wired inside us. So yeah, it's in us from the beginning and it's sort of up Aristotle would say, it's up to us to take those seeds and then develop them into real flourishing jungles. White lies. Yeah. So the third chapter in the book is about, is it okay to lie to your friend and tell them you like they're ugly shirt or something and Kant believes that lying in any form anywhere

for any reason is wrong and is not allowable. Because his whole thing is when you're going to do anything, you formulate a rule and you follow that rule, you have a duty to follow that rule. And what you have to imagine is what if this rule were universal, what if everyone did what I did, what would happen to the world? If everybody lies all the time, if lying is permissible, then all human interaction becomes suspect, because everyone would know that everybody else at any given moment could be or is lying, and communication would cease to mean anything.

And by the way, even the thing that you're going to do, which is lie, would cease to have any effect, because the person that you're talking to would know that maybe you're lying, right? So he goes as far as to say if someone shows up at your door and Says hey, I'm here to murder your brother. Do you know where he is? If your brother's upstairs in the house, you're not allowed to say sorry, I don't know where he is You're not allowed to lie to that murderer You don't have to tell him the location you can say I'm not gonna tell you to that murderer. You don't have to tell him the location you can say I'm not going to tell you.

Right, so that's the loophole. The loophole is you are allowed to tell him something that is true that does not disclose the location of your brother. So you can say, well, it's Sunday, and on Sundays my brother usually likes to go to the movies. Like you can sort of do that and hope that the guy goes like, great, I'll go to the movie theater and try to murder your brother, instead of going inside, and murdering your brother. But Kant holds human beings in this incredibly highest team. It's actually kind of sweet to me. He thinks of human beings

as these incredible creatures who have the ability to reason and have these gigantic brains. And he thinks that humans should be held in the highest possible respect. And that means not doing anything to other human beings that devalues them or that treats them as lesser creatures. He basically said, because we are so advanced, because we have these giant brains, we have to take everything except for our giant brains out of the equation. We cannot act based on emotion or on the concept of happiness or fear.

Anything that like a gerbil could feel, right? A gerbil can be fearful or happy. So if a gerbil can feel fearful or happy, we got to eliminate fear or happiness from our decision making process. It can only be about reason and our brain. So are you like to lie and tell your friend you like her shirt when you think her shirt is ugly? No. But you could say, according to Kant, you know, you have other shirts that I actually think you look better in or You know that blue shirt you have you should wear that one that one really flatters your eyes or whatever

But you're not allowed to say that looks great. I love that shirt According to him because that is devaluing the person that you're talking to Isn't it maybe like oversimplifying a broad spectrum of lies? This is one thing to say that the 2020 election was rigged. That's a big, pernicious, provably false lie as opposed to a white lie, which you could argue is innocuous. Cont would not see the difference, I believe. I could be wrong. I'm certainly not a Kantian expert here, but any lie to him is notuous. Cont would not see the difference, I believe. I could be wrong. I'm certainly not a Kantian expert here,

but any lie to him is not allowable. I mean, he might say that some are worse than others. Obviously, I think anyone would say that, but he's very black and white. He's just like yes or no, upper, down, good, bad. Any lie that you tell is bad and wrong because it violates a universal maxim and the universal maxim is you must be honest at all times.

Or lying is not allowable. So yes, lies can have different degrees of damage that they cause, but the action of lying to him is the same no matter who's doing it and for what reason. Where do you fall on this personally? And if you were to take a Kantian approach, could you even tell jokes anymore? It's a good question, unless you were serious about punching me. Kant loses me a little bit.

There's a lot to like about him, in part because he's kind of the only one who promises that there's a right way to do this, right? He basically is laying out. He's rules and regulations, guys. So he's saying like, follow these rules and you win. It doesn't matter the results of what happens. If you create a universal maximum, follow it. You're done.

