Schur’s unending quest to be perfect
‘Good Place’ creator returns to philosophy with first book
Several years ago, Michael Schur was stuck in Los Angeles traffic when he went into a philosophical tailspin. As he watched other drivers use the emergency lane to escape the gridlock, he started fuming about people who put their desires above everyone else’s, then wondered if such minor ethical lapses even matter.
What started as a flash of irritation yielded an idea: What if there were a cosmic point system that tallied our good and bad behavior, and ranked people accordingly? From then on, when Schur saw drivers misbehaving, he would comfort himself by imagining them losing 15 points on their moral score cards.
That fantasy helped shape the premise for Schur’s television series, “The Good Place,” a metaphysical comedy set in an afterlife where people are assigned to the Good Place or Bad Place based on their ethical ranking. The show, which starred Kristen Bell as a pathologically selfish pharmaceutical saleswoman accidentally sent to the Good Place, posed complex thought experiments and explored moral principles from philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, all in the framework of a 22-minute sitcom.
“The Good Place” ran for four seasons on NBC and was a commercial and critical success. But when the final season aired in 2020, Schur, who’s also known for his work on comedies like “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and
“Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” felt unsatisfied.
“I had this nagging feeling, like I wasn’t done talking about it,” Schur said. “I didn’t want to try to do another TV show on the same topic, because that just seemed weird. I’m not sure there’s another TV show that’s explicitly about moral philosophy that anyone would be interested in.”
So, in a somewhat surprising pivot, he decided to write a book about ethics.
Schur’s debut, “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” released by Simon & Schuster, is likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling. Jeff McMahan, a philosophy professor at Oxford, called it “an enjoyably boisterous guide to the moral life.”
Schur covers some 2,500 years of Western philosophical thought, breaking down concepts like virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism and contractualism; analyzing principles espoused by Aristotle (“a good salesman, and he gets us all excited about his pitch”), Kant (“a pretty rigid dude”) and Camus (“a stone-cold hottie”); and examining arguments from contemporary philosophers like Judith Thomson, Peter Singer, T.M. Scanlon and Johann Broodryk. He raises quandaries that are easy calls (“Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason?”) along with more challenging thought experiments like the Trolley Problem (“Should I Let This Runaway Trolley I’m Driving Kill Five People, or Should I Pull a Lever and Deliberately Kill One (Different) Person?”) and fraught issues like whether it’s wrong to enjoy art and literature created by people who behave reprehensibly.
In some ways, the topic felt unavoidable. Schur, 46, has been preoccupied with how to be a good person for as long as he can remember.
“I have been interestedin-slash-obsessed with the concept of ethics my whole life,” he said. “There have been moments when I’ve confronted something about my own behavior, where I realized I was behaving in a ethically questionable way, or had wandered into some complicated situation, that seemed like I would be better equipped to handle it if I knew what the hell I was talking about, ethically speaking.”
Writing a book about the quest for ethical perfection, Schur risked coming across as unbearably pedantic or worse, sanctimonious, but he grounds his overviews
of abstract doctrines in self-deprecating digressions. He confesses he still has books by Woody Allen on his shelves and hasn’t been able to renounce him even after allegations of sexual abuse came to light. He describes the self-loathing he would feel whenever he left a tip at Starbucks but paused to make sure that the barista saw him do it. He agonizes over his privileged status as an educated, affluent white man, worries that his hybrid car is still bad for the environment and frets that the money he spends on baseball tickets and other luxuries could have gone to people in need. (He’s donating his earnings from the book
to several charities and nonprofits, he said.)
After creating a show that seemed to defy the boundaries of a sitcom, blending heady concepts with extreme silliness, Schur felt he had discovered a winning formula that he could deploy in a book. He sold “How to Be Perfect” to Simon & Schuster in early 2020, just before the pandemic arrived and shut down much of the entertainment industry.
Schur is aware that he faces higher expectations than most debut authors.
“I wanted the book to be conversational and engaging and funny enough so that people who had
watched ‘The Good Place’ or anything else I’ve ever done felt like the same guy was talking to them, and I also wanted anyone who knows anything about philosophy to read it and think, like, hey, not bad,” he said.
He’s somewhat reassured by the fact that “The Good Place” was so well-received, suggesting that there’s an audience for goofy riffs on ethics, and said he’s gotten positive responses from friends and colleagues who loved the show and the quandaries it raised.
“And if they were lying, then that’s their problem,” Schur added, “because they’ve been unethical.”