Michael Schur

To make it a little less overwhelming, this book hopes to boil down the whole confusing morass into four simple questions that we can ask ourselves whenever we encounter any ethical dilemma, great or small:
What are we doing?
Why are we doing it?
Is there something we could do that’s better?
Why is it better?

quick glance around will reveal a ton of people who have clearly decided they don’t care about being ethical, so they’re not really trying. Part of me doesn’t entirely blame them, because attempting to be a decent moral agent in the universe—a fancy way of saying “trying to do the right thing”—means we are bound to fail. Even making our best efforts to be good people, we’re gonna screw up.

All of which can make caring about what we do—or in the modern parlance, “giving a crap”—seem pointless

Later we’ll meet a group of very bleak French guys who believed there’s no God and we’re just tiny flecks of nothingness floating on a big dumb rock in space—and even they didn’t want us to just throw in the ethical towel.

learning to accept failure—or really, to embrace it—as a necessary and beneficial by-product of our efforts to try, learn, and improve.

Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.
—MAYA ANGELOU

What the hell am I supposed to do?
This question—how can we live a more ethical life?—has plagued people for thousands of years

here’s some good news: Philosophers have been thinking about those exact questions for a very long time. They have answers for us—or, at least, they have ideas that may help us formulate our own answers

four simple questions

Nearly every single thing we do has some ethical component to it, whether we realize it or not. That means we owe it to ourselves to learn what the hell ethics is and how it works, so we don’t screw everything up all the time