And if there is a bad result, it doesn't matter because you did your job in following the maximum. That's very enticing, I think, for someone who's trying, especially a dorky rule follower like me, because it promises like you can get an A on the test. All you have to do is use his theory, follow the maximum. And if everything goes haywire, it doesn't matter. I did what I was supposed to do. But I can't imagine that if my brother were in my house and a murderer came to the door and said, I'm here to murder your brother, do you know where he is? That

I would find anything more important than not letting him murder my brother. I would do whatever it took. I would say like, I haven't seen him murder my brother. I would do whatever it took. I would say like, I haven't seen him in weeks, murderer. You know, like I just, I don't know how, it's like what he expects of us is so extreme that I don't think it's actually applicable. I don't think you can actually follow his rules and I tell white lies all the time.

When you have kids and you're married and you have some event on the books with some other couple or something and then your life goes haywire in one of the ways it always does, which is you're stressed out at work or you have too much to do or you get stuck in traffic

and you want to not go to dinner with this couple that you barely know. What's easier? Calling them and saying, I'm so sorry, I got stuck at work or my sitter canceled on us the last second, can we reschedule? Or saying, I'm very tired and I don't want to go to dinner

with you, like that's just two. It's like some of this is just about greasing the wheels of society a little bit. And like if I say to that couple, I'm so sorry our sitter canceled on us the last second, there's an 80% likelihood that they know that I'm lying or telling, at least telling I'll be a small white lie, but they go, oh, don't worry about it. We'll reschedule.

We'll make it up in a couple of weeks or whatever. And by the way, they might be thrilled because they probably don't want to go to dinner with me either, right? So like, there are these ways that in a complicated, messy society, I think that very, very small and relatively harmless white lies can actually be beneficial. The ghost of contours behind me right now with his arms crossed, boring a hole in the back of my head. But I don't care because he lived in 18th century Prussia

and we live in 21st century America and it's a lot more complicated to live in 21st century America. Coming up, Michael, sure on whether you should return your shopping cart, how much morality we can stand, and something called effective altruism right after this. Hey, I'm Arisha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen.

Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Rue, of course. In our series, RuPaul bore naked. We'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app.

The next question in the book, how to be perfect one of the great book names of all time, is about returning your shopping cart in the parking lot because it would be a pain the butt to walk across the parking lot and put it back. Yeah, that has been a question I've had ever since I first encountered this problem. Like, can you leave it in your parking space or do you have to return it? That chapter is about a philosopher, largely about a philosopher named TM Scanlan, who's still with us. He is an emeritus at Harvard.

He has a theory called contractualism. Contractualism is basically like, let's figure out the rules of our society, not in this abstract intellectual way, like Kant did. Although his theory actually comes out of Kantian reasoning weirdly, but it's not like I'm gonna go into this solitary meditation zone and derive a maxim using my giant brain and my pure ability to reason. It's, let's figure it out with each other.

So when it comes to these little rules, these mundane little rules, imagine that you're sitting around a table with everyone in the world or everyone in your town or whatever, and everybody can veto any rule they want at any time, and you start pitching rules to each other. You say, okay, we shouldn't murder each other. Anyone veto that rule? No, of course not. Why would anyone veto that rule?

We shouldn't start fires for no reason and burn down buildings. Anyone veto that? No. And you keep going. And you get all the way down to these weird complicated ones. Should we return the shopping cart to the rack or should we leave it in our thing? Well, now there's a debate, right? Some people might say, well, you know, if it's a grocery store where they have employees who mill around and collect them, then maybe it's okay. And then other people would say, well, yeah, but that job stinks and maybe it would make their lives easier or something if we return them. You have these debates, but you get down to the point where you put it up for a vote and you see if anybody vetoes it. Now, importantly, the main requirement here is everybody has to be what he calls a reasonable

person. That is a very tricky thing to define, but essentially what he means by reasonable is, are you constraining your desires to the same exact degree that everybody else is constraining their individual desires? Not more or not less the same amount. Are we all going to check ourselves in terms of what we want out of this world to the exact same degree that everybody else is? So basically when we're in these sessions, we know that everybody is coming to the table with the same set of constraints of like, I'm not going to ask for too much for myself and people like me and you're not going to ask too much for yourself or people like you, and you know that if you do ask for too much, that the other person can veto your rule anyway

