How to Be Perfect

Utilitarianism is one branch of a school of ethical philosophy broadly called “consequentialism,” which cares only about the results or consequences of our actions.

The more we try to learn and understand the lives being led by other people—the more we search for a golden mean of empathy—the less we will find it permissible to treat them with cruelty.

there is a way to escape the scourge of cruelty: knowledge. (Specifically: knowledge of cultural practices other than our own.)

If we really work at finding the means of our virtues—learning their ins and outs, their vicissitudes and pitfalls, their pros and cons—we become flexible, inquisitive, adaptable, and better people.

Cruelty, she says, is often way out of proportion to the behavior that prompted it.

when we practice a virtue over and over and over, we become fluent in the virtue, and our responses emerge from a deep reservoir of understanding about the virtue, so instead of remaining stuck in a rut defined by our previous behaviors, we have a fighting chance to make a good decision regardless of how weird the situation might be.

The best thing about Aristotle’s “constant learning, constant trying, constant searching” is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesn’t rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.

If we’re not careful, our personalities and habits slowly and inevitably calcify over time.

an excess of dutifulness can negatively impact the people around me: I am constantly killing everyone’s buzz.