Michael Schur

and I started calling philosophy professors and asking them to talk this out with me.

And in the process, yeah, and they all, by the way, did it, because philosophy professors love talking about philosophy.

The drop of a hat.

They will all talk about philosophy with you.

So in the process, I learned all of these incredibly wonderful theories that the smartest people who have ever lived have developed over the last 2,500 years that help us make better decisions and become better people.

For example, I learned about Immanuel Kant and the categorical imperative.

So Kant says when we're about to do something, we have to design a rule or a maxim that we could will to be universal, meaning we have to imagine what if everyone did what we're about to do, what would happen to the world?

Would it be OK or would it get all screwed up?

So the maxim I'm designing here is something like, any time two people are in any kind of negotiation, one of them can drag into the negotiation an entirely unrelated global calamity and tell the other person that they shouldn't care about whatever they care about because they should care about that instead.

that world would suck, right?

Like, your sister borrows five dollars from you, you ask for it back.

She says, how dare you care about five dollars when the polar ice caps are melting?

No one wants to live in this world, right?

Kant also says, by the way, that you should treat people as ends in themselves and not a means to an end, meaning you shouldn't use people to get what you want.

Well...

Guess what I was doing?

I also learned about Aristotle and the study of virtue ethics.

So Aristotle says there are certain qualities we should all have, things like generosity and courage and friendliness and mildness, and he wants us to practice them every day so that we not only have them, we have them in the exact right amount.

We don't have a deficiency of them, and we don't have an excess of them.

Now, virtue ethics can be kind of maddeningly imprecise, but at the very least, it was pretty clear that I was exhibiting an excess of anger and maybe a deficiency of friendliness.