and it won't pass. So it's a real like cooperative venture that he's after, which is maybe hopelessly optimistic, but given that we do have to share the world with other people, it kind of seems like a cool way to do it. If you could manage it, the problem with it, I think, is that what it creates is only this minimum baseline,

because you're gonna veto everything that even slightly you don't want, right? And so is everybody else. And so it's basically like you're setting a floor. You're not setting a ceiling for how good we can be. You're setting a floor for how non-bad we can be. And that is good, but it's not an ideal situation, I think, in every aspect of society.

So where do you land on the shopping cart? Well, for the shopping cart, I think you ought to return it. So what Scanlan would probably say is something like, if I pitched this rule to the group, if I said you should return it to the rack where it came from, because generally speaking, our parents taught us cleanup after yourself, right? Like you borrowed the thing, but the thing back. Unless there's an employee whose job it is to go around and pick them up, in which case,

it seems like allowable to leave it where it is, but where I fall on this, and this is where I leave Scanlan, and I move into a different arena, I kind of feel like, look, maybe there's an employee at the shopping cart center called the grocery store. Maybe there is an employee at the grocery store who is job it is, but like, so what?

Like, make their job a little easier, right? If you can go to the grocery store and buy food and bring it to your car, here's what I know about you. You have enough money to buy a bunch of food at a grocery store. You have a functioning car. You have a little bit of leisure time in all likelihood, because people can't go to the grocery store unless they have a little bit of free time. Those three very small things make you incredibly lucky. You also have an able body. You have an able body and you have a little bit of free time. Those three very small things make you incredibly lucky.

You also have an able body. You have an able body and you have a functioning credit card. And it's hard to see this, but those things put you in the top 20th of 1% of all people on earth in terms of how lucky you are. And that's a thing we forget all the time because we take it for granted that we can go to the grocery store

and that we have a car that has gas in it, we can drive home. And so, look, you're one of the lucky ones. You're one of the luckiest people on earth. Make that person's job a little easier and make it a little more convenient for future shoppers by running the damn cart over there. It's 40 yards away. Just go put it back. Put it back where you got it and then delay your trip home by what?

90 seconds. And I say this by the way, as a person who frequently has not done that because I'm impatient or I'm annoyed or I'm having a bad day or whatever. And I go like, that's fine. I'll just leave it here. And I shouldn't do that. I should always go bring it back, put it back where you got it from. The more that we start thinking of these things, and that's again, the problem with Scanlan, I don't think about the minimum you can do. Think about your situation on Earth and how lucky you are and how fortunate you are, and the fact that you can afford to do this.

By doing this, you're going to make people's lives a little better. The person who collects the shopping carts and future shoppers who are coming in and will find a full rack of carts waiting for them, all of those little things will make their lives a tiny, tiny, tiny bit better at virtually no cost to your own. So like, just do it. It's better to do it than not do it. This may be stepping on an argument

you were gonna be making later in the interview anyway, but the should argument has moral force and especially for rule followers like you. But I take a, maybe it's my Buddhist training here, kind of an intrinsic motivation approach, which is if you are self-aware enough to know the quality of your own mind in a given moment, you will notice that it feels better

to return the shopping cart. Right, yes, that is a great point. I was talking about this with Dak Shepherd on his podcast. You're gonna mention another podcast. I am, yes. And then at the end of this, I'm gonna rank your podcast in relation to all the other ones I've done.

He made a similar point not from a Buddhist standpoint, but from a self-esteem standpoint. He said, all I know is, I know how I want to feel about myself. And when I do things like return the shopping cart to the rack, I get a little hit of self-esteem. And when I do things like return the shopping cart to the rack, I get a little hit of self-esteem. And when I don't, I have a tiny little like,

yeah, you're kind of being a jerk. To me, that's as good a reason as any to do it. That's another gut feeling, right? It's like whether it's coming from Buddhism or coming from therapy or coming from wherever, you know the way it makes you feel. And you have this spidey sense tingling of like, I know what I should do, and I know what makes me feel good when I do it, and I know what makes me feel bad when I don't.

So why not do the thing that makes you feel good? I totally agree with that. I mean, this quote is widely attributed to Abraham Lincoln. I'm not sure he actually said it, but when I do good, I feel good when I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty, like if you just use that as a guide,

you'd probably be a pretty good person, right? Like assuming you're not like a sociopath who doesn't understand the difference between feeling good and feeling bad, yeah, I think that's pretty good guide. You don't have to have a PhD in philosophy. I don't in order to get a decent sense of like what is right and wrong, what makes you feel good, what order to get a decent sense of like,

what is right and wrong, what makes you feel good, what's bad, all that sort of stuff. It's, some of it is just intuition. It's interesting though, the emphasis in our approach because you said, if you just follow that, you'll probably be a good person. And what I would have said is, if you just follow that, you'll probably be a happy person.

Right, I think those things are related. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a matter of emphasis. And you know, you brought up the word should. One of the irritating things about philosophy in the very casual way that I've engaged with it is if you're talking with a philosopher and you use the word should, they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then it's like, there's like 11 books you need to read before you can use the word

should in a conversation. Again, that's where philosophy can lose me personally, is because like the semantics of it and the language of it and the difference between can should ought to, like if you use the word should instead of the phrase ought to, philosophers will like have a panic attack and start screaming. It gets really, just really thinly sliced baloney when you're talking about some of the ways that we describe these actions and for that reason doing the thing that makes you feel good or happy and it makes you feel good or happy because you have the sense that you are being a good person that sometimes

maybe is a better guide for the average non-PhD than then really finally parsing the language of what's the operational kind of action that I'm supposed to be taking right now. It sounds like you come down to an interesting position, vis-a-vis moral philosophy, which is that you're clearly borderline obsessed with your road of hold, but I don't say that in any way, in a negative sense, you wrote a whole book about it, you've based a hit, TV show on it. Yeah. And yet, you're only willing to go so far with these folks.

Well, that's probably more on me than it is on them. I think it's maybe it's 50-50, but part of the reason I'm only willing to go so far is there's some of it I just can't access or can't understand. Like, some of the really technical stuff is just beyond me. Especially you're using the Amad dummy defense. Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah, I'm coming to it too late. I have no training in it. Like I tried to read Vidkenstein and Klein and some of these guys. And I'm just like, nope. Sorry. So some of it's on me. But some of it is on them because to me, these things are wonderful. If you can apply them to your life, right?

If they become practical, if they become actual guides for what to do, if you can get into a complicated situation and access the theories and then have them actually help you. And some like scamlands, I think are very helpful because I can say to myself, you know, well, okay, I'm about to do this thing. What would I do if I just got 12 of my friends? Forget everybody on town or everybody on earth.

I got 12 friends and sat them at a table and pitched this as a rule. 12 people I think are reasonable and that I respect and admire would any of them veto it. And then I can go like, yeah, you know what? Dave would veto this rule because he would say blah, blah, blah, blah. That can be actionable. That can help you figure out what to do.

And when it becomes less practical and more theoretical, that's when I sort of get a little bit frustrated. So here's a practical question. Now we're descending down the ladder here from Super Obser to actually much more urgent. Yeah. Should I run into a burning building and try to save everyone trapped inside?

Yeah. Great question. Me. So that's about what are the limits? What are the limits of how good we have to be? How good do we have to be before? We can say that we're good. And that's a tricky question to answer. A big part of that chapter is this woman, Susan Wolf, who was a contemporary philosopher, wrote a paper called Moral Saints, where she basically says, like, is there such a thing as a perfect person, right? And the answer is no. And she is an excellent writer and explains why in exquisite detail. And basically what she says, this is hilariously reductive. But a person who was only concerned with being a Moral saint,

with being perfect, would have to do nothing but think about how to be perfect all the time and would have to act in ways all the time in order to be perfect. So you're having lunch with your friend and your friend is telling you a sad story about her relationship with her sister, which has gone sour. And you're like, okay, the job of a moral saint is to comfort my friend. But then out of the corner of your eye, you see that there's a person struggling with a parking meter because the parking meter isn't accepting their coin and the parking meter woman is coming down the street and she's about to get a ticket. And then you have to

make a calculation. Should I run over there and try to help that person? How much better is that, or worse is that than comforting my friend? And then you abandon your friend and you go over to help that person. But as you're doing so, you hear a news report about a tornado that hit a community in Texas. And you think, well, those people are in real trouble. And you veer off and you go to the airport and you fly to Texas to help. That could just becomes absurd, right? If the goal is to always be doing the best thing you can be doing, you end up just not doing anything but making those calculations. And she says, as a result, you don't learn how to

play tennis or cook food or spend any time just goofing around with your kids because that's valuable, perfect person time that could be used doing something else. So there's a sentence in that paper that I love, which is she basically says, there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand, which I think is a really good reminder of like everything can't be about this. Everything you do cannot be about this

because part of being a human being is having dimension to your life and having interests and hobbies and things that are not on any moral vector. Like just reading books or watching TV or learning how to play racquetball or whatever. Like those are valuable aspects and dimensions of your life

and there are things you wouldn't do if your goal were only to be perfect as a human being. But how do you draw the line as to how much morality you can stand? Right. I agree. Obviously we should have leisure time. It actually gives us more bandwidth to do more good, but it's tricky to know where you stop caring. It is indeed. And that is where the theories come into play, right?

There are people like Peter Singer, who's a utilitarian philosopher at Princeton, who says, there is a certain amount of money you need to pay rent and clothe yourself and eat food and maybe put away a small amount for future calamities. And you can calculate it based on what city you live in and how big your family is. And every dollar that you make above that, you are morally obligated to give to someone

who has less than that. Full stop. Like, in other words, he's as close to attempting moral st.hood as you can get, I think. It's literally like, if that amount for a person living in Detroit, Michigan is $52,300. When you make your $52,300 and first dollar, you have to immediately donate it to a charity that

will help someone who has less money and is in a worse situation because the problems of people are so great. So he essentially says there's no limit. The only limit is like how do you make sure you're safe and okay? And as soon as you are, give everything else away. He wrote a piece about Bill Gates years ago in the New York Times Sunday magazine. Bill Gates had just pledged $30 billion to his charitable foundation, and at the time it made Gates the single greatest philanthropist in history, more money than JP Morgan Vanderbilt, any of those guys, right? And he wrote this piece where he was like,

okay, well, here's the thing though. Bill Gates still has like $58 billion at the time. So what would you say if I told you that there was a guy who had $58 billion in was giving none of it to charity? You'd be furious. Like you'd think like what a terrible person is $58 billion. He's not giving any of it away. And I remember reading that and being like, well, that's a really good point. You know, and so he is an extremist. In the world of everyone is the same. There is no difference between a life over there and a life over here, wherever he is for you.

And so if you are as soon as you are safe and okay, you have to give everything else you make to someone who is not safe and okay. So there's people like him and then there's other people who say, no, look, there are reasonable limits on what can be expected of anybody. And just paying for food and clothing and shelter is a little bit scary because what happens if next year there's some, your brother is in a terrible car accident and it's enormous medical bills and you gave all your money to a charity that deworms, rivers, and Malawi. And of course, the chances of it happening are small, but the world is scary

and these things happen all the time. And so it shouldn't be expected of someone to go to that extreme length. So there's a million different theories and you just kind of have to figure out where you fall on the scale of what you're doing and whether it's enough. I mean, figuring out where you fall on the scale is tricky. Singer, if I recall, talks about the decision to spend any dollars north of only your basic needs is like walking by a drowning child in a pond. That's right And so I mean, it's a really urgent and compelling way to put it

It is given rise to this whole school of effective altruists. Yes. Who I've never had any of them on the show, although if you're listening guys, I'd be interested, although we've talked about it on the show. And I find it really compelling. And it's a source of some guilt because I'm not doing that. Yes. Curious, where are you? So there's a whole chapter in the book later

where I talk about I went to see Emma Redsox fan, and I went to the World Series in 2018 when they beat the Dodgers. And for Christmas that year, I was with my son who's also a Red Sox fan. And I wanted to buy him something to commemorate that incredible moment. And I bought him this autographed bat by four of the players that cost 800 bucks. And I was a little bit like $800 kind of expensive present. He was, you know, whatever, 10. But, you know what, like that was such a wonderful magical moment and of course, like I'm gonna do this. And then immediately I started thinking about Peter Singer

because he was tapping me on the shoulder and saying like, really, $800 for that? Like, there's nothing better you could do with that money. And to me, the thing that singer and the effective altruism movement does really well is it stops you from becoming complacent, right? Like we said before, it's very easy to forget how fortunate we are.

It's very easy to forget that things we take for granted are extreme luxuries for the great majority of people in the world. And so he's just constantly tapping you on the shoulder and going, hey, just reminding you that the poverty rate in sub-Saharan Africa is X and also that this many children die of malaria per year and that they need money and that you're blowing another 160 bucks on that dumb pair of jeans that you don't really need. It's annoying to have someone doing that to you

all the time. It doesn't make life more fun, but someone's got to do that. Someone has to be reminding us all the time of what, at least what is possible with our time and resources and energy and money, because if no one does, we'll forget. And we will just go about our lives and stop thinking about the kids who were drowning in pond's metaphorical and literal all over the world. While you're not living the way singer would prescribe. Do you think your life is different because of singers prescription? No question.

Yeah. The first time I ever read anything by him was that Times article. And I've read a lot of the stuff he's written since then. And there's no question that I'm more careful, in a number of ways. I'm more careful about where I give money when I give to charity.

Like I do way more research because that's a big part of the effective altruism movement is like, hey, don't give money to the charities that waste the money. Then you're just wasting the money. Find the ones that do the best and make your dollar stretch the furthest. But also, it's maybe completely rethink what is the minimum that I need to do, what's the maximum I can do, and where do I fall in between? Before that, it was like someone would email me and say like, hey, I'm doing this, you know, run for the cure thing, 5K, whatever. And I go, like, sure, here's a hundred bucks.

And now when that happens, I have a number of thoughts. I'm like, okay, how good is this charity? How much should I give? Are there better charities I can give to? Should I try to get someone to match this? Like, I'm much more aggressive in the way that I approach the money I give away. And I'm also just thinking a lot more about like,

well, is this a good use of my money? Do I need this? Or is there something better I can do with this? How can I better use my time and position on earth and resources and everything else to try to give other people a better life than they have? Where do you end up coming down on why we should be ethical or moral?

I mean, do you believe that there's a divine referee? There will be consequences to pay or do you land on the Lincoln, you know, that's my religion thing? I don't think the question of whether there is a divine referee matters, honestly. I don't begrudge anyone who believes in a divine referee, but I think that we should divorce

our feelings about religion, organized religion and the afterlife and everything else from what we do on Earth while we're alive. I don't think that we should do good things for a reward. I think we should do them because we're here for a certain amount of years and then we die. And that while we're here, there doesn't seem to be a better way to spend our time than trying to be the best people we can be.

Like I don't know what else is there. What else are we after? Like, I think that the problem often becomes external goals for behavior, I think are traps. So like money, fame, achievement, accomplishment, trophies, clicks, likes, faves, eternal reward, all of that stuff, those are ways that you can organize your decision trees and your actions on Earth, but to what end, right? So that I can have more followers on Twitter or so that I can win a trophy or whatever. If you can let go of those as reasonable goals

or worthy goals, you strip it all away and you say like, all right, well, I have a number of years here, a number of actions I can take or not take. Why not just try to, this is a Buddhist idea, right? Just be mindful, be mindful of the moment that you're in and the thing that you ought to do for the sake of doing the thing, not for anything else,

but just to do the thing. Think about it, do the best job you can, then move on to the next thing. Philosophers all had different ideas of what's the point of all this, what's the goal? For Aristotle, it was what he called flourishing, which is sometimes translated as happiness, but I like flourishing.

So flourishing to him is just nailing it, right? Getting it exactly right, being exactly the right amount of generous and kind and courageous and magnanimous and all of those things. And it's this almost god-like description of just perfecting the art of being human. To me, that's the goal. That's as close as I can come to explaining why I think we should be ethical people.

It's because there's a way that you can be in theory where you just are like, my job is to be a human being, and I'm going to be a human being as well as I can be a human being. That's as worthy as any kind of external reward that I can imagine. There was a Buddhist monk on the show recently who said something that I think I've probably quoted him on the show subsequently a couple of times because it stuck with me. He said that every living thing and even inanimate things their purpose is to give even a tree gives shade. And we may not know it, but when we act in alignment with our purpose,

it feels good cellularly. So it's back to my emphasis on intrinsic reward rather than the extrinsic should or ought. Yeah, I mean, again, I don't know that there's a better reason to do things or not do them than that. Like, I think that's about as good as you can get, right? If you can get to a point of cellular happiness because you feel that you have accomplished

something that has to do with the very purpose of being alive or an extant creature on Earth, I mean, what could be better than that? That seems amazing. And maybe there's an external referee, maybe there isn't. But we won't know for a while, right? So like, hopefully. Yeah, exactly. Like, maybe work now on that goal,

which is a goal you couldn't be around to understand and to accomplish in theory. Coming up, Michael Schur on how empathy is the glue that holds everything together, winning the ovarian lottery and recognizing that certain personal attributes are the result of a kind of cosmic role of the dice after this. So how are you doing? Where are you in the immaculate spectrum? So, how are you doing? Where are you in the immaculate spectrum?

You know, I'm like at 38% or something, where I should be. I mean, this is the frustrating thing, right? When you set this kind of thing as your goal, the realities of life are harsh and even for someone as lucky as I am. I have essentially no problems. I mean that, honestly. I got an incredibly lucky role of the dice. Warren Buffett talks about this a lot, and I'm not Warren Buffett, but he talks about

winning what he calls the ovarian lottery, which is he was born a white male in America at a certain key moment in history where Americans were flourishing and defeating fascism in Europe and the economy was booming. And he's obviously a genius, but he also came into adulthood as an incredibly fortunate person, which allowed him in part to achieve what he's achieved. And he's slightly more money than I do, but I feel the same way. I feel like I was born to two able-bodied,

very smart people in Michigan in 1975. My dad was in grad school and the law school there and they valued things like education and when I told him I wasn't going to be an academic, I was going to try comedy writing. Their attitude was like, great, good luck. You know, like they were just supportive, nice people who encouraged me and I never had to deal with sexism or racism or ableism or any of the things that plague other people. And that, I didn't do anything to warrant that. That's just the dice roll that came up. So when I judge my own progress, I judge it very harshly because if this is a marathon, I had like an 18 mile head start in the marathon. And I believe that people in

my position should be judged more harshly, frankly, than people who didn't have all of those lucky or unlucky advantages, just in the way that they popped into existence. So I don't think too highly of my own progress in the arena of ethics. I think that I've taken an important step, which is I've decided to really care about it one way or the other and try as hard as I can to be better. I appreciate what you're saying. I relate to a lot of it. Is not your reflection upon luck as the kids would say privilege? Is that not a source of, which is also a source of ethical behavior? In that, if you can realize, oh, I'm here by dint of so many exogenous factors, I can't count them, and that none of which I can claim credit for.

Well, then, oh, well, I can understand why people would do things I completely disagree with. Of course, absolutely. I've said this many times, but to me, the most galling personality type is the born on third thought they had a triple. It's the people with no empathy who don't understand how fortunate they are and who think that they are standing on third base

because they're awesome, not because they were born there. And I think empathy is essentially the glue that holds everything together and that without it were doomed. And so the more that you can be aware of where you are through no amazing thing that you did, but rather just good fortune luck, whatever you want to call it, Robert Frank is a social scientist who wrote a book that I talk about in my book and he talks about all of the fortunate things that go into making it like people like Warren Buffett.

And I came up where he talks about this or I just took this, I just adapted it into this theory, but like Michael Jordan, for example, everybody talks about the most legendarily hard working guy, the most determined, the most dedicated, the, the just toughest, grittiest dude, most competitive, most talented, hardest working guy, and to think that he doesn't deserve what he has, like he would be laughed at if he said he doesn't deserve that. Robert Frank's point would be, he was also six foot six,

and he didn't get to be six six because he like worked really hard at being tall. He got to be 6.6 because of the lucky dice roll that had nothing to do with anything that he did. And it's not taking anything away from him to say that he was lucky, that he was tall. Because if Michael Jordan's exact personality was put into the body of a five foot four inch tall goat herder in Bangladesh, then that is not six-time world champion, Michael Jordan. That's a really irritating goat herter who yells at all the other goat herters for not

being good enough at herding goats and no one's ever heard of him. So the empathy, I'm sure that Michael Jordan doesn't think about or I hope he does think about how lucky he was in certain ways. It doesn't take anything away from the work he did, the dedication, the competitive fire, all that stuff. He still had that, and he still gets the credit for that. Does he, though, who created his personality? And who created your personality, your mind? I mean, can you claim credit for the intelligence

that took to write your TV shows or was that implanted in you? I think it's nature and nurture, I think, right? Like I had a predilection toward comedy for some reason, don't know why. My parents were both smart and gave me an intellectually and nurture, I think, right? Like I had a predilection toward comedy for some reason, don't know why. My parents were both smart and gave me an intellectually curious inclination, which made me read a lot, and then I, you know, who knows what combination of factors led to it.

And in Jordan's case, he clearly had this thing in him from birth, and then he worked really hard in a Aristotelian way at developing it. So he does get the credit, he gets all that credit. The only point is that everyone, no matter who they are, Warren Buffett, Michael Jordan, me, you, anyone, certain things about our lives, just are the result of luck. It doesn't take anything away from anyone to just say that.

It doesn't change what they did or how hard they worked or what they deserve. It's just a fact. Yeah, it's both end. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. I think I've hit all of my questions. I haven't punched you yet, so that's pretty good. No, I mean, we have a few seconds.

Is there anything I should have asked you but fail to ask? No, I mean, God, we're lucky that there's a time stamp on these things because I will just talk about this stuff forever. So you did a great job. You will not be punched in the face. You've gone through the obstacle course of talking to me for an hour without getting punched in the face. Thank you for the external validation. I was looking forward to it. I appreciate that. Can you just please plug the book and anything else you've put out into the universe that you think people might enjoy? The book is called How to Be Perfect. It is available now anywhere you buy books. I recommend getting it from an independent bookseller

because I think it's important to support independent booksellers, but it's also on all of the normal places. And as far as anything else, I'm putting out in the universe. I don't know. There's a bunch of TV shows I worked on. You can watch those at your leisure

and to your immense benefit and enjoyment. I say from personal experience, thank you very much. Great to meet you, Imperson. Good to meet you. Thank you. Thank you, Michael Schur and thank you to Corey Hageham, the curator at Ted who chose Michael to give a speech at Ted. And she connected me to Michael.

So big thanks to Corey and everybody at Ted who made this possible. This show is made by Gabrielle Zuckermanerman DJ Cashmere, Justin Davy Lauren Smith Maria Wartelle Samuel Johns and Jen point out with audio engineering From the good folks over at ultraviolet audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode with the phenomenal Estaire Perl perhaps best known for her work as a couples counselor. She wrote a book called Meeting and Captivity. She's the host of a huge podcast called Where Should We Begin? And we're going to talk about a really complicated and often understudied or underappreciated

flavor of human relationship and that is friendship. So that's coming up on Wednesday with Esther Perrell. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free

with 1-3- Